The Country Beyond, subtitled A Romance In the Wilderness, is a story of Jolly Roger McKay, an outcast on the run from the law; Nada, the girl he falls in love with; and Peter, the devoted mixed-breed dog who links the two together as no human could, as action, adventure, and romance take them through the Northwest Canadian wilderness in search of The Country Beyond. (Summary by Roger Melin)...

Adventure, Romance

A tale of mystery, romance, and honor, as David Carrigan must choose between his duty as an officer of the law and a girl who holds him captive; a girl who Carrigan thinks he may have fallen in love with no less! Who is this strange girl Jean-Marie, and why won't she give him his freedom? And who are the people that she surrounds herself with along the great Canadian rivers and wilderness barrens and forests of the northwest? Summary by Roger Melin....

Adventure, Mystery, Romance

Dark Kensington had been dead for twenty-five years. It was a fact; everyone knew it. Then suddenly he reappeared, youthful, brilliant, ready to take over the Phoenix, the rebel group that worked to overthrow the tyranny that gripped the settlers on Mars.The Phoenix had been destroyed not once, not twice, but three times! But this time the resurrected Dark had new plans, plans which involved dangerous experiments in mutation and psionics.And now the rebels realized they were in double jeopardy. Not only from the government's desperate hatred of their movement, but also from the growing possibility that the new breed of mutated monsters would get out of hand and bring terrors never before known to man. (Summary from Project Gutenberg text)...

Science fiction, Adventure

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a prolific and genre-bending American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. 2 B R 0 2 B is a satiric short story that imagines life (and death) in a future world where aging has been cured and population control is mandated and administered by the government. (Summary by Wikipedia and Laurie Anne Walden)This recording is done as a dramatic reading.Characters: Narrator: Denny Sayers Hospital Orderly: Mark F. Smith Painter: Alan Davis-Drake Leora Duncan: Laurie Anne Walden Dr. Hitz: Michael Yard Wehling: Julian Jamison Federal Bureau of Termination hostess: Kara Shallenberg...

Short stories, Satire, Science fiction

Natives of the distant planet of Kwannon believe that their world is about to end, and in preparing for the apocalypse, may be unnecessarily bringing about their own demise. The planetary government can’t overcome its own bureaucracy to help them, and the military is overwhelmed. Can a single newsman change the course of a whole people, and save their world? (by Mark Nelson)...

Science fiction, Teen/Young adult

With no written language, Native Americans living in the Lake Superior region passed their cultural identity down through the generations by way of stories. Far more than mere tales to amuse children, they passed along the collective wisdom of the tribes. In the 1830s, government Indian Agent and ethnologist Henry R Schoolcraft learned the language of these people and went out to collect and preserve their stories before the tribes disappeared under the westward rush of American civilization. Though these stories were recast as children’s fairy tales in the 1920s, they contain much of the old wisdom of a culture which has largely disappeared. (Summary by Chip)...

Fairy tales, Children, Short stories

The Small House at Allington concerns the Dale family, who live in the Small House, a dower house intended for the widowed mother (Dowager) of the owner of the estate. The landowner, in this instance, is the bachelor Squire of Allington, Christopher Dale. Dale's mother having died, he has allocated the Small House, rent free, to his widowed sister-in-law and her daughters Isabella (Bell) and Lilian (Lily)....

Romance, Satire, Politics

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is a work of humorous fiction by Stephen Leacock first published in 1914. It is the follow-up to his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Like that work, it is a sequence of interlocking stories set in one town, but instead of focusing on a small Canadian town in the countryside, it is set in a major American metropolis and its characters are the upper crust of society. Although currently not as well-known as the earlier book, Arcadian Adventures was extremely popular in North America at the time of its publication and for a while was considered the greater success. It was also translated and published by the Bolshevik government soon after the 1917 revolution and it became a bestseller in the Soviet Union....

Comedy, Humor

The Bluebird Books is a series of novels popular with teenage girls in the 1910s and 1920s. The series was begun by L. Frank Baum using his Edith Van Dyne pseudonym, then continued by at least three others, all using the same pseudonym. Baum wrote the first four books in the series, possibly with help from his son, Harry Neal Baum, on the third. The books are concerned with adolescent girl detectives— a concept Baum had experimented with earlier, in The Daring Twins (1911) and Phoebe Daring (1912). The Bluebird series began with Mary Louise, originally written as a tribute to Baum's favorite sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster. Baum's publisher, Reilly & Britton, rejected that manuscript, apparently judging the heroine too independent. Baum wrote a new version of the book; the original manuscript is lost. The title character is Mary Louise Burrows. In this, the fourth book of the series, Mary Louise and friends form a group dedicated to supporting the soldiers in World War I, and she brings Josie O'Gorman in to spoil a treasonous plot against the government. (Summary from Wikipedia and Sibella Denton)...

Teen/Young adult, Mystery

Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (Dutch: Max Havelaar, of de koffij-veilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij) is a culturally and socially significant 1860 novel by Multatuli (the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker) which was to play a key role in shaping and modifying Dutch colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the novel, the protagonist, Max Havelaar, tries to battle against a corrupt government system in Java, which was a Dutch colony at the time. [en.Wikipedia.org]Dutch description:“Max Havelaar, of de koffij-veilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij” is in 1860 geschreven door Multatuli (pseudoniem van Eduard Douwes Dekker) als aanklacht tegen de behandeling van de plaatselijke bevolking in Indonesie, destijds een Nederlandse kolonie, door Nederlandse en Nederlands-Indische bestuurders. Het is een van de belangrijkste werken uit de Nederlandse literatuur. [Anna Simon]...

Adventure, Historical Fiction

The US Government is very smartly letting Tom Swift Jr. handle the recovery of its probe to Jupiter. But a mystery missile suddenly intercepts the probe and splashes it in the South Atlantic. Faced with a huge search task to find the probe on the ocean bottom, Tom soon realizes that the same shadowy group that attacked the probe is competing to find it, and no holds are barred: kidnap, coercion, and lethal force are all in play. Under such circumstances, what can Tom do? What he does every time, of course! He invents some utterly cool device to get the job done! And his Electronic Hydrolung is just the beginning!...

Adventure, Teen/Young adult, Science fiction, Fiction

A pre-eminent legal firm gets far more than it bargained for when it hires the son of its late senior partner, Hopkins Toppleton, Sr., simply to retain the illustrious family name on the company masthead. Knowing Jr. is a loose cannon, their strategy is to pack him off to the UK to head up a European branch of the firm - a branch they have no intention of sending work. The unwitting Hopkins Toppleton, Jr. is, however, determined to make his mark. (Summary by Cathy Barratt)...

Adventure, Humor, Fiction

Andre Norton's Star Born pictures a human colony in another galaxy, driven away from Earth generations ago by a repressive government. Considered outlaws, the colonists are in permanent hiding. They have developed friendship and cooperation with a local race of mermen who are equally at home on land or sea. But that race only took to the sea to escape a malevolent power that hunted them and killed them violently for sport - Those Others. With a global decline in the population and reach of Those Others, contacts are few and the humans have no direct knowlege of them. So it is a major surprise when Dalgard, a human scout on his coming-of-age expedition, along with his knife-brother Sssuri of the mermen, run into a party of Those Others who are bent on reclaiming hideous weaponries left behind in one of their abandoned cities... and find that they are being aided by new arrivals from Earth! (Summary by Mark F. Smith)...

Science fiction, Adventure

The Forsyte Saga' is the story of a wealthy London family stretching from the eighteen-eighties until the nineteen-twenties. The Man of Property is the first book in the saga. The 'man of property' of the title is Soames Forsyte, a partner in the family law firm. He is married to Irene but the marriage is not happy and during the book she falls in love with another man. Another branch of the family is headed by 'Old Jolyon,' estranged from his bohemian artist son 'Young Jolyon' and the story tells of their rapprochement and of Young Jolyon's daughter June who is engaged to an architect Philip Bosinney. For those familiar with the Forsytes, this book takes us up to the night when Soames exercises his 'rights' and to the death of Bosinney. (Summary by Andy Minter)...

Literature, Historical Fiction

“Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?” “We are dominated by journalism.... Journalism governs for ever and ever.” One of the nastiest of the British tabloids was founded a year too late to join in the moral panic generated to accompany Oscar Wilde’s court appearances in 1895. Yet there was no shortage of hypocritical journalists posing as moral arbiters to the nation, then as now. This compendium work - skilfully assembled by the editor, Stuart Mason - ends with transcript of Wilde’s first appearance in the Old Bailey, when he was cross-examined on the alleged immorality of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The disastrous outcome of these trials provides an ironic conclusion to the earlier knockabout exchanges between Oscar and his reviewers. In these he is at his flamboyant best, revelling in the publicity he pretends to disdain. His brave performances in the dock did nothing, however, to save him from hard labour, the treadmill and complete physical and moral breakdown which the law found it necessary to inflict on him. In contrast to th...

Literature, Biography, Philosophy

Further Chronicles of Avonlea is a collection of short stories by L.M. Montgomery and is a sequel to Chronicles of Avonlea . Published in 1920, it includes a number of stories relating to the inhabitants of the fictional Canadian village of Avonlea and its region, located on Prince Edward Island.The book was published without the permission of L.M. Montgomery, and was formed from stories she had decided not to publish in the earlier Chronicles of Avonlea . Montgomery sued her publishers, L.C. Page & Co, and won $18,000 in damages after a legal battle lasting nearly nine years. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Children, Short stories

The story begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somersetshire, the country residence of the happy Vanstone family. When Andrew Vanstone is killed suddenly in an accident and his wife follows shortly thereafter, it is revealed that they were not married at the time of their daughters' births, making their daughters Nobody's Children in the eyes of English law and robbing them of their inheritance. Andrew Vanstone's elder brother Michael gleefully takes possession of his brother's fortune, leaving his nieces to make their own way in the world. Norah, the elder sister, accepts her misfortune gracefully, but the headstrong Magdalen is determined to have her revenge. Using her dramatic talent and assisted by wily swindler Captain Wragge, Magdalen plots to regain her rightful inheritance. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia)...

Literature, Mystery

This is the classic story of Mowgli, the young boy raised by wolves in India: his escapades and adventures with his dear friends Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, his capture by the Monkey-People, his attempt at reintegration into human society, and his ultimate triumph over his avowed enemy the tiger Shere Khan. Included in the book is the story of the brave white seal, Kotick, and the tenacious young mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi who battled through the night to protect his human family from a pair of sly and viscous cobras. Packed with adventure and Jungle Law wisdom, this book has pervaded popular culture as the basis of many film and stage adaptations, including the popular Disney movie. Summary by Meredith Hughes and Phil Chenevert...

Children, Adventure, Animals, Fiction

John Charles Dent, the author of the following remarkable stories, was born in Kendal, Westmorland, England, in 1841. His parents emigrated to Canada shortly after that event, bringing with them, of course, the youth who was afterwards to become the Canadian author and historian. Mr. Dent received his primary education in Canadian schools, and afterwards studied law, becoming in due course a member of the Upper Canada Bar. He only practised for a few years, then returned to England to pursue a literary career, writing mostly for periodicals. After remaining in England for several years, Mr. Dent and his family moved to Boston, in America, for about two years. But he finally returned to Canada, accepting a journalistic position in Toronto. Mr. Dent proceeded to write 'The Canadian Portrait Gallery', which ran to four large volumes, 'The Last Forty Years: Canada since the Union of 1841', and a 'History of the Rebellion in Upper Canada'. This collected work of his short fiction, contributed by their author at considerable intervals to different periodicals, was published posthumously. The stories themselves are delightfully anchored in...

Horror/Ghost stories, Mystery, Short stories

This classic children's book by Rudyard Kipling tells the story of Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves: his escapades and adventures with his dear friends Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, his capture by the Monkey-People, his attempt at reintegration into human society, and his ultimate triumph over the lame tiger Shere Khan. The account of Mowgli's adventures is followed by several short stories, including the tales of the brave white seal, Kotick, and the tenacious mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Packed with adventure and Jungle Law wisdom, this book has pervaded popular culture as the basis of many film and stage adaptations, including the popular Disney movie, and through its adoption as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts....

Children, Animals, Adventure

The Titus Brothers Contractors company have won a government contract in Peru to blast a tunnel through a mountain and connect two isolated railroad lines. The deadline is approaching, and the contractors have hit a literal wall: excessively hard rock which defies conventional blasting techniques. The company is under pressure to finish, or else the contract will default to their rivals, Blakeson & Grinder. Mr. Job Titus has heard of Tom Swift and Tom's giant cannon, which is used in protecting the Panama Canal, and wants to hire Tom to develop a special blasting powder to help them finish the excavation. Mr. Damon, Tom's very good friend, arrives in the middle of this conversation, and is unaware of the situation. By coincidence, Mr. Damon is invested in a business which procures cinchona bark from Peru, but production has all but ceased, prompting Mr. Damon to invite Tom to accompany him to Peru and discover the source of the problem. Tom, Mr. Damon and Mr. Titus (along with Koku, Tom's giant) embark for Peru. On the way, they encounter Professor Swyington Bumper, who is on a life-long quest to locate the lost city of Pelone. Prof...

Adventure, Teen/Young adult, Fiction

The novel begins with the accidental discovery, in a Government laboratory in Washington D. C., of a form of clean nuclear power. Our hero, Dr. Richard Seaton, uses this power to build first a flying belt and then an interstellar spaceship. He later discovers that the process operates by generation and manipulation of gravity fields. When his government coworkers do not believe him, Seaton acquires rights to his discovery from the government and commercializes it with the aid of his friend, millionaire inventor Martin Crane. A former colleague, Dr. Marc DuQuesne, joins with the unscrupulous World Steel Corporation to try to steal Seaton's invention. The resulting conflict escalates, as Seaton and Duquesne develop greater and greater technical capabilities and enlist more and more powerful alien races as allies.....

Adventure, Fantasy, Fiction, Science fiction

Lizzie Greystock, a fortune-hunter who ensnares the sickly, dissipated Sir Florian Eustace, is soon left a very wealthy widow and mother. While clever and beautiful, Lizzie has several character flaws; the greatest of these is an almost pathological delight in lying, even when it cannot benefit her. Before he dies, the disillusioned Sir Florian discovers all this, but does not think to change the generous terms of his will. The diamonds of the book's title are a necklace, a Eustace family heirloom that Sir Florian gave to Lizzie to wear. Lizzie attempts to hold onto them, much to the irritation of the longtime family lawyer, Mr Camperdown. The Eustaces find themselves in an awkward position. On the one hand, the diamonds are a valuable heirloom to which Lizzie may not have a legal claim, but on the other, they do not want to antagonize the mother of the heir to the family estate (Lizzie having only a life interest). Meanwhile, after a respectable period of mourning, Lizzie searches for another husband, and the plot thickens. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Historical Fiction, Mystery

Noli Me Tangere (Latin for Touch Me Not) is a novel by the National Hero of the Philippines, Dr. José Rizal. It was originally written in Spanish, and first published in Germany in 1887. Noli Me Tangere exposed the corruption and abuse of the Spanish government and clergy towards the Philippine people and the ills of the Philippine society. This novel, and its sequel El Filibusterismo were banned in many parts of the Islands. Rizal was later arrested for inciting rebellion, based largely on his writings, and was excuted in Manila. Noli Me Tangere, and the execution of Rizal, indirectly influenced the Philippine revolution from Spain. Today, Noli Me Tangere is required reading in all Philippine Schools. (Summary by JoeD)...

Literature, Politics

Pierre and Luce were an unlikely young pair who found themselves in the chaos of Paris during the war; Pierre, the shy, recently conscripted pacifist, and Luce, the free spirited artist in training, and both confused about the things going on around them. Why were these war birds flying overhead? Why these warning sirens, and occasional bombs exploding in the distance? Why did the government leaders, who didn't even know one another, hate and destroy so much? Why did these two delicate young adults find each other now? This story takes place between Jan. 30 and Good Friday, May 29, 1918. (Introduction by Roger Melin)...

Literature, War stories, Romance, Tragedy