Best of
Fiction

1931

Gaban


Munshi Premchand - 1931
    It tells the story of Ramanath, a charming but morally weak young man, who in order to fulfil his beautiful wife's Jalpa excessive craving for jewellery involves himself in complex economic and personal relationships, which eventually leads to his apparent ignominy, and his escape from home. He doesn't even bother to realise that by doing so he brings disgrace to his family honour and leaves his dear wife alone. However, Jalpa's brave attitude brings a sense of redemption in Ramanath and they unite again.One of the classics of Indian literature, Gaban gives an engrossing picture of Indian society. It also captures the social and economic conditions and conflicts of a North Indian society in pre-independence India. It is a must read for readers interested in regional Indian literature.

Hatter's Castle


A.J. Cronin - 1931
    J. Cronin. The story is set in 1879, in the fictional town of Levenford, on the Firth of Clyde. The plot revolves around many characters and has many subplots, all of which relate to the life of the hatter, James Brodie, whose narcissism and cruelty gradually destroy his family and life.

The Waves By Virginia Woolf: Illustrated Edition


Virginia Woolf - 1931
    It begins with six children--three boys and three girls--playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

The Waves (19th century classics: illustrated Edition)


Virginia Woolf - 1931
    Different people draw different words from me."Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children-three boys and three girls-playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

The Waves-Classic Edition(Annotated)


Virginia Woolf - 1931
    Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.

The Waves


Virginia Woolf - 1931
    Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.

Collected Ghost Stories


M.R. James - 1931
    R. James is widely regarded as the father of the modern ghost story, and his tales have influenced horror writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. First published in the early 1900s, they have never been out of print, and are recognized as classics of the genre. This collection contains some of his most chilling tales, including A View from a Hill, Rats, A School Story, The Ash Tree, and The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance. Read by BAFTA and Emmy-award winning actor Derek Jacobi, and with haunting and evocative music, these tales cannot fail to send a shiver down your spine.

The Forsyte Saga Volume Three: End of the Chapter


John Galsworthy - 1931
    For centuries, the Cherrell sons have left their home of Condaford Grange to serve the state as soldiers, clergymen and administrators, but the 1930s bring uncertainty in a world of rapidly altering morals and unemployment. Galsworthy’s portrayal of the effect of political change on individuals show him as a great social novelist as well as the author of one of the most gripping family sagas ever written.

The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories Volume 1


H.P. Lovecraft - 1931
    Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor brings the ancient stone city of R'lyeh to the surface once more, the Old Ones awaken at last.The Whisperer in Darkness brings together the original Cthulhu Mythos stories of the legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume are several early tales, along with the classics 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'At the Mountains of Madness'. Arm yourself with a copy of Abdul Alhazred's fabled Necronomicon and prepare to face terrors beyond the wildest imaginings of all, save H.P. Lovecraft.

The Fortnight in September


R.C. Sherriff - 1931
    The family’s only regret is leaving their garden where, we can imagine, because it is September the dahlias are at their fiery best: as they flash past in the train they get a glimpse of their back garden, where ‘a shaft of sunlight fell through the side passage and lit up the clump of white asters by the apple tree.’ This was what the First World War soldiers longed for; this, he imagined, was what he was fighting for and would return to (as in fact Sherriff did).He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’

Silver Wings


Grace Livingston Hill - 1931
    While trying to keep her employer's preacher nephew from having his heart broken by houseguests, she has plenty of time to worry about the ill aunts she has left behind to earn money for and the dashing pilot for whose soul and safety she is praying.

The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith


Clark Ashton Smith - 1931
    This work offers both readers and scholars a collection of short fiction and short novels by Clark Ashton Smith.Contains the stories The Return of the Sorcerer The City of the Singing Flame The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis The Double Shadow The Monster of the Prophecy The Hunters from Beyond The Isle of the Torturers A Night in Malnéant The Chain of Aforgomon The Dark Eidolon The Seven Geases The Holiness of Azédarac The Beast of Averoigne The Empire of the Necromancers The Disinterment of Venus The Devotee of Evil The Enchantress of Sylaire

The Country Child


Alison Uttley - 1931
    Alison Uttley has drawn on her own youth to produce memories so vivid and nostalgic that you can almost smell the honeysuckle and hear the owls calling at dusk.She writes about the small intense joys and sorrows of life on a small farm: the fun of haymaking, the sadness of favourite animals being slaughtered, and the close sweetness of Christmas celebrations in the farmhouse kitchen.

Two Prisoners


Lajos Zilahy - 1931
    Tormented by jealousy he pursues her and they marry. Their idyll is destroyed by the onset of war, when Peter joins the army and ends up a prisoner of war of the Russians.

The Black Swan


Rafael Sabatini - 1931
    But also on board the Centaur is Charles de Bernis - a mysterious and intriguing buccaneer. Just as their friendship is beginning to blossom, a dark figure from de Bernis' past emerges to propel them into a thrilling and perilous adventure, taking them right to the heart of pirate life.

Kerry


Grace Livingston Hill - 1931
    But could Kerry overcome all that stood between her and delivering the manuscript to her father's publisher? Could she withstand her beautiful, spoiled little mother who wanted her to abandon her father's masterpiece? Could she escape the cunning plans of a man who would stop at nothing--even kidnapping--to steal the manuscript and take credit for her father's genius? And could she trust the handsome young stranger who offered her his quiet strength, wisdom--and love?

Government


B. Traven - 1931
    Traven wrote an epic of the birth of the Mexican revolution in what have become known as the "Jungle Novels." Government is the first of the six novels that comprise the series. Depicting the political corruption that infected even the smallest villages in Mexico, the novel tells the story of Don Gabriel, a minor government functionary who has a virtual license to steal from the Indian village where he is secretary—except that the Indians have nothing to steal. By chance he finds an opportunity in the labor agent business, shanghaiing luckless Indians into debt-slavery so that he can ship them off to work in the great mahogany plantations owned by foreign capital. The novel reaches a moving climax in a clash of cultures between the simple dignity of the illiterate Indians and the cynicism and corruption of the politicians and petty bureaucrats.

Penrod: His Complete Story


Booth Tarkington - 1931
    This compilation takes the contents of Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), and Penrod Jashber (1929) and rearranges the stories to form a "biography" of its young hero.

The Good Earth


Pearl S. Buck - 1931
    The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall.Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls.

Salka Valka


Halldór Laxness - 1931
    The story of a prostitute and her child, victim of her passions, her selfishness, and her ill-fame -- and of their attempt to find a place for themselves in a new community which is unfriendly, critical, and unforgiving. Chiefly the story of the daughter -- her obsessions with and revulsions from sex, and her relations with two men, the one by morbid fascination and hate and love of a queer sort -- the other by appeal to her better nature. Glimpses of effects of industrial unrest in a distant part of the world. A difficult style -- not easy reading. (Kirkus review)

Fair Tomorrow


Emilie Loring - 1931
    There she could manage a restaurant and make ends meet. Just as her future looked darkest, two charming men entered her life. Scott Mallory, the handsome, internationally-famous lawyer, offered to act as her legal advisor. And dashing Philip Carr helped her keep her finances limping along, with his ingenious architectural plans. Slowly, gratitude began to give way to love... Then disaster struck. Only after a harrowing courtroom drama, and the revelations that ensued, could Pam truly understand her feelings for Scott and Philip, and know which man would share her future.

Franz Kafka: The Best Works


Franz Kafka - 1931
    This edition has been professionally formatted and contains several tables of contents. The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.

The Shadowed Hills


Audrey Howard - 1931
    A sweeping 19th-century saga set in the Peak District, this is the next generation sequel to Promises Lost.

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1931
    Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers.

Black No More


George S. Schuyler - 1931
    Schuyler's satiric romp. Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can't beat them, turn into them.Ishmael Reed, one of today's top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited Introduction.The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920- 1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today's renaissance of black writers.

Guests of the Nation


Frank O'Connor - 1931
    O'Connor is concerned with the way in which war imposes a false and cruel ethic on people, ruthlessly destroying human relationships. The title story has been widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of the short story form.This short story collection includes:"Guests of the Nation""Attack""Jumbo's Wife""Nightpiece with Figures""September Dawn""Machinegun Corps in Action""Laughter""Jo""Alec""Soiree Chez une Belle Jeune Fille""The Patriarch""After Fourteen Years""The Late Henry Conran""The Sisters""The Procession of Life"

Birth of Our Power


Victor Serge - 1931
    Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge’s “tale of two cities” is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city “we” could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship over the revolution.

All Passion Spent


Vita Sackville-West - 1931
    Seventy years later, released by widowhood, and to the dismay of her pompous children, she abandons the family home for a tiny house in Hampstead. Here she recollects the dreams of youth, and revels in her newfound freedom with her odd assortment of companions: Genoux, her French maid; Mr. Bucktrout, her house agent; and a coffin maker who pictures people dead in order to reveal their true characters. And then there's Mr. FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who met and loved her in India when she was young and very lovely. It is here in this world of her own that she finds a passion that comes only with the freedom to choose, and it is this, her greatest gift, that she passes on to the only one who can understand its value. First published in 1931, Vita Sackville-West's masterpiece is the fictional companion to her great friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

Shadows on the Rock


Willa Cather - 1931
    Set in seventeenth-century Canada, an evocation of North American origins highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the new world even as they clung to the one they left behind.

Father


Elizabeth von Arnim - 1931
    Of Jennifer's adventures with cottages and clergymen and clergymen's maiden sisters Elizabeth weaves a romance that is pointed with tenderly malicious satire and flooded with the intoxicating golden sunshine that was the delight of The Enchanted April.

The Old Nurse's Stocking Basket


Eleanor Farjeon - 1931
    The children always stopped their bickering at once, for none of them wanted to miss her extraordinary stories of princes and princesses, Greek gods, sea captains and other wonderful characters she had come across in her hundreds of years as a children's nurse. All the tales were so entrancing that the boys could hardly be blamed for sometimes making large holes on purpose, so that they'd have a long story to match!

Turnabout


Thorne Smith - 1931
    So an ill-tempered minor god, tired of their bickering, worked a modest miracle......and Sally Willows, no occupying her husband's body, experienced the full horrors of the Nationwide Advertising Agency, while Tim, now outwardly Sally, dealt with the amourous advances of a local Lothario.It was a toss-up whether Sally/Tim's well-earned dismissal or Tim/Sally's bizarre attempt at murder was more spectacular - but both seemed insignificant when Tim found he was pregnant!

Silver Ley


Adrian Bell - 1931
    Describing his first year in farming he finds himself and his community caught up in larger affairs as the signs of the Depression begin to affect the countryside. However, there is still time for play, with field hockey and hunting in winter, dancing and village fetes in summer, not to mention the firm friends he found amongst his neighbors.

The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1931
    These are stories of ambition and young love, insecurity and awkwardness, where a poor boy with energy and intelligence can break into the upper classes and become a glittering success. This selection brings together the best of Fitzgerald's St Paul stories -- some virtually unknown, others classics of short fiction. Patricia Hampl's incisive introduction traces the trajectory of Fitzgerald's blazing celebrity and its connections to his life in the city that gave him his best material. Headnotes by Dave Page provide specific ties between the stories and Fitzgerald's life in St Paul.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen (The Hera Series)


Naomi Mitchison - 1931
    Set over two thousand years ago on the clam and fertile shores of the Black Sea, Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic. Erif Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen. Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break Tarrik's power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, an Hellenic philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so begins for Tarrik a Quest - a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge and which will reunite him with his beautiful Spring Queen.

শেষ প্রশ্ন


Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - 1931
    The novel caused a sensation when it was first published in 1931, drawing censure from conservative critics but enthusiastic support from general readers, especially women.The heroine, Kamal, is exceptional for her time. She lives and travels by herself, has relationships with various men, looks poverty and suffering in the face, and asserts the autonomy of the individual being. In the process, she tears apart the frame of the expatriate Bengali society of Agra, where she lives. Through Kamal, Saratchandra questions Indian tradition and the norms of nationhood and womanhood.The Final Question transcends time and will appeal to readers of all ages.

Away to Sea


Stephen W. Meader - 1931
    One spring day back in 1821, Jim Slater stole out of his father's farmhouse before daybreak and ran away to Providence to become a sailor. He signed up with the first ship he could find, and it was only when they were six days out at sea that he discovered he was one of the crew of a slave ship bound for Africa for its cargo. On the return trip there came an opportunity to escape when the ship was in the Gulf of Mexico, near New Orleans. His struggles in the wilderness, his meeting with the naturalist, John James Audubon, and his final homecoming are as exciting and real as if the reader had lived the story himself.

Single Lady


John Monk Saunders - 1931
    Whether early Hemingway or vin­tage Hollywood, Single Lady is certain to surprise and delight readers today. As readers of this new edition will dis­cover, John Monk Saunders, a Rhodes Scholar and a highly successful screen­writer (The Dawn Patrol, A Yank at Oxford) peoples his landscape with memorable figures, and has an extraordinarily good ear for dialogue. The story is this: five young ex-war­riors of the sky, Shepard Lambert, Bill Talbot, John Swann, Cary Lockwood, and The Washout, unable to let down from the high nervous pitch of flying and fighting, are adrift in Paris after the Armistice, and seemingly bent on self-destruction. They meet Nikki, who joins them in their spectacular journey through the bars of Paris, the cafés of Lisbon, and the bullring of Madrid, and who becomes part of their strangely disordered lives.

Red-Headed Woman


Katharine Brush - 1931
    Brush's risqué novel of a red headed vamp who steels her boss from his wife served as the basis for the ever popular pre-code Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer black and white talking film directed by Jack Conway and featuring Jean Harlow and Chester Morris.

The Face is Familiar: The Selected Poems


Ogden Nash - 1931
    

Edgar Wallace Selected Novels


Edgar Wallace - 1931
    Contents:The Four Just Men (1905)Sanders of the River (1911)The Angel of Terror (1922)The Dark Eyes of London (1924)The Ringer (1926)The Avenger (1926)The Gunner (1928)On the Spot (1931)The Devil Man (1931)

Guests of the Nation


Frank O'Connor - 1931
    The short story itself

The Young Mrs. Meigs


Elizabeth Corbett - 1931
    Even the youngsters, Richard and Cecile, admit that their grandmother is young enough to understand their problems. Indeed, young Mrs Meigs is the conclusive proof that no woman need ever grow old, if she possesses the charm and humour which are the secrets of eternal youth. And young Mrs Meigs has been created for us by the sympathy and the artistry of Miss Elizabeth Corbett."

The Ten Commandments


Warwick Deeping - 1931
    A wounded soldier who loves beauty and a beautiful young woman who cares only for the modern world of jazz and fast living.

The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens


Lord Dunsany - 1931
    Joseph Jorkens is a collection of fantasy short stories by writer Lord Dunsany. It was first published in London by G. P. Putnam's Sons in April, 1931, with the American edition following in September of the same year from the same publisher. It was the first collection of Dunsany's Jorkens tales to be published. It has also been issued in combination with the second book, Jorkens Remembers Africa, in the omnibus edition The Collected Jorkens, Volume One, published by Night Shade Books in 2004.The Jorkens stories are set in the London gentleman's or adventurer's club of which the title character is a member. They usually open with another member mentioning an interesting experience he has had; this rouses Jorkens, who in return for a whisky-and-soda (merely to "moisten his throat," you understand!) goes the other member one better with an extraordinary tall tale, supposedly from his own past. His stories often tip well over the boundaries of the plausible, into the realms of fantasy, horror, or even science fiction, and his auditors can never be quite sure what proportion of what he relates was truly experienced and to what degree he might have embellished.The initial Jorkens collection includes thirteen short pieces by Dunsany.

The Grass Roof


Younghill Kang - 1931
    autobiographical fiction > korea > fiction > 20th century Korea > history > 20th century > koreans > japan > fiction young men > korea fictionLC Classification PS3521.A444 G7

The Lewis Carroll Book


Lewis Carroll - 1931
    Includes:• Alice in Wonderland• Phantasmagoria• Through the Looking-Glass• A Tangled Tale• The Hunting of the Snark• Nonsense from Letters

Which Way?


Theodora Benson - 1931
    Blinds and curtains were closed; the light of the skies, if any, was shut out. ... Only the fire was alive, consuming its life-for what? Then the door opened and as Claudia came with hurried steps into the fire's glow, two open letters in her hand, the telephone began ringing. She shut the door and turned up the lights.' Claudia Heseltine returns to this moment three times in a series of parallel narratives. As the novel presses the re-set button, she accepts each invitation, one by telephone, two by letter, to a specific social event, and in doing so her life goes down a different path with its own possibilities and achievements, sorrows and disappointments. This is an inventive novel, published in 1931, which contemplates the consequences of a single decision.

Three Cities


Sholem Asch - 1931
    The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events.

Pagan


W.F. Morris - 1931
    Over a decade later, they return to France not as soldiers but as tourists, taking a serene walking holiday through the Vosges Mountains.   But their idyll soon turns dark when they stay at a remote country guesthouse. The locals are secretive and frightened, breaking their silence only to warn the visitors against visiting an old battlefield nearby. Having seen many such fields under fire, Pagan and Baron consider such apprehensions nonsense—until one night when Pagan thinks he’s glimpsed an apparition on the moonlit battlefield . . .