Best of
Fiction

1935

Musashi


Eiji Yoshikawa - 1935
    Musashi is a novel in the best tradition of Japanese story telling. It is a living story, subtle and imaginative, teeming with memorable characters, many of them historical. Interweaving themes of unrequited love, misguided revenge, filial piety and absolute dedication to the Way of the Samurai, it depicts vividly a world Westerners know only vaguely.

The Good Earth Trilogy: The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided


Pearl S. Buck - 1935
    

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft


H.P. Lovecraft - 1935
    P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”—Stephen KingThe most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre—a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice—are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.

Swami and Friends


R.K. Narayan - 1935
    Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian."—Graham GreeneOffering rare insight into the complexities of Indian middle-class society, R. K. Narayan traces life in the fictional town of Malgudi. The Dark Room is a searching look at a difficult marriage and a woman who eventually rebels against the demands of being a good and obedient wife. In Mr. Sampath, a newspaper man tries to keep his paper afloat in the face of social and economic changes sweeping India. Narayan writes of youth and young adulthood in the semiautobiographical Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. Although the ordinary tensions of maturing are heightened by the particular circumstances of pre-partition India, Narayan provides a universal vision of childhood, early love and grief."The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness—like one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."—Margaret Parton, New York Herald Tribune"The novels of R.K. Narayan are the best I have read in any language for a long time. . . . His work gives the conviction that it is possible to capture in English, a language not born of India, the distinctive characteristics of Indian family life."—Amit Roy, Daily Telegraph

The Stars Look Down


A.J. Cronin - 1935
    Cronin's fourth novel, published in 1935, and this tale of a North country mining family was a great favourite with his readers. Robert Fenwick is a miner, and so are his three sons. His wife is proud that all her four men go down the mines. But David, the youngest, is determined that somehow he will educate himself and work to ameliorate the lives of his comrades who ruin their health to dig the nation's coal. It is, perhaps, a typical tale of the era in which it was written (there were many novels about coal mining), but Cronin, a doctor turned author, had a gift for storytelling, and in his time wrote several very popular and successful novels.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky


Patrick Hamilton - 1935
    A timeless classic of sleazy London life in the 1930s, a world of streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars.

Musashi: The Way of the Samurai


Eiji Yoshikawa - 1935
    Now the Yoshiokas are fighting for their future, and Musashi must face his most difficult contest--in a battle that will change his life forever. Previously published by Harper & Row.

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth


Thomas Wolfe - 1935
    The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer. The work of an exceptionally expressive writer of fertile imagination and startling emotional intensity, Of Time and the River illuminates universal truths about art and life, city and country, past and present. It is a novel that is majestic and enduring. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, "It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life." This edition, published in celebration of Wolfe's centennial anniversary, contains a new introduction by Pat Conroy.

National Velvet


Enid Bagnold - 1935
    The heroine's grit and determination, backed by the support of her eccentric and loving family, offer an inspiring example of the struggles and rewards of following a dream."The book is one that horse lovers of every age cannot fail to enjoy."--"The New York Times""Humorous, charming, National Velvet is a little masterpiece."--"Time""Put on your not-to-be-missed list."--"The New Yorker"

The Good Master


Kate Seredy - 1935
    But their summer proves more adventurous than he had hoped when headstrong Kate arrives, as together they share horseback races across the plains, country fairs and festivals, and a dangerous run-in with the gypsies.In vividly detailed scenes and beautiful illustrations, this Newbery Award-winning author presents an unforgettable world and characters who will be remembered forever.

The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies


Clark Ashton Smith - 1935
    P. Lovecraft into calling him "perhaps unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith—autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller—simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith’s visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder.

Mules and Men


Zora Neale Hurston - 1935
    AbrahamsMules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her "native village" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, "big old lies," and the lyrical language of song. With this collection, Zora Neale Hurston has come to reveal'and preserve'a beautiful and important part of American culture.Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, anthropologist and playwright whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage are unparalleled. She is also the author of Tell My Horse, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on a Road, and Mule Bone.Ruby Dee, a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame, starred on Broadway in the original productions of A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, and was featured in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. She is also an award-winning author and the producer of numerous television dramas.

The World of Mr. Mulliner


P.G. Wodehouse - 1935
    Take, for example, young Lancelot. He is a bohemian - or was, until he had to look after his saintly uncle's cat Webster, and was startlingly transformed.The forty-two truth-stretching Anglers' Rest stories told by Mr. Mulliner in this collection concern the foibles, plights, fates, and perils of his singular kinsmen.

Parables and Paradoxes


Franz Kafka - 1935
    

White Orchids


Grace Livingston Hill - 1935
    Grace Livingston Hill is the beloved author of more than 100 books. Read and enjoyed by millions, her wholesome stories contain adventure, romance, and the heartwarming triumphs of people faced with the problems of life and love.

Beauty for Ashes


Grace Livingston Hill - 1935
    Her life had been filled with every conceivable luxury, which would only continue when she was married to a well known and wealthy man. But Gloria's world is shattered when her fiancee is found murdered—in very questionable circumstances. Brokenhearted, Gloria flees to the quiet country town where her father grew up. There she meets sincere, humble people who seem satisfied without money—and discovers a love she never dreamed existed. But can even the love of handsome Murray MacRae release Gloria from the shame of her past? Grace Livingston Hill is the beloved author of more than 100 books. Read and enjoyed by millions, her wholesome stories contain adventure, romance, and the heartwarming triumphs of people faced with the problems of life and love."

The Luck of the Bodkins


P.G. Wodehouse - 1935
    Atlantic is not progressing as it should. And the cause of all the trouble is Miss Lotus Blossum, the brightest star in Hollywood's firmament. The easy camaraderie of Miss Blossom, coupled with the idea that Monty is the only person who can send the errant Ambrose back to her welcoming arms, is causing Mr Bodkin moments of acute distress.

Paths of Glory


Humphrey Cobb - 1935
    Humphrey Cobb's protagonists are Frenchmen during the First World War whose nightmare in the trenches takes a new and terrible turn when they are ordered to assault a German position deemed all but invulnerable. When the attack fails, an inquiry into allegations of cowardice indicts a small handful of lower-ranked scapegoats whose trial exposes the farce of ordering ordinary men to risk their lives in an impossible cause. A chilling portrait of injustice, this novel offers insight into the tragedies of war in any age.

Auto-da-Fé


Elias Canetti - 1935
    With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction.Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis..."Auto-da-Fé" was first published in Germany in 1935 as "Die Blendung" ("The Blinding" or "Bedazzlement") and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. "Auto-da-Fé" still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

The African Queen


C.S. Forester - 1935
    Fighting time, heat, malaria, and bullets, they make their escape on the rickety steamboat The African Queen...and hatch their own outrageous military plan. Originally published in 1935, The African Queen is a tale replete with vintage Forester drama - unrelenting suspense, reckless heroism, impromptu military manoeuvres, near-death experiences - and a good old-fashioned love story to boot.

Joy of Man's Desiring


Jean Giono - 1935
    With a poet's grace and imagination, he weaves a grand story of the earth and of passion, of animals and weather, of the miracles we now call the laws of nature.

The Sea Priestess


Dion Fortune - 1935
    Vivien has the ability to transform herself into magical images, and here she becomes Morgan Le Fay, sea priestess of Atlantis and foster daughter to Merlin! Desperately in love with Vivien, Wilfred Maxwell works by her side at an isolated seaside retreat, investigating these occult mysteries. They soon find themselves inextricably drawn to an ancient cult through which they learn the esoteric significance of the magnetic ebb and flow of the moontides.

Mipam


Albert Arthur Yongden - 1935
    It is a love story woven around the search for the missing reincarnation of a great Lama. Along the way we glimpse a people whose spirituality is as exalted as the Himalayas. There is humor as well, when the hero encounters a bewildering group of Christian missionaries. In the depiction of Chinese culture, and the Chinese merchants of Tibet, there is a foreshadowing of the country's tragic fate.

Spring Came On Forever


Bess Streeter Aldrich - 1935
    In 1935, she published her masterpiece, Spring Came on Forever, a novel of two Nebraska pioneer families from settlement to the 1930s. Elsewhere an artist of the romance, here Aldrich turns romance on its head. The heroine is Amalia Holmsdorfer, one of a band of German immigrants who settle on the prairie. From her late teens to her mid-eighties she confronts and defeats the forces of nature and society that discourage or ruin others. Her life might be a modest triumph but for one detail: she married the wrong man. Quickly paced and precisely drawn, this novel is Aldrich's greatest tribute to the complexity, humor, endurance, and intelligence of the people who settled the prairie. Whatever its sentiments, it has as many cutting edges as a buzz saw.

Waiting For Nothing


Tom Kromer - 1935
    The book, a classic portrayal of the brutality and inhumanness of the time, was written while author Tom Kromer (1906-1969) was working at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in California, and was his only completed novel. Waiting for Nothing describes Kromer's travels on the rails, his encounters with small-time crooks, prostitutes and homosexuals, and the endless search for enough food to eat and a warm place to sleep. Throughout the book, Kromer describes the plight of a vast army of unemployed workers, left to fend for themselves in a largely uncaring society.

Progress of Stories


Laura Riding - 1935
    Stories of Lives:Socialist PleasuresThe Friendly OneSchoolgirlsThe SecretThe Incurable VirtueDaisy and VenisonThree Times RoundII. Stories of Ideas:Reality as Port HuntladyMiss Banquett, or The Populating of CosmaniaIII. Nearly True Stories:The Story-PigThe PlaygroundA Fairy Tale for Older PeopleA Last Lesson in GeographyIV. A Crown for Hans AndersenV. More Stories:In the BeginningEve's Side of ItPrivatenessIn the EndFrom Anarchism Is Not Enough:How Came It AboutHungry to HearIn a CaféAn Anonymous BookFrom Experts Are Puzzled:Mademoiselle CometThe Fortunate LiarMolly BarleywaterButtercupThe Fable of the DicePerhaps an IndiscretionArista ManuscriptThat WorkshopFinale:A Later Story: Christmastime (1966)

The Family Mark Twain


Mark Twain - 1935
    The term means "two fathoms deep," but as a writer, Mark Twain is far deeper. For more than 40 years he published some of America's most enduring literature, ranging from essays, humorous miscellanies, autobiographies and travel sketches, to novels and short stories. This massive omnibus celebrates the works of this American original with the complete books of his most famous novels: Life on the Mississippi; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The Family Mark Twain also features selections from some of his most famous essays, speeches, sketches and short stories. It includes Pudd'nhead Wilson; The Jumping Frog, The Petrified Man, and My Bloody Massacre from Sketches New and Old; The Stolen White Elephant from Tom Sawyer Abroad; Punch, Brother, Punch and Speech on the Weather from Tom Sawyer, Detective and Other Stories; The Turning-Point of My Life from What Is Man? and Other Essays; Baker's Bluejay Yarn and The Awful German Language from Tramp Abroad; Private History of the "Jumping Frog" Story from In Defense of Harriet; The Invalid's Story from Shelley and Other Essays; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg; more. 1,462pp.

The Young Clementina


D.E. Stevenson - 1935
    But when her younger sister unceremoniously bursts into her quiet life one afternoon, Charlotte's world turns topsy-turvy.

The Quiet Man and Other Stories


Maurice Walsh - 1935
    Since then, readers have continued to be charmed by these accounts of the simple and common activities of the characters in 1920s rural Ireland. The lives of Hugh Forbes, Paddy Bawn Enright, Archibald MacDonald, Joan Hyland, and Nuala Kierley intermingle as the themes of nationalism, human dignity, honor, and love are given full play. Made famous by John Ford's Oscar-winning film The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, these remain humorous and poignant tales set against a backdrop of intrigue and Irish civil unrest.

The Winged Bull


Dion Fortune - 1935
    He summons the ancient cult of the Winged Bull to infiltrate the Black Mass in which she faces the ordeal which will be literally worse than death. Magical practices and esoteric laws are described in dramatic form. Lover, The Sea Priestess, Moon Magic and The Secrets of Dr Taverner, as well as several non-fiction studies of the occult.

On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories


Tess Slesinger - 1935
    Hers is, one soon discovers, also a wholly feminine voice: compelling, filled with insight, acute at observation, sure of its tone, and everywhere discovering the reality behind human appearances and pretensions. This is a remarkable collection of short stories by a brilliant young writer who was cut off in her prime when she died of cancer in 1945. On being told that her second husband has taken his first lover --After the party --The times so unsettled are --Mother to dinner --Relax is all --Jobs in the sky --White on black --The mouse-trap --Missis Flinders --the Friedmans' Annie --The answer on the magnolia tree --A life in the day of a writer

The Hanging on Union Square


H.T. Tsiang - 1935
    Tsiang's hallucinatory, quasi-experimental novel Hanging on Union Square explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York--an era of union busting and food lines--in an ambitious style that brilliantly blends Gertrude Stein's playful language with the political satire of Carl Sandberg's prose fables. It follows the peripatetic musings of a young man throughout a single day that takes him from a worker's cafeteria to a world of dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, and back again to the streets of Greenwich Village, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. Each chapter comprises a single hour of the day. Tsiang's style combines satirical allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, Hanging on Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.

Great Expectations / Oliver Twist


Charles Dickens - 1935
    

The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions


Oliver Onions - 1935
    

Forever


Mildred Cram - 1935
    The author is concerned with mystery, tenderness and fragility and a love that was longer than life and stronger than death.

Broken Fang


Rutherford G. Montgomery - 1935
    How or when or whence this strange bond between the two had its beginning, we do not know. The dog alone volunteers to be man's chum and serf.This is the story of a dog wrongfully branded as a killer, who never lost the trust and confidence of his master.Bart the dog is all dog. His creator has mastered in full the secrets of canine reason.

Illyrian Spring


Ann Bridge - 1935
    her remote, brilliant husband has no time for her and she feels she only exasperates her delightful, headstrong daughter. So, telling no one where she is going. she embarks on a painting trip to the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia - in the Thirties a remote and exotic place. There she takes under her wing Nicholas, a bitterly unhappy young man, forbidden by his family to pursue the painting he loves and which Grace recognises as being of rare quality. Their adventures and searching discussions lead to something much deeper than simple friendship ...This beautiful novel, gloriously evoking the countryside and people of Illyria, has been a favourite since its publication in 1935, both as a sensitive travel book and as [an] unusual and touching love story.

The Voice of Bugle Ann


MacKinlay Kantor - 1935
    We include The Voice of Bugle Ann in The Derrydale Press Foxhunters' Library as a testament to one of the finest pieces of foxhunting fiction ever written.

The City of Fire / Time of the Singing Birds / The Gold Shoe


Grace Livingston Hill - 1935
    

Grimm's Fairy Tales


Elenore Plaisted Abbott - 1935
    Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Scribners, 1935. Octavo. 308 pages. Illustrated with 6 color plates by Abbott.

We Have Been Warned


Naomi Mitchison - 1935
    She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes.She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced.It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Blood Dark


Louis Guilloux - 1935
    Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.

Hubert's Arthur


Frederick Rolfe - 1935
    In Hubert's narrative, which begins with an account of the struggle for succession in the wake of King Richard Lionheart's death, young Duke Arthur of Brittany does not die at the hands of King John, but instead ascends to the throne. Hubert relates Arthur's adventures as he combats the wily John, fights in the Crusades, and wages battle against the treacherous Simon de Montfort, before facing perhaps his greatest challenge when his reign is threatened by the crucifixions of young Christian boys.Penned by the brilliant but eccentric Frederick Rolfe (who styled himself Baron Corvo) whilst he was starving and homeless in a self-imposed exile in Venice, "Hubert's Arthur," first published posthumously in 1935, is one of the strangest and most remarkable novels of the twentieth century. Filled with action and suffused throughout with Rolfe's characteristic humor, the novel is notable for its blatant homoeroticism, its savage anti-Semitism, and its shockingly graphic violence. This edition features a new scholarly introduction by Kristin Mahoney, who also provides detailed annotations to help guide readers through Rolfe's labyrinth of historical and literary references and his unique vocabulary of archaic words, some of which have not been used since the sixteenth century."Mahoney's introduction to "Hubert's Arthur" is excellent advocacy for the virtues and importance of the work. With notes in the text up to this standard, the edition will not only contribute importantly to scholarship on Rolfe, but also help forge new understanding of the values of his age." - Prof. Edmund Miller, Long Island University

South Country Secrets


Euphan - 1935
    PRE-ISBNFrom the first page: “The South Country’s secrets are about smugglers, wishing wells, Roman villas, and such queer things as a wall made of bullock horns; about the ‘Doormat’ of England, the ‘sea lane’, swan upping and more real things.A family of boys and girls returning from South Africa to see England for the first time, are the explorers and detectives, identifying places they had often seen in Daddy’s album of treasured snapshots of “home.”

The Demi-Widow


Mary Pickford - 1935
    The famous Hollywood film actress's first novel about the romance of a Hollywood publicity director.

The Great Book of Thrillers


H. Douglas Thomson - 1935
    

The Bunch Quitter


Don Patton - 1935
    He is, however, tamed by a half Indian wolf trapper, Narcisse. The book is set in Montana.

Its a Great World


Emilie Loring - 1935
    Then she discovers that the woman who broke his heart is suddenly free again – free to marry him.Determined not to stand in Jeff’s way, Eve steps out of his life, and throws herself into her work as secretary to her uncle, a famous senator. There, in Washington’s glittering world of politics and diplomacy, Eve uncovers an international conspiracy and finds herself plunged into excitement, suspense and unexpected romance…

Tiburon


Kylie Tennant - 1935
    Jessica Daunt, the fastidious schoolteacher from the city, learns more of life from them than she can teach.

The Eleventh Hour


J.S. Fletcher - 1935
    However, the collection of priceless jewels, hidden since the fifteenth century and discovered only that day, has disappeared... The absorbing story moves steadily against the lovely cloistered background with logical sleuthing, plot twists and a few red herrings - until an exciting, unexpected last-minute resolution, as the title suggests. One of the finest performances in J.S. Fletcher's distinguished career as a writer of murder-mystery stories.

Father Brown: A Selection


G.K. Chesterton - 1935
    W. Robson. His work brings together a lifetime's critical appreciation of Chesterton and includes the establishment of new texts for some of the stories.

The Twisted Tree


Frank Baker - 1935
    But it is not the only souvenir of their encounter: eighteen years later, Tansy’s son, David, is the living image of Chailey, sharing not only his father’s good looks but also his immoral ways. David’s resemblance to her first lover triggers powerful feelings in Tansy and leads to a strange relationship between mother and son, as well as a terrible and shocking conclusion . . .The Twisted Tree (1935) is the extremely rare first novel by Frank Baker (1908-1983), best known for his avian apocalypse novel The Birds (1936) and his classic fantasy Miss Hargreaves (1940). A story that one critic said might have been “written by the ghost of D. H. Lawrence seated on the grave of Mary Webb,” Baker’s brooding Gothic drama is an important rediscovery that remains a gripping and powerful read.