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Description
Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse, was first published on February 24, 1917 by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York. It was subsequently published in London in May 1918 by Herbert Jenkins. It is based on a story originally published in the Saturday Evening Post from September 16 to November 11, 1916. The book sees Jimmy Crocker, also known as “Piccadilly Jim,” trying to escape his increasingly bad reputation by returning to New York from London. On the way, he meets and falls in love with Ann Chester, and agrees to help her kidnap Ogden, her cousin, for his own good. Their plans go awry and become more convoluted as impersonations, explosives and a determined detective get in the way.
Description
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and shortest plays. This comedy utilizes slapstick humor, word play, and mistaken identities to create a series of farcical accidents. Over time, the play’s title has become an idiom used to describe “an event or series of events made ridiculous by the number of errors that were made throughout.”
In Ephesus, the law forbids entry to any merchants from Syracuse, and if they are discovered within the city, they must pay a thousand marks or be put to death. Aegeon, an old Syracusian merchant, is arrested and Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus, listens to his story of coming to the city. Long ago, Aegeon was on a sea voyage. Traveling with him was his wife, his twin sons, and their twin slaves. The family becomes separated during a tempest; Aegeon, one son, and one slave were rescued together, and the others were never to be seen again. Years later his son Antipholus and his slave Dromio left to search for their long lost siblings; after the boys didn’t return, Aegeon set out to bring his son back home. Moved by this story, the duke allows Aegeon one day to get the money to pay his fine and to find his family.
This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Description
Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, five aristocratic families in Russia are transformed by the vagaries of life, by war, and by the intersection of their lives with each other. Hundreds of characters populate War and Peace, many of them historical persons, including Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, and all of them come to life under Tolstoy’s deft hand.
War and Peace is generally considered to be Tolstoy’s masterpiece, a pinnacle of Russian literature, and one of history’s great novels. Tolstoy himself refused to call it that, saying it was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” It contains elements of history, narrative, and philosophy, the latter increasing in quantity as the book moves towards its climax. Whatever it is called, it is a triumph whose breadth and depth is perhaps unmatched in literature.
This production restores the Russian given names that were anglicized by the Maudes in their translation, the use of Russian patronymics and diminutives that they eliminated, and Tolstoy’s original four-book structure.
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Satan has returned to Earth for a sightseeing visit in the form of the American billionaire Henry Wondergood. Accompanied by his faithful demon butler Toppi they head for Rome, but are sidetracked by an unforeseen accident and end up at the home of the inscrutable Thomas Magnus and his divine daughter Maria. As Satan begins to discover the meaning of being a man, the satanic aspects of mankind become ever more apparent to him.
Leonid Andreyev was a Russian author active in the beginning of the twentieth century, famous mostly for his plays and short fiction, and often portrayed as Russia’s equivalent to Edgar Allan Poe. Satan’s Diary was his last work, completed just a few days before his death in 1919. This edition was translated by his previous collaborator Herman Bernstein and published in 1920.
Description
Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is one of P. G. Wodehouse’s less famous characters. He first appears in Love Among the Chickens in 1906 and then continues to make appearances in another 19 short stories until as late as 1966, making him Wodehouse’s longest running character.
Ukridge is an inveterate opportunist, and these stories chronicle his exploits as a young man: his trials and tribulations as one who is destined for greatness, if the rest of the world would only cooperate. Told from the point of view of his long-suffering friend and fellow bachelor “Corky” Corcoran, they chronicle their many meetings in the years before the period of Love Among the Chickens.
As with most of his stories, Wodehouse published the first 10 stories in both the U.S. (Cosmopolitan) and the UK (Strand Magazine) before they were published in the 1924 collection Ukridge.
Description
Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which she’s exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicott’s home town.
Carol, inspired by big-city ideas, soon begins chafing at the seeming quaintness and even backwardness of the townsfolk, and their conservative, self-satisfied way of life. She struggles to try to reform the town in her image, while finding meaning in the seeming cultural desert she’s found herself in and in her increasingly cold marriage.
Gopher Prairie is a detailed, satirical take on small-town American life, modeled after Sauk Centre, the town in which Lewis himself grew up. The town is fully realized, with generations of inhabitants interacting in a complex web of village society. Its bitingly satirical portrayal made Main Street highly acclaimed by its contemporaties, though many thought the satirical take was perhaps a bit too dark and hopeless. The book’s celebration and condemnation of small town life make it a candidate for the title of the Great American Novel.
Main Street was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but the decision was overturned by the prize’s Board of Trustees and awarded instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. When Lewis went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, he declined it—with the New York Times reporting that he did so because he was still angry at the Pulitzers for being denied the prize for Main Street.
Despite the book’s snub at the Pulitzers, Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, with Main Street being cited as one of the reasons for his win.
Description
The first published novel by a black American author combines real-life stories, including his own story of escaping slavery and recollections he heard while helping others escape, with abolitionist agitprop, revealing ephemera from the newspapers of the time, and sympathetic (if somewhat melodramatic) characters. What emerges from this collage is an indictment of slavery and of American hypocrisy about liberty that found an enthusiastic and enraged audience when it was published in 1853.
Clotel has a complex publishing history, with four separate editions published between 1853 and 1867. These editions contain huge differences in characters and plotting, so much so that they might each be considered separate novels in their own right. This edition is based on the first edition of 1853.
Description
Fritz Leiber is most famous for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” stories, but he also wrote in many other genres. Between 1950 and 1963 he wrote a number of short stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine, including one in the same universe as The Big Time and the Change War stories (“No Great Magic”).
Description
In the year 2126, scientists Arcot and Morey chase a sky pirate—and invent the technology to travel through space. In the second story, the heroes travel to Venus and make first contact with an alien species. Finally, they must defend the solar system from invaders whose own star has long since gone dark.
Originally published separately as “Piracy Preferred” in Amazing Stories June 1930 edition, “Solarite” in Amazing Stories November 1930, and “The Black Star Passes” in Amazing Stories Quarterly Fall 1930, these three novellas were edited and collected into this volume in 1953.
This is the first book in John W. Campbell’s Arcot, Morey, and Wade trilogy. Most famous for editing Astounding Science Fiction and Fact magazine and introducing Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and many other great science fiction authors to the world, Campbell’s other notable works include the novella “Who Goes There?”, which was adapted to film as The Thing by John Carpenter in 1982.
Description
In a desire for better sheep-farming land on an unnamed British colony, Higgs decides to traverse the distant mountain range. On the other side he discovers not the empty rolling plains of his imagination but an entirely new civilization: the land of Erewhon. Inducted into the ways of their culture, he attempts to transcribe as best he can their thoughts on birth, death, machines, the production of food, their financial system, and many more subjects that on first glance seem absurd to the narrator but often end up revealing absurdity in his own thinking.
Erewhon was extremely well received on its initial (and anonymous) publication, with its satirical commentary on contemporary Victorian attitudes ensuring its commercial success. Samuel Butler incorporated into the novel his philosophical ideas, including chapters founded on his interest in Darwinian evolution theory, and on the potential rise in artificial consciousness. George Orwell held the novel in high regard, and the Erewhonian philosophy on the danger of machines even made its way into Frank Herbert’s Dune series as the “Butlerian jihad.”