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Description

While the Billy Boils collates Henry Lawson’s most well known short stories of the 1890s, originally published in a variety of Australian and New Zealand newspapers—most prominently the Sydney Bulletin. Lawson presents a satirical and sometimes emotional study of frontier life in late colonial Australia, and the characters living in it.

Description

Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the Puritan English poet John Milton between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667. This is a period of English history which encompasses the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Perhaps reflecting some of his country’s turmoil during Milton’s life, Paradise Lost deals with revolution in Heaven by Satan and his followers against God, their defeat and banishment to Hell, and their subsequent plotting of revenge, leading ultimately to Satan beguiling Eve in Paradise to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge against the explicit command of God. Milton’s vivid and poetic description of these events is both dramatic and compelling. The work gained swift acceptance and has always remained a popular and important part of English literature.

Originally published in ten books, a second edition was published in 1674 arranged into twelve books, the form in which it appears here. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a 1910 edition edited by A. W. Verity.

Description

Perhaps best known for creating the character Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer is also known for his works involving the supernatural. This novel follows Robert Cairn, his father, Dr. Bruce Cairn, and their suspicion of one Antony Ferrara.

After witnessing the strange and violent death of a swan, Robert Cairn suspects that Ferrara may be involved with the death of the bird. Soon after two murders, Dr. Bruce Cairn arrives in London and warns Robert that he suspects Ferrara is using ancient Egyptian magic to accomplish his evil deeds. After a mystical attack on Robert, Dr. Cairn and his son become involved in a series of supernatural events as they work to prevent Antony Ferrara from inflicting his dark magic on more victims.

Like many of his works, Rohmer includes exotic locations in this novel; first set in London, the action soon moves to the pyramids of Egypt as the father and son duo track down Ferrara. Having received both success and notoriety from Fu-Manchu, Rohmer has been given praise for Brood of the Witch-Queen, such as when H. P. Lovecraft favorably compared it to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Description

Poems is an anthology of William Carlos Williams’ poetry collections, combining The Tempers (1913), Al Que Quiere! (1917), and Sour Grapes (1921). Williams is recognized as one of the foremost poets of American Modernism. In these collections a reader may perceive Williams’ contact with and subsequent growth through and away from Imagism. The poet’s work asserts a decidedly American approach to Modernism and features highly localized diction and imagery.

William Carlos Williams was born in 1883, grew up in New Jersey, and was educated in Europe and the United States. He was friends with Hilda Doolittle “H. D.” and Ezra Pound, and through these friendships was introduced to Imagism. He eventually broke with the Imagists and invested himself instead in capturing the unique diction and linguistic intermingling of the United States, while remaining committed to the concreteness that characterizes Imagism. A practising doctor, Williams included many images of bodies, sickness, and medical care in his early poems. Williams later claimed there are “no ideas but in things,” a sentiment rooted in both his contact with Imagism and his firm sense of place.

Williams continued to read and respond to expatriate and English Modernism, culminating in his long work Paterson. In his later career Williams influenced postwar literary movements, most notably the Beat Generation. He died in 1963.

Description

Published in 1919, Mr. Standfast is a thriller set in the latter half of the First World War, and the third of John Buchan’s books to feature Richard Hannay.

Richard Hannay is called back from serving in France to take part in a secret mission: searching for a German agent. Hannay disguises himself as a pacifist and travels through England and Scotland to track down the spy at the center of a web of German agents who are leaking information about the war plans. He hopes to infiltrate and feed misinformation back to Germany. His journey takes him from Glasgow to Skye, onwards into the Swiss Alps, and on to the Western Front.

During the course of his work he’s again reunited with Peter Pienaar and John Blenkiron, who both appear in Greenmantle, as well as Sir Walter Bullivant, his Foreign Office contact from The Thirty Nine Steps.

The title of the novel comes from a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to which there are many references in the book, not least of all as a codebook which Hannay uses to decipher messages from his allies.

The book finishes with a captivating description of some of the final battles of the First World War between Britain and Germany in Eastern France.

Description

Jeeves Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the adventures of his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster. Wooster is a wealthy and idle young English gentleman of the interwar era. Jeeves is his extraordinarily competent valet whose name has since become synonymous with perfect service. The stories follow Wooster in his wanderings about London, around England, and across the Atlantic to New York, with Jeeves following in his wake and striving to keep his employer well-groomed and properly presented. Along the way Jeeves must somehow also manage to extricate Wooster and his friends from the various scrapes and follies they get themselves into.

First published as early as 1915, the stories first appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine. They were later collected into books or reworked into novels. Though only less than 50 of Wodehouse’s over 300 short stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, they remain his most enduring characters. They’ve been copied, imitated, and featured in countless interpretations and adaptations. A century later, these stories still are as amusing and entertaining as they were when they were first published.

Description

Booker Taliaferro Washington began life as a slave in Virginia shortly before emancipation, but rose to become one of the most celebrated leaders the African American community has ever had. His principal occupation was as president of the Tuskegee Institute, which he founded in 1881, but he earned national renown as an orator, writer and political advisor. His address at the Atlanta Exposition was a pivotal moment in race relations in America.

Washington believed deeply in the dignity of physical labor, and that merit and talent are eventually rewarded regardless of race or class. The Tuskegee Institution was primarily a technical college, and aimed to teach industrial skills in addition to academic training. Students built many of the buildings on the campus, grew the food that was eaten there, and even made the furniture, tools and vehicles used by the school.

Up from Slavery was originally published as a serialized work in The Outlook, a Christian magazine based in New York, before being collected in a single volume in 1901. This edition includes an introduction by Walter H. Page, a future U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Description

In 1917 John Reed, a journalist and socialist, witnessed first-hand the 1917 Russian October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks seized power and began forming the Soviet Union. Ten Days that Shook the World is his account of the revolution, including on-the-ground descriptions of the days up to those portentious events.

The book received a mixed reception. Some reviewers found it a powerful account of the events, one of the few available in English. Others noted Reed’s bias as an established Socialist writer. In any case, the book was hugely influential: this edition boasts a preface by Lenin, John Reed was buried in Moscow in a site reserved for Soviet leadership, and some Soviet couples even went so far as to name their children “Johnreed.” In 1999 New York University placed Ten Days that Shook the World 7th in their “Top 100 Works of Journalism” list.

Description

Esmeralda is a breathtaking beauty and attracts the attention of men all around her, including an actor, a captain, and an archdeacon, to whom she is of course forbidden. But because of a kindness she paid to him, there is one whose love for her is pure: the archdeacon’s bellringer. The actions of the archdeacon, who cannot control his lust for the young woman, ultimately draws all four men into her orbit, and his, with tragic consequences.

Hugo’s tragic novel is an ode to gothic architecture in general and that of Notre-Dame de Paris in particular. Hugo was upset both at the neglect of buildings like Notre-Dame, and the modernization of those that weren’t being neglected. By centering on the building, he was able to bring all classes into his story: from kings and nobles to bellringers and sewer rats. The first American translation changed the title to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” shifting attention to the bellringer, but Hugo’s focus was always on Notre-Dame and the beautiful gothic architecture of Paris.

Description

The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain’s first novel written solely by himself. Although he was already a well-known author, it was for autobiographical sketches (The Innocents Abroad) and novels written with others (The Gilded Age). In writing about Tom, Twain drew on his childhood growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, infusing the story with his usual biting satire and social commentary. In Tom Sawyer and his friends, Twain created young men who would long outlive him. Not without controversy over the years due to its language and negative depiction of a Native American, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is arguably Twain’s most endearing, and enduring, work.