#and! what does the first sentence of the epilogue say? 'this is the diary of a madman'!!! I am!!!

[misskamelie]

Brain is going all brrrr now that I've finished No Longer Human by Dazai and I'm ahghhhhhf I need to read an essay on it by someone who actually studied this stuff

[endlich-allein]

“Werner Lindemann: Mike Oldfield in the rocking chair.

Vater und Sohn

The father does not understand the son's love life. There is the loyal girl M. from R. who takes the arduous trip to the countryside almost every weekend to see the son and spend the night with him in the attic. But after her departure, it rages vigorously elsewhere every time. For example, in the "Dorfbums", as the son calls it, after which another girl foolishly fears that she is pregnant.

But the father also doesn't understand many other things about his son, for example the taste in music. "Why," he wonders, "doesn't the guy even hear classical works?" And the hairstyle, terrible: "You should go to the hairdresser." The boorish behavior, unbearable: The boy "belches like a sheep when ruminating".

Long before he became world famous with his band Rammstein, the 19-year-old Till Lindemann lived with his father in the countryside in Mecklenburg for some time in the early 1980s, where he began an apprenticeship as a wheelwright in an agricultural production cooperative. The father, Werner Lindemann, was a well-known author of children's and youth books in the GDR and lived in a farmhouse in the Zickhusen municipality. He recorded the complicated life together with his son in irregular diary form, the book first appeared in the GDR shortly before the fall of the wall. Now, supplemented by a detailed interview with the now 57-year-old Till Lindemann, it has been reissued under the title "Mike Oldfield in a rocking chair".

Till means in the book Timm, which was a rather listless and useless pseudonym even back then, as Lindemann junior thinks. The portrait of his youth was made without his consent: "I didn't like it at all that my father just published it without asking me. Everyone knew that I was the Timm in the book. That was too much insight into my life." , says Till in the afterword. At the time, he knew that his father kept a diary about their male community, but not that he intended to publish it. Till Lindemann explains the six years that elapsed between the events described in 1982 and the first appearance in 1988 by explaining that the text was too risky for his father's publishing house. It contains "a number of critical thoughts on the GDR", both from the father and the son. For example, the two philosophize about the meaning and nonsense of making over. A publisher was only found shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is why it "almost became a turning book".

In retrospect, however, the delicate regime criticisms of the GDR leadership and their utilities for socialism are much less exciting than a father's observations about the relationship with his son. Werner Lindemann prefixed the book with the sentence: "Young trees have trouble getting up in the shadow of the old ones."

The life situation of the Lindemann family in the early 1980s was such that Till's parents were still a couple, but lived separately. The shy man Werner had fled to the country with his three cats Mulle, Billi, Puschi, worked on his poems and the dilapidated house and marinated herring.

The mother Gitta, a cultural journalist, lived with Till and his younger sister in Rostock. Till, on the other hand, was already exceptionally experienced for a young person, especially in the GDR, because he had spent a lot of time in various European swimming pools as a competitive swimmer in his youth.

When he finally moved in with his father to start the apprenticeship as a wheelwright, where he was supposed to learn how to produce agricultural equipment from wood, he and his father were strangers because they had hardly seen each other for years. Werner Lindemann suffered from this and made his cautious, awkward approaches to the son on the subject of the book: "My thoughts circle around one point: How do I make my son a friend?"

He, who describes himself as a "loneliness worker", tries desperately to understand the life of the 19-year-old and comes into an inevitable conflict between the generations because the child, who has long been a young adult, does not readily adapt to the familiarization game lets in. That's why the first few weeks look like this from the father's point of view: "I'm talking about my parents, estate workers full of humility. My son listens for a while, gets up, yawns and goes out of the room. Insulted, I walk to the wild pear tree and back."

Werner Lindemann suffers from the typical intellectual illness that, although he anticipates the problems of relationships and reflects them in theory, he cannot avoid them himself in practice. He does his part in the disputes. On the one hand, he understands that "like many young people" his boy suffers from "that we adults expect what we expect from them". On the other hand, he can't help rubbing his son's nose constantly, how good he is, and that he, the father, has a much more difficult childhood under his belt. That is why he also wants the son to pay him 150 marks "maintenance contribution" per month. "I don't need this 'fare', but the boy has to understand that money is necessary for life, that it is not given to him."

Pointed and touching, Werner Lindemann describes the old dilemma of all relationships, that you feel particularly close to your fellow human beings, especially in their absence, while you are being screwed up in their presence. When the son is at work, the father climbs into his room: "It doesn't mean a happy fart comes out of an annoying ass. I climb into the attic, select a record from the stack: Mike Oldfield. Never heard of it. I listen the music. Nice! Very nice indeed! But why does it have to be heard out loud? "

The father is surprised that the major incidents - the son drives his Trabant to scrap, 2000 marks damage - hardly upset him, but the small ones do. When Till alias Timm trudges carelessly through the freshly cleaned house one day with mud boots, there is a scuffle between father and son: "Where there are no arguments, you use your fists - I take a swing, strike. Timm defends himself. I stumble , fall on the steps of the house entrance. "

This struggle is at the end of the book, and even if the father suggests reconciliation, a little happy ending, it led to the break between the two. The struggle, according to the son in the epilogue, "was actually the trigger for me to leave".

He only read his father's notes and his view of the conflict much later. Why a kind of counter-representation of the father-son years would be a nice addition to this text from his point of view - Till Lindemann's autobiography is still pending anyway. The father did not live to see the son's success, he died of cancer in 1993. A year later, Till Lindemann founded Rammstein.

Werner Lindemann: Mike Oldfield in the rocking chair. Father's Notes. With an afterword by Till Lindemann. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2020. 213 pages, 12 euros.”

Translate by Till Lindemann - The Poet Of Rock facebook page

[gal-liveblogs]

So let’s just start with the beginning.

So it’s not just Homestuck 2, it’s Homestuck². That’s fun. Also it has a subtitle of “Beyond Canon”. Makes sense, given what went down in the Homestuck Epilogues. Kinda wish I had liveblogged those now, but I had been too excited. Legitimately spent an entire day reading. I was too focused to even think to liveblog those.

The ^2 looks handwritten and is orange, also makes sense given what happened in the Epilogues. Dirk has his fingers all over this. How much influence will he have, I wonder?

Now that I’ve spent so long staring at the title perhaps I should get to reading the actual comic? Perish the thought! There appears to be a link to an FAQ! Let’s check that out first.

Oh man, this is bringing back some nostalgia. Putting the questions in the exile command boxes is a nice touch.

It is actual Homestuck. That is, an extension to the "canonical" Homestuck storyline,

Those are some big quotation marks around canonical, after the mess the Epilogues were. Not to say the Epilogues were bad, they just flipped and twisted everything around and made you really question what was “real” in a story.

It was designed to include the writing and art contributions from fans of the series. Many writers will be involved, and collectively they will be allowed significant latitude in shaping the direction of the story and the way it's told.

Interesting. Homestuck itself was no stranger to having art done by someone other than Andrew Hussie and the Epilogues were written with the help of someone other than Hussie. Even Homestuck was not solely written by Hussie, in the beginning fans wrote the commands that propelled the story forward. Plus we have Hiveswap, Friendsim, and Pesterquest all belonging to the Homestuck mythos but made by a team only overseen by Hussie. Homestuck 2 seems to be falling in line with the games. Different people make it and bring their own ideas to it, all while Hussie occasionally peeks in to give his nod of approval.

An "official fanonization" of the ongoing epic, if you will.

I can’t wait to see what happens. This is such a weird idea and I love it.

Oh my god. The Epilogues started off with a spoof as if they were written on Archive of Our Own, and now the recap of them is spoofing SparkNotes. Glorious.

Reading through said recap just so all the important bits are fresh in my mind (never skipped the Homestuck recaps, so I’m not skipping the Epilogue recap) and come across this:

In the heat of the moment, the two embrace passionately.

That’s an understatement. John and Terezi boned n the back of a car. Stiiiiill don’t know how to feel about that. Like, Terezi was flying around in Paradox Sapce for who knows how long from her perspective. Everyone else, including John, grew up and became adults. Was Terezi also an adult by this time, or did John just have sex with a minor?

They then fuck in the back of the car and there's really all there is to say on the matter.

Oh. So the previous sentence wasn’t an understatement. I just hadn’t read far enough yet.

But when they arrive, our hero finally succumbs to LE's venom, which has the effect of corroding a person's canonical existence beyond any hope of revival.

AKA, we really needed John to die but also didn’t want to deal with godtier revival rules.

Jade, who is now somehow aware of Dirk's influence, declares that he must be stopped. Dirk agrees with her, claiming his role as the villain of the story outright. He accepts the intrinsic antagonism of his narrative power, and has decided to carry that antagonism to its natural conclusion. He states that his eventual death will be Just.

Dirk is such a fascinating character. He has always been painfully aware of his faults. Yet he doesn’t try to stop himself. He has just accepted that he is not a good person and even encourages everyone else to give up on him. He is full of so much self-loathing and yet he does it all without any self-pity. It is truly something I have never seen in a character before.

Calliope distracts him with one final task: he must rescue Gamzee, who she insists deserves to begin his redemption arc immediately.

Gamzee used to be a fascinating character to me. I had so many questions about him. How much of his fall was out of his control? Was he to blame for everything? Outside forces? Mental instability? Then the Epilogues happened and I finally had to give up on him. I couldn’t hold out the hope that Gamzee could be a good character (if not a good person). Everyone who hated him were right all along. Gamzee is just a trash clown and should have stayed in the fridge.

As Jane joins in with Jake's day drinking, she attempts to seduce him but is ignored. Not to be denied, she resorts to using the terrible power of the trickster lollipop. The two sleep together. When they come to, Jake is alarmed by his lack of consent in the matter--Jane manages to talk him into a committed relationship.

Speaking of characters I gave up on: Jane. I never really had any strong feelings about Jane in Homestuck. She wasn’t interesting, but I didn’t dislike her. She was just... there. Had a few moments that really hit me in the feels, but overall kind of forgettable. Then in the Epilogue he not only turns into a xenophobic fascist, but she also pulls stuff like this. For all her pining over Jake she never actually did care about him it would seem. He wasn’t a person, he was a prize.

I didn’t care about Jake either, and he often annoyed me, but he deserved better than always ending up as Jane’s sex toy without any autonomy.

Gamzee has started performing public redemptions featuring sloppy makeouts and baby bottles full of Jane's breastmilk.

Seriously, Gamzee is just the worst. I hate him. Before the Epilogues the only character I hated was Kankri, but I hate Gamzee now too. This is also a reason why Jane has sunk so low in my standing with her.

They're interrupted by Gamzee, who tries to manipulate Vriska into a sexual relationship in the name of "redemption".

Now here is a sexual encounter that is without question involving a minor. Another reason to hate Gamzee.

She no longer cares if this reality is true, relevant or essential, and is enjoying the simple happiness of loving her wife and daughter.

This was a really sweet moment. Rose always did have a hard time just letting herself be happy.

Phew, O.K., done with the recap. Back to the FAQ!

Oh sweet, optimisticDuelist is part of the writing team for Homestuck 2! I’ve seen some of their stuff. It’s good stuff. Keep meaning to do a deep dive into all their analysis of Homestuck. Also Xamag is the art lead. Nice.

Homestuck has a Patreon now. Neat. Need to pay they people at What Pumpkin after all!

> Is this canon?

It's being pulled further away from direct control by the original author, and allowed to expand into spaces governed by fandom desire - a fanontinuum, you might say.

I’ve always liked the literary lens of Death of the Author. Homestuck 2 is diving head first into it. Yes, there is still an author (or authors, as the case may be), but The Author of Hussie is having less and less control (which makes sense from a narrative standpoint as Hussie, The Author, died in the story to really cement Death of the Author) and the fans are encouraged to take things into their own hands more and more. Homestuck is built by the fans and as such fan-created stories should have the same amount of importance as “canon” does.

> I just can't get enough Homestuck. I want to shove more and more of it into my slavering maw. Please help me.

Did they just plagiarize my diary?

Alright. Now I can start the dang comic!

In the next post. This one is getting a little long.

> Get on with it.

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

I have finished Renia’s Diary at last, one of my goals for this year. It did not take long once I had it in my hands, and while there is plenty to say, I want to start, simply, with the fact that Renia herself, through her writing, reminded me of one of my younger friends.

Whether it is proximity, age, or who knows what – my friend even agreed, there was a similarity in their tone, in the way she went from writing of her suffering in one sentence, to being hopeful that things would improve in the next, in an almost cheerfully, dismissive way. As if the complaint mattered not at all.

There was more than that to it, but being able to relate the person of Renia Spiegel to a still-living, still-breathing person, was not what I anticipated and it struck home a message I try to say here: there is happiness in all times, and there is sorrow in all times. In all times, emotions are the same, no matter the technology. We are human, and we share in the experiences of all other humans, throughout all time, in how we feel.

Even in personality quirks.

They are not so different from us, not in how they experienced life.

Renia Spiegel died at the age of 18. Barely 18. She experienced one last good May, her favorite month it seemed, the month of love and spring, before she was found for hiding, and executed, along with her boyfriend’s parents. Her boyfriend, Zygo, survived, and is the reason we have her diary.

So did her sister, Ariana, who became Elizabeth by being baptized in Catholicism and starting a new life with her mother. Elizabeth sheds light on the events following her escape from the ghetto, and her life. She also talks of Zygo’s life, and some of the other survivors.

She adds notes about the various chapters in Renia’s diary – what she remembers, what she doesn’t.

It hurts, of course, to read the diary. To know her sister’s life, and that she did not make it.

Much of the diary, up to the end, is a story of a young woman experiencing first love. The pining, the longing, the misunderstandings, the fights. In the background is the war, and the hopes of everyone’s survival. Gradually, it becomes the foreground, and this shift is almost unnoticeable, until the move to the ghetto.

Renia does not say much on the murders going on around her, or the briberies. Her life is full of hopes for the future, of traveling on trains with her boyfriend, their future children, and so much else. For Renia was going to go to France one day! Renia would be famous – or maybe just a simple woman raising children.

She, too, wanted it all.

I see myself in that.

And it is for this reason that I think reading diaries, rather than memoirs or after the fact (not that these aren’t important) should be read. They capture the life as it was, not the life as it is remembered. For Renia, her life was poetry and Zygo, and wishes to see her mother again, constantly. For much of this, Renia was a young woman in love, and her end, while not unforeseeable, is terribly jarring when considered in reflection of that.

On one page, she is talking about the garden in the ghetto, and her friend Nora’s birthday, and on the next page she is praying and giving her diary to Zygo’s safekeeping.

And then, she’s gone.  

We don’t have her last words, or her last thoughts, of course. This is a diary. She couldn’t write those in. We have notes from Zygo at the end, which let us know his heartbreak, and then it is over. Her diary is complete.

That is not the kind of ending we are used to in our narratives. Not even Game of Thrones, which gave us Catelyn numbly killing the wife of Walder Frey before her own end. There is always more.

And in a way, the epilogues, and notes, add that “more”. We see what became of others in the tale – but no more from Renia. She is gone. That is it.

Talking about WWII on the whole would take too long, but I must say I am glad that the word “murdered” is used, rather than killed, or in some cases, executed. Murdered is more fitting, and it does not wash away what happened.

Renia was murdered in the streets. We have her diary. We have her experiences before that moment. We know she experienced a life of love, of fear, of worry – and we know her life was cut tragically short in spite of all her dreams, hopes, wishes, faith.

And that is why I think these are important to read. They show us exactly how sudden death can be, and how they can strike anyone, at any time.

Renia’s story will live on where she does not.

Other people will relate to her.

Even her calling her boyfriend, in translation, “Daddy”. That’s right. 

That’s the note I’m ending on.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year in Review - Books I Read In 2017

Last year I only read about a hundred of other people's works, so I was able to note everything.  This year....was not like that.  By more committed Gutenberg-grinding, I increased that number by a factor of three.  These are the highlights, excerpted notes on stuff that I found particularly good, or relevant, or interesting.

Robert Wallace - The Tycoon of Crime Another Phantom adventure, though this one holds back the appearance of the great detective a little and actually sets up a few tricks that aren't immediately obvious.  Most are, though, and this is not a great mystery, but it's a competent enough pulp, well-flavored with brutality and gore that's almost heartrending in the modern day -- because it's a callback to the trenches of the Western Front, where bad-luck wounds, dismemberment, and poison gas were just everyday facts of life.  That look in passing into the world of the men who wrote this stuff and were looking for it in their reading is the main attraction of this nowadays, but if you're looking to read a Phantom story, this is probably the pick of the litter.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Apache Devil There are a few pulled punches in this, but not a lot, and in addition to a gripping narrative this story also packs a lot of good craft and a more united plot than it seems at first glance.  It's interesting from the modern perspective to see Burroughs so sympathetic to the Apache in the context of his vigorous racism against "savages" from other places; some of this may be closer exposure to Native American culture and thus the greater willingness to credit them as human beings, and some of it may be him pitching to his audience, where American natives were crushed, nearly extinct, and eulogizable, while black people were making the Great Migration out of the south and creating economic anxiety.  Either way, this is a pretty good book and not as garbage in its politics as Burroughs frequently is.

Abraham Merritt - Seven Steps To Satan Merritt's Eastern lore is well-worked into this tale, and more importantly he does a good job of keeping the reader on their toes, guessing what of this Satan's tricks are magic and what are just that, tricks.  The intersection of magic, illusion, manipulation, and hypnotism is a neat contrast to the usual suspicions of occultism, and the effect is really neat in keeping this Indiana Jones adventure full of darkness and mystery.  Harry is a little too obvious a plot jackknife, but you have to get to a resolution somehow, and he doesn't stick out too much in this world of super-minds and super-drugs.  Merritt has better stuff, but this is pretty good even so.

Stella Benson - This Is The End I had a limited selection of Benson's stuff, but this is definitely the choice of the batch.  As smart and observant as ever, and with nearly as flawless and perfect a flow of language and an eye for metaphor as in Living Alone, she also turns all of this around into a punishing, apocalyptic hammer of emotional weight and import at the turn and through on to the devastating finish.  I'd been reading up on the Somme and Verdun campaigns, which would have been the backdrop offstage for this, so this may have hit me harder than others, but it's hard to see how that ending, and Benson's poetry woven in around her prose, could fail to have the same effect regardless of circumstances.

Walter S. Cramp - Psyche For real, I nearly miscopied this author's name as "Crap" when writing this out.  This one is BAD, folks.  You can introduce your characters with a physical description if you like, though it does get kind of fan-ficcy, but do not attach a goddamn alignment readout to it.  The descriptions suck, the deliberate archaisms in dialogue suck -- do not write 'thou' unless you are going to use 'you' elsewhere to show correct tu/vous formulations in older English -- the staging and plotting sucks, and Cra(m)p can't be bothered to keep a consistent tense.  This is an awful book and should have been pulped a hundred years ago rather than continuing to waste people's time and electrons down to the present.

J. A. Buck - Sargasso of Lost Safaris Everything you need to know about this insistently self-footbulleting series can be found from the episode here, where in the middle of a taut thriller about bad whites and educated natives double-crossing each other, the protagonists fight the world's worst-described dinosaur for pagecount.  No explanation, they just needed another 500 words between two chapters and so they roll on the random monster table and get a fucking Baryonix or whatever.  The 'girl Tarzan' trope is at the outer edges of reality, and Tarzan did a lot of Lost World garbage too, but too much of this is too true to life to fuck itself over by throwing in dinosaurs like it aint a thing.  Fuck this stupid shit.

Wilhelm Walloth - Empress Octavia "Death was to stalk over it like a Phoenician dyer, when he crushes purple snails upon a white woollen cloak till the dark juices trickle down investing the snowy vesture with a crimson splendor."  When you write this sentence, stop.  Just stop.  I have bad habits like this too, but nothing, even a translation from German, is a justification for throwing out a sentence like that, especially in a second paragraph.  Stop.  No. Beyond this, this is yet another Ben-Hur wannabe that is in love with its research and can't decide what fucking tense it's in.  If you are interested in Rome, read Gibbon or Tacitus, or Suetonius or Caesar himself; if you want literature, stay the FUCK away from the Bibliotheca Romana.  The plot takes directions that only a German can and would go in, in its period, but this boldness alone is not enough to excuse the poor composition and overall aimlessness.

Stephen Crane - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets I'm sure this was revolutionary when it came out, but at this distance, it feels like parody or melodrama - a lot of which is coming from the dialect, which is even more intolerable in the present than it was when this was written.  This isn't even hard dialect, and there's no need for it to be consistently phonetic rather than, like, just describing people's accents.  You look at "The Playboy of the Western World" and what that doesn't do with forcing pronunciations, and then you look back at this, and you see rapidly which one does a better job of conveying the lifestyles of the deprived and limited.  I know this is supposed to be heartbreaking, but it's completely outclassed and replaced, for modern audiences, by The Jungle, which more people need to re-read and actually understand as a labor story rather than a USDA tract.  Anything, literally anything, else you can get out of Stephen Crane is going to be better than this.

John Peter Drummond - Tigress of Twanbi Seriously, this story would be greatly improved by getting the Tarzan shit out of it.  If it was Hurree Das, picaresque Indian doctor versus Julebba the Arab Amazon with their countervailing motivations and the local allies who ended up in the crossfire of her domination war in the African bush and his attempts to stop it or at least get out with a whole skin, this tale would be significantly improved in addition to completely unidentifiable for the white audience it had to be sold to at the time of publication.  So it goes.  Drummond's side characters are significantly better than his leads or his plots, and should have held out for a trade to Stan Weinbaum or P.P. Sheehan for a case of beer plus a player to be named later rather than having to submit to this dreck.

Robert Eustace - The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings Playing like a series of Eustace's Madame Sara stories -- there's definitely something to peel the onion on there, where every villain is a mysterious older Latin woman -- the plot here moves by the usual bumps of caper and medical/forensic detection, with seldom an attachment from one episode to the next.  The individual stories are entertaining, but this is a collection, not a novel, and going from front to back is like binging a TV series in novella form.  The individual tricks range from lame and overdone to Holmesian superclass, but this would be so much better if there was an actual whole narrative rather than this point to point.

Augusta Groner - The Pocket Diary Found In The Snow If I had gotten to this before Three Pretenders, I definitely would have thrown in a shoutout callback to Joe Mueller somewhere; Groner's Austrian detective is a more modern Holmes in a Vienna at the end of its rope, and in addition to the neat characters and relatable scene dressing, the mystery here is pretty good and the inevitable howdoneit epilogue is actually interesting rather than tiresome, which is always a potential stumbling block in this sort of caper.  Most of Groner's work that I have is pretty short, but at least I'll have the possibility of re-reading her in the original German later.

Anonymous for The Wizard - Six-Gun Gorilla It's easy to see why nobody, so far, has come forward to claim this clunky Western with a hilarious concept played absolutely straight.  This is a Madonna's-doctor's-dog exercise in crank-turnery written in Scotland by Brits who have never been to the high desert, for an audience that needs to be told that bandits aren't particularly interested in mining.  As a craft exercise, there's some merit to it: anyone can write a gorilla-revenge story in Africa, or a Western manhunt, but when an editor comes to you and says "so there's this gorilla and he's a badass gunfighter, write a story to fit these illustrations and make it not suck", that's when you really have to stretch your creative muscles.  There are signs that this was a house name product or a collab rather than one author, and more insistent signs that it was a joke played on the readership to see how long they'd put up with it.  It's almost magic realist in its combination of brutality and absurdity -- who the hell knows what British schoolboys thought of it in 1939.

Robert W. Chambers - The Slayer of Souls Probably not the inspiration for that song that was on like every compilation in Rock Hard and Metal Hammer in summer 2005, this Chambers joint is either pitched perfectly for the Trumpist present -- did you know that Muslims, socialists, Chinese people, unionists, and anarchists are all actually the same, and all actually parts of a gigantic Satanist conspiracy? oh wow such deep state many alex jones -- or an incoherent stew of staunch J. Edgar Hoover fanboyism that can't keep its own geography straight, which is actually kind of the same thing so never mind.  This is exactly the sort of story that George Orwell was so hot about in "Boys' Weeklies": good, craft-wise, and definitely gripping, but utterly complicit in a way and to a degree that almost becomes self-parody.  If you can stop laughing at it, it's got the good action and aggressively-expansive world-setting of good rano-esque anime; if you can't, Chambers has better short stories and have you heard of this guy called Abraham Merrit?

Stendahl - The Red and the Black It is maybe over-egging it a little to call this a 'perfect' novel, but it is closer to that perfection than it is to any other reasonable descriptor.  The society of the Bourbon restoration may be lost to us, but the characters stand the test of time, and Stendahl moves them in time with the plot -- the way that their actions are only tenuously liked to their outcomes is a triumph of realism -- with the hand of a master.  I like Stendahl's Italian stuff too, but France in his own time is his best course, and this is his best work.

Sylvanus Cobb - Ben Hamed What's really striking about this sword and sandal mellerdrammer is how relatively non-racist it is, and how easily it accepts Muslims as real people and mostly normal.  There's a bunch of orientalism, sure, but while the Giant Negro sidekick occasionally comes off servile, he's also smart, experienced, and independent, and takes, for his characterization, an appropriately central role in shepherding the star-crossed lovers to the end of their tale.  This could easily get a banging Arab-directed film adaptation today with very few changes -- and that's not just about how good it is as entertainment, but also about how far Cobb was ahead of the curve in 1863.

Talbot Mundy - C. I. D. Another inter-war Indian thriller, this excellent spy novel pits a wide range of the native-state establishment -- corrupt priests, a venal rajah, the incompetent British Resident, a motley gang of profiteers -- against the genius and initiative of Mundy's great hope for India, the always effective, never moral Chullunder Gose.  As expected, the top agent of the Confidential Investigations Division masterfully controls the whole chessboard, pitting the various enemy forces against each other and subverting each in turn before throwing in his reserves -- Hawkes, back in a smaller role as British India yields to British-Indian cooperation, and the obligatory American, a pre-MSF doctor who starts the book looking for a Chekhov's tiger hunt.  Thing is, this is fiction, and so it's Mundy who's really keeping all these balls in the air and weaving the skein of the story into an incredibly awesome whole.  If you have problems with Kipling and Haggard, start getting into Mundy from here. A neat thing that will not go unnoticed by other pulp deep-divers is the shots-fired bit introducing the Resident's library, which is noted to feature the works of Edgar Wallace.  Whether to make a point in the story -- "every colonial section chief, no matter how actually bad, secretly thinks of himself as Sanders", which I've used in my own stuff -- or to start beef -- "people read Wallace and think he knows about the colonies, but he has actually just been to the track and his apartment and needs to stfu before idiots making policy off his 'exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League circa 1910' worldview hurt somebody" -- this is definitely a callout, and definitely intentional.

Gordon MacReagh - The Witch-Casting I'm reading these Kingi Bwana stories in order, and it is getting suspiciously clear that as long as he put in a bit of African-kicking at the start, he was free to get as smart and real as he liked later in the story -- and the amount of kicking was something that there were subtle efforts to reduce.  This one starts off with Kaffa getting the brunt of it, but almost immediately turns around on that point as King and a larger collection of nonwhite friends-as-much-as-trusties do a witch-hunt unlike any witch-hunt you'd expect from '30s pulp, with a similarly sharp turn on African traditional religion that's nearly as out of place.  MacReagh cannot completely escape his own prejudices or the expectations of his time, but this one gets as close to the event horizon as any of his stuff.

Titus Petronius Arbiter - The Satyricon The modern age has ground a lot of the obscenity off this one, which for many years was mostly famous, infamous and/or banned for its central plots of man-on-man sex; in 2017, it takes more than boyfucking to shock people.  This is probably for the better; with the false atmosphere of licentiousness cut out of it, this is as it was at the beginning, a spicy story of Roman idiots having hilarious misadventures that, by subtle exaggeration, hold the follies and fads of their time up to ridicule.  It is longer than it needs to be, and some of the jokes are poorly preserved, and this translation is contaminated by unnecessary footnotes and inclusion bodies of later forgers' porn that's been stapled in over the centuries, but it's still a good, true look at Rome as it actually was at the height of the empire, without the hagiography of a historian or the religio-political axe-grinding of the Christians.  Probably worth the struggle.

Willa Cather - April Twilights I was collecting Cather from her papers at the University of Nebraska, and had to read this in the process of reformatting it; poetry does not well survive HTML->ASCII transitions.  The deep and dark and bleak is strong here; through the classical allusions, the callbacks to Provencal troubadours, across the American landscape, the same refrain runs: "I am old and decrepit and not emotionally capable of loving other people".  So, relatable.  The widespread criticism of Cather, that she can't get herself out of traditional modes even when this is to her disadvantage, is held up by her poetry as well; there's more than a few places here where you've got to frown at a bodgingly conventional rhyme or metaphor that someone more open to modernity would almost have had to have done better.  But there are, even still parts where that traditionalism works well, and is effective; it's worth reading out for those, even at all that.

H.P. Lovecraft and others - Twenty-Nine Collaborative Stories Most of what we now recognize as the Cthulhu Mythos -- and definitely any kind of idea of Lovecraft's stuff as a coherent whole or linked world-system -- comes out of these stories as much as his own.  On his own, Lovecraft moved to the beat of his own drum and followed his ideas where they went; here, he helps friends and fans plug their fanfic into what becomes a shared universe.  The stories are not all great; Hazel Heal put up some classics here but also some stinkers, and most of Robert Barlow's contributions, especially as they range into sci-fi, are kind of eh.  Zealia Bishop, though, does yeoman service as Lovecraft's official trans-Mississippian correspondent, and Adolphe de Castro's top-class works settle Lovecraftian mysticism in real foreign lands.  It's worth getting through these: there's good stuff in here, and you also get the sense and feel of how Lovecraft actively built his 'school' -- and ensured that he was the one to influence the direction of weird fiction for years to come.

William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland A true classic, this is potentially the very most black metal horror novel ever written.  The brutality of the swine creatures, the remote devastation of the time-blasted cosmos, the liminality of dreams and reality; Teitanblood and Xasthur and Inquisition hope and fail to convey this sense of unholy immensity, of uncaring timeless evil.  Hodgson hits some heights in his shorter stories, but here, he hits it absolutely out of the park.  Completely essential.

Suetonius - The Life of Claudius Claudius comes off in this one like I've observed German colonial rule as remembered in most places other than Africa: "not worse than necessary".  Suetonius doesn't miss the caprices of a guy who almost certainly was on the spectrum, and had other distinguishing impairments, but also faithfully records a lot of good works and good ideas, with less wastage and idiocy than the likes of his surrounding emperors.  The translator's appendix, as expected, freaks out about the results of Claudius' expedition to Britain, and continues to vainly expect the Roman people to want to get rid of effective and oppressive imperial rule to get back to the ineffective oppression of the senatorial republic.  How someone who translates Latin can be ignorant of "senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia" and what that actually means in the context of government is beyond me.

Julius Caesar - De Bello Civili This is in three parts, double-text, and when I can understand what places are being talked about (still not 100%, even after all of this, on where the heck in Italy Brundusium is), it flows well and is as clear in its language as anything else of Caesar's.  Even the structure is well-laid: in book 1, Caesar starts the war, and wins a big victory in Spain; in book 2, one of his generals gets disastered in Africa; and in book 3, the epic conclusion and final battles.  Though this is still ultimately a public relations exercise, Caesar doesn't step back from his own disasters, and gives full credit to his foes: this does tend to make him look better when he beats them up, and it is curious how nothing is ever directly his fault, and how most reverses go to troops losing their head and acting without orders, which would be out of character for his faithful super-army if it didn't keep happening.  As always, Caesar leans on logistics; his focus on the relative supply situations in Spain and in Thessaly is the key to success, and a dead giveaway that this was written or at least dictated by the commander himself, and not by some biographer who wouldn't've had that experience in keeping an army fed and watered in the field.

Katherine Mansfield - Something Childish and Other Stories What's really cool in this collection of earlier Mansfield is that you get to see her evolve through the War: she's already mature, and really good, in the New Zealand and Continental tales that precede it, but after the title story (dated to 1914, with a collapse-out at the end that is a KILLER allegory for that August, even if unintended), you really start to see how the nervous stress of total war wears on a population engaged, how the greater position of women in society transforms her and her work, and leads her on towards self-discovery.  The later and more experimental stories are, in general, slightly better, but this is all good material -- and there's a hell of a sting in the tail at the end.

Henry W. Herbert - The Roman Traitor In his introduction Herbert mentions a friend who encouraged him to finish this book, without which it would never have been released.  This friend should be dug up and beaten soundly with rocks, because this rehash of the Catilline conspiracy is utterly unnecessary as a novel or as antiquarianism, and Herbert is an awful, awful writer whose torture of language and narrative structure would shame a Nero.  The day you write the phrase "bad conclave" is the day your editor should throw you through a door.  This isn't the worst book in the Bib. Romanica, but it may be the very most badly written.  Just read the actual history from Sallust and forget this stupid garbage.

Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo This takes a while to really get its feet under it and show where it's going, but once it does, look out.  Flaubert masterfully captures the brutality of warfare and the color of the ancient world, and his language is superbly translated; you put this next to the staid English garbage in the rest of the Bib. Romanica and you wonder why most of them even bothered.  The turn at the end hits like a ton of bricks, especially if you like me don't know anything about Carthaginian history and don't know what's coming -- but it's also the only possible ending for this captivating chronicle of horror, misery and nightmare.  Just excellent.

Willa Cather - My Antonia A deeply drawn narrative of love, growth, and the midwestern plains, this book is more enhanced than anything else by Cather's commitment to its place and time: childhood is always a lost world forever, but the place that Jim and Antonia grow up through is thoroughly lost a hundred years and more on, but it survives in these pages down to the dirt on the floors and the chaff under the characters' collars.  After the narrator goes to Omaha, the tale weakens a little, and the end, for modern audiences, is probably a little under-tuned, but this is Cather's flagship novel for a reason, and definitely rewards the time spent reading it.

Margaret Atwood - Negotiating With the Dead This is another lecture series like the Forster above, but coming from different source, moving in different ways, and much more about Atwood herself and the roots of her writing in the Canadian landscape and literary scene that shaped her.  There is a lot about writing as a living thing in this book, and very little about it as a process: it's kind of a synthesis-antithesis-conclusion out of Forster and Bickham, more perceptive than either and leaving Welty, poor soul so far from the modern perspective, in the absolute dust.  It may be a question of eras, or just one of sympathies -- an adequately intelligent writer of speculative fiction is going to necessarily fall in with Atwood's ideas about doing something meaningful that also keeps the lights on -- but this book, out of all of the four in this mini-course, hit the most home and told me the most about what I do that I didn't already know.  It doesn't have the coherent, lecturized feel of the Forster, but at times there are just the most amazing insights, and the craziest images out of that crazy time that was the middle 20th century, and with how good it was I'm fairly ashamed to not have read any other Atwood before it, which makes me just an awful person.  At least I'm in a damn library and probably can fix that now.

Willa Cather - The Bohemian Girl A novella that should probably better and more widely reputed than it is, this one is mostly a meditation on love, maturity, and switching horses in midstream, but Cather, like no one else, manages to defend both the dour, hard prairie homestead and the need to escape from it.  This is her "zwey seele wohnen, ach, in meinen Brust", and it's kind of a thing all through her fiction, but in here it's especially well developed, with a coda that unlike a lot of her other ones actually works.

Talbot Mundy - The Marriage of Meldrum Strange Sales figures or editorial comment must have highlighted the "big team" problems in the last book, because this one cuts it down to the essentials: Ommony and Gose and Ramsden for muscle and some minor characters.  The plot is a good and twisty romance, keeping everything real, and it is just magic to watch Ommony work calm while Gose spits science like a Bollywood comedian, yin and yang combining to catch everyone in every trap.  A rare gem after several misfires.

Talbot Mundy - Old Ugly-Face One of Mundy's real best, this is an epic navigation of the human heart, against the majestic Himalayas....played by psychics battling to ensure the succession of the Dalai Lama.  Mundy gon Mundy, but the love triangle here is perfect and the environments are astounding -- a must read.

D. W. O'Brien - Blitzkrieg in the Past There's a chapter in this one called "Tank Versus Dinosaur", and that's about the shape of it.  You could also say "Sergeant Rock goes to Pellucidar" and not miss by much; a M3 Grant and crew ends up in a fantasy cavemen-and-dinosaurs past and has some adventures while talking '40s smack, and then romps their way home.  What's cool about it for authors is how O'Brien writes around his dinosaur: there is no description at all of the beast or its species or attributes.  It is big, and makes angry noises, because the author could not be assed to take the time out to do research while writing this story.  And yet it works, unless you're reading really close; let this be a lesson for anyone who can't finish their research up exactly correct on deadline.

Talbot Mundy - The Ivory Trail A lot of this raw, brutal epic of survival in the east-African backcountry is probably from life; Mundy tried this life and failed at it before he became a writer, and the asides and incidental scenes can only be from bitter experience.  Others might expect a purer adventure -- you'd get one from MacReagh on these materials -- but Mundy has the essential truth of colonialism: there are no secrets, mere survival is hideously tough, and everyone else in the game is more brutal and better equipped.  Conrad might have had the literary chops and adventurousness to end this differently, but even he who fared into the Heart of Darkness didn't have the stomach to write a middle passage like Mundy does here with his heroes in German prison.

Talbot Mundy - Guns of the Gods This Yasmini adventure makes itself a prequel, of her youth and how she got into the position of wealth and information mastery that sets up her later career.  The plot is tight if less convoluted than some that I've been reading lately, and the incidents woven through the intrigue and the treasure hunt are fantastic.  On a deeper level, the real judgment and sensitivity in the negotiation of east and west by Tess and Yasmini makes up for the stray Americans happening into the heart of the tale, and in a real way this is Mundy's most openly and solidly anti-Raj, pro-Home Rule adventure yet.  For both an excellent story and what's probably a local maximum in wokeness, this comes highly recommended.

Thorne Smith - Rain In The Doorway A kind of Alice in Jazz Age NYC, this is a ridiculous madcap adventure that loses little in the passage of time and not much at all in the way it winds back down to reality.  Smart and stupid and sexy in all the best ways, this kind of hilarity is pretty much Smith's best stock in trade, and this particular book is one of the better examples.

Thorne Smith - Turnabout The least hair of maturity creeps into Smith's writing here, as one of his interminable boozing Lost Generation miscouples actually gets in a family way as well as into an inexplicable supernatural adventure.  The very very familiar central trick is well executed, and Tim's advancing pregnancy provides a nice frame to hang the rest of the events off of.  The end is a little pat with the reinsertion of the Dutch uncle, but you live and deal.  This is one of Smith's better, and a good occasion to round out the end of the string.

Wilkie Collins - Armadale Collins makes up for his bad start with this absolute beast of a romance, bound up with mysticism rather than being an encyclopedia, but still turned out with real and vital if slightly implausible people.  The consistent mystery of the vision unites the book, but the way that the various Armadales react to that vision, its interpretations, and each other, is solid and real.  It is an immense read that demanded like six hours of flight time, but it is definitely rewarding, and worth the bother of pounding through the huge narrative.

Wilkie Collins - No Name There is a tangled tale and a half in this one, a desperate adventure of roguery in the name of revenge that keeps getting tangled up with coincidence as much as fate or intent.  The links may be a little creaky, but this is a huge, smart, intensely twisting drama with a lead for the ages in Magdalen, and an adversary worthy of her steel in Lecomt.  The end is a little formula and takes a little long to wind down, but this is an artifact of the time and the expected conventions, and it inhibits the power of this novel but little.  Good good stuff.

Talbot Mundy - The Thrilling Adventures of Dick Anthony of Arran "For a few days Cairo swallowed Dick."  NO.  Shut it.  Shut up.  Be mature.  Tuned to a compositional level somewhere between Sexton Blake and Lovecraft's middle-school works, this is not good or well-written Mundy, and there are research holes in it that might have been stabbed through with a claymore.  In places, his later quality pokes through, but in the main this is a stolid imitation of part Kipling, part John Buchan by a writer who does not have enough name weight to force publishers to his way of thinking rather than the reverse.  This leftover should have stayed left over and buried.

These were excerpted from the full writeups of the complete chronological list below, which accounts for frequent hanging references.  The pure volume of this list indicates why I didn't copy the whole of the writeup blocks into this entry.

Robert Barr - The Sword Maker E. Rice Burroughs - Land of Terror E. Rice Burroughs - Tarzan and the Leopard Men L. Winifred Faraday (tr) - Tain bo Cuailnge Robert Barr - The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb Robert Wallace - Death Flight Richard Rhodes - Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Richard Rhodes - Twilight of the Bombs Robert Wallace - Empire of Terror Robert Wallace - Fangs of Murder Robert Wallace - The Sinister Dr. Wong Mary Cagle - Let's Speak English! Robert Wallace - The Tycoon of Crime Stella Benson - Kwan-yin William H. Ainsworth - The Spectre Bride Robert Eustace - The Face of the Abbot Robert Eustace - The Blood-Red Cross Robert Eustace - Madam Sara Robert Eustace - Followed Robert Eustace - The Secret of Emu Plain Arthur Conan Doyle - The Uncharted Coast Edgar Rice Burroughs - Apache Devil Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan the Invincible William W. Astor - The Last of the Tenth Legion Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan the Magnificent Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Bandit of Hell's Bend Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Cave Girl Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Efficiency Expert Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Girl From Farris' Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Girl From Hollywood Stella Benson - Living Alone Stella Benson - The Desert Islander Victor Appleton - Tom Swift and his Giant Telescope Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Lad and the Lion Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Man-Eater Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Moon Men Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Outlaw of Torn Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Rider Edgar Rice Burroughs - The War Chief Abraham Merritt - Burn, Witch, Burn! Abraham Merritt - Creep, Shadow! Abraham Merritt - Seven Steps To Satan Abraham Merritt - The Dwellers in the Mirage Abraham Merritt - The Face in the Abyss Abraham Merritt - The Last Poet and the Robots Edward Spencer Beesly - Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius Malcolm Jameson - Collected Stories Fantasy Magazine - The Challenge From Beyond The Strand - As Far As They Had Got J. M. Synge - The Playboy of the Western World Abdullah/Brand/Means/Sheehan - The Ten-Foot Chain Stella Benson - This Is The End Stella Benson - Twenty Emily Beesly - Stories From the History of Rome Hugh Allingham - Captain Cuellar's Adventures in Connaught and Ulster, A.D. 1588 James DeMille - The Martyr of the Catacombs Sallust - Bellum Catalinae Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac "Captain Adam Seaborn" - Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery R.E.H. Dyer - Raiders of the Sarhad Walter S. Cramp - Psyche H.P. Lovecraft - From Beyond Robert F. Pennell - Ancient Rome Garrett Putnam Serviss - Edison's Conquest of Mars Irving Batcheller - Charge It Irving Batcheller - Vergillius Duffield Osborne - The Lion's Brood Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People J. A. Buck - The Slave Brand of Sleman bin Ali J. A. Buck - Killers' Kraal J. A. Buck - Sargasso of Lost Safaris J. A. Buck - Sword of Gimshai Wilhelm Walloth - Empress Octavia Stephen Crane - The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky Stephen Crane - The Blue Hotel Stephen Crane - The Open Boat Stephen Crane - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Stephen Crane - The Monster and More Stendahl - Armance Victor Appleton II - Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung Victor Appleton II - Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X Robert Curtis - Edgar Wallace Each Way John Peter Drummond - Bride of the Serpent God John Peter Drummond - The Nirvana of the Seven Voodoos John Peter Drummond - Tigress of Twanbi Robert Eustace - The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings Augusta Groner - The Pocket Diary Found In The Snow Augusta Groner - The Case of the Registered Letter Augusta Groner - The Case of the Lamp That Went Out Augusta Groner - The Case of the Golden Bullet Augusta Groner - The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study Anonymous for The Wizard - Six-Gun Gorilla Walter Horatio Pater - Marius the Epicurean John Russel Russell - Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds Answers Magazine - Sexton Blake J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Occult Detector J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Significance of the High "D" J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The House of Invisible Bondage Stendahl - The Abbess of Castro and Others John Aylscough - Faustula John Aylscough - Mariquita Robert W. Chambers - The Maker of Moons and Other Stories Robert W. Chambers - The Slayer of Souls Edith Nesbit - My School Days Edith Nesbit - Re-collected  (self re-collection) Edith Nesbit - The Magic World Edith Nesbit - Wet Magic Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Planet of Doubt Stanley G. Weinbaum - Smothered Seas Stanley G. Weinbaum - Graph Stanley G. Weinbaum - Flight on Titan Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Red Peri Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Black Flame Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Dark Other Stanley G. Weinbaum - The New Adam Gordon MacReagh - re-collected shorter stories  (self re-collection) Stendahl - The Charterhouse of Parma Stendahl - The Red and the Black Sylvanus Cobb - Atholbane Sylvanus Cobb - Ben Hamed Sylvanus Cobb - Ivan the Serf Sylvanus Cobb - Bianca Sylvanus Cobb - Orion the Gold-Beater Sylvanus Cobb - The Gunmaker of Moscow Sylvanus Cobb - The Knight of Leon Sylvanus Cobb - The Smuggler's Ward Talbot Mundy - Black Light Talbot Mundy - Burberton and Ali Beg Talbot Mundy - C. I. D. Talbot Mundy - Caesar Dies Talbot Mundy - For the Salt Which He Had Eaten Talbot Mundy - From Hell, Hull, and Halifax Talbot Mundy - Full Moon J. U. Giesy - Palos of the Dog Star Pack J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Wistaria Scarf J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Purple Light Gordon MacReagh - The Slave Runner Gordon MacReagh - The Ebony Juju Gordon MacReagh - The Lost End of Nowhere Gordon MacReagh - Quill Gold Gordon MacReagh - Unprofitable Ivory Gordon MacReagh - The Witch-Casting Gordon MacReagh - Strangers of the Amulet Gordon MacReagh - The Ivory Killers Gordon MacReagh - Black Drums Talking Walter Moers - The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear Gordon MacReagh - Wardens of the Big Game Gordon MacReagh - Raiders of Abyssinia Gordon MacReagh - A Man to Kill Gordon MacReagh - Slaves For Ethiopia Gordon MacReagh - Strong As Gorillas Gordon MacReagh - Blood and Steel Gordon MacReagh - White Waters and Black Cardinal Newman - Callista J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Master Mind Titus Petronius Arbiter - The Satyricon Talbot Mundy - Her Reputation Giancarlo Livraghi - The Power of Stupidity Willa Cather - April Twilights H.P. Lovecraft and others - Twenty-Nine Collaborative Stories J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - Rubies of Doom Abraham Merritt - The Moon Pool Abraham Merritt - The Metal Monster Abraham Merritt - The Ship of Ishtar John G. Lockhart - Valerius William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki, Supernatural Detective and Others William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki the Ghost Finder William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland Suetonius - The Life of Julius Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Augustus Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Tiberius Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Caligula Suetonius - The Life of Claudius Suetonius - The Life of Nero Suetonius - The Life of Galba Suetonius - The Life of Otho Suetonius - The Life of Vitellus Suetonius - The Life of Vespasian Suetonius - The Life of Titus Suetonius - The Life of Domitian The Lock and Key Library - Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English Hume Nisbet - The Demon Spell b/w The Vampire Maid Hume Nisbet - The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom Hume Nisbet - The Swampers E. Hoffman Price - The Girl From Samarcand Flavius Philostratus - The Life of Apollonius H. P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness H. P. Lovecraft - Selected Essays including Supernatural Horror in Literature H. P. Lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward H. P. Lovecraft - The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Others H. P. Lovecraft - The Dream Cycle H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow Out of Time H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow Over Innsmouth H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness H. P. Lovecraft - His Earliest Writings H. P. Lovecraft - Poems and Fragments  (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - The Cthulhu Mythos  (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of Monstrosity  (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of the Crypt  (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of Paganism  (self re-collection) Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Last Days of Pompeii Gavin Menzies - 1421: The Year China Discovered America Ernst Eckstein - Quintus Claudius Julius Caesar - The African Wars Julius Caesar - The Alexandrine War Julius Caesar - De Bello Civili Julius Caesar - The Hispanic War Talbot Mundy - Cock o' the North Julius Caesar - The Gallic Wars Katherine Mansfield - Bliss and Other Stories Katherine Mansfield - In A German Pension Katherine Mansfield - Something Childish and Other Stories Katherine Mansfield - The Garden Party and Other Stories John W. Graham - Nearea Andy Adams - A Texas Matchmaker Andy Adams - Cattle Brands Andy Adams - Reed Anthony, Cowman Andy Adams - The Log of a Cowboy Andy Adams - Wells Brothers Charles Kingsley - Hypatia Francis Stevens - Claimed! Francis Stevens - Nightmare! Francis Stevens - Serapion Francis Stevens - The Heads of Cerberus Francis Stevens - The Rest of the Stories  (self re-collection) Talbot Mundy - Hira Singh Henry W. Herbert - The Roman Traitor Robert Howard - Tales of Breckenridge Elkins Robert Howard - Tales of El Borak Robert Howard - Tales of the West Robert Howard - Swords of the Red Brotherhood Robert Howard - The Black Stranger Robert Howard - The Pike Bearfield Stories Robert Howard - The Exploits of Buckner Jeopardy Grimes Robert Howard - Weird Poetry  (self re-collection) Robert Howard - Collected Juvenilia Robert Howard - The Spicy Adventures of Wild Bill Clanton  (self re-collection) Robert Howard - Tales of the Weird West  (self re-collection) Robert Howard - The Treasure of Shaibar Khan Robert Howard - Red Blades of Black Cathay Robert Howard - The Isle of Pirates' Doom Robert Howard - Dig Me No Grave Robert Howard - The Garden of Fear Robert Howard - The God in the Bowl Virgil - The Aneid Gustave Flaubert - Herodias Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary Talbot Mundy - Hookum Hai Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo Willa Cather - Alexander's Bridge Willa Cather - My Antonia Eudora Welty - On Writing E.M. Forster - Aspects of the Novel Jack M. Bickham - The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them) Margaret Atwood - Negotiating With the Dead Arthur Conan Doyle - Fairies Photographed Arthur Conan Doyle - Great Britain and the Next War Willa Cather - My Autobiography, by S. S. McClure Willa Cather - O Pioneers! Willa Cather - One of Ours Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark Heinrich Brode - Tippu Tib Willa Cather - The Troll Garden Willa Cather - Youth and the Bright Medusa Willa Cather - The Bohemian Girl Willa Cather - The Affair at Grover Station Willa Cather - The Count of Crow's Nest Willa Cather - The Shortest Stories  (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales ABC  (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales DEF  (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales G-K-O  (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales PRST  (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Stories W  (self re-collection) Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt Talbot Mundy - Jimgrim and Allah's Peace Talbot Mundy - East and West Talbot Mundy - The Iblis at Ludd Talbot Mundy - The Seventeen Thieves of El-Khalil Talbot Mundy - The Lion of Petra Talbot Mundy - The Woman Ayisha Talbot Mundy - The Last Trooper Talbot Mundy - The King in Check Talbot Mundy - A Secret Society Talbot Mundy - Moses and Mrs. Aintree Talbot Mundy - The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb Talbot Mundy - Jungle Jest Talbot Mundy - The Nine Unknown Talbot Mundy - The Marriage of Meldrum Strange Talbot Mundy - The Hundred Days Talbot Mundy - OM: The Secret of Ahbor Valley Talbot Mundy - The Devil's Guard Talbot Mundy - Jimgrim, King of the World Talbot Mundy - Machassan Ah Talbot Mundy - Oakes Respects An Adversary Talbot Mundy - Old Ugly-Face Talbot Mundy - Payable to Bearer Talbot Mundy - Poems and Dicta Talbot Mundy - Rung Ho! Talbot Mundy - Selected Stories Gordon MacReagh - Projection From Epsilon Leroy Yerxa - Back from the Crypt  (self re-collection) Garrett P. Serviss - A Columbus of Space Garrett P. Serviss - The Moon Metal Garrett P. Serviss - The Second Deluge Garrett P. Serviss - The Sky Pirate Sinclair Lewis - Arrowsmith Robert Buchanan - Camlan and the Shadow of the Sword Robert Buchanan - God and the Man Henry R. Schoolcraft - To the Sources of the Mississippi River D. W. O'Brien - Squadron of the Damned D. W. O'Brien - Blitzkrieg in the Past D. W. O'Brien - The Floating Robot D. W. O'Brien - Gone In 20 Kilobytes  (self re-collection) D. W. O'Brien - Lost in Space  (self re-collection) D. W. O'Brien - Ghosts of War  (self re-collection) William Ware - Aurelian William Ware - Zenobia J. S. Fletcher - The Stories  (self re-collection) J. S. Fletcher - Perris of the Cherry-Trees J. S. Fletcher - The Middle Temple Murder J. S. Fletcher - The Paradise Mystery J. S. Fletcher - The Safety Pin Francis H. Atkins - The Short Stories  (self re-collection) M. P. Shiel - In Short  (self re-collection) Francis H. Atkins - A Studio Mystery Francis H. Atkins - The Black Opal Talbot Mundy - The Eye of Zeitoon Talbot Mundy - The Ivory Trail Talbot Mundy - The Man From Poonch Talbot Mundy - The Middle Way Talbot Mundy - The Red Flame of Erinpura Talbot Mundy - The Thunder Dragon Gate Talbot Mundy - Tros of Samothrace Talbot Mundy - Queen Cleopatra Talbot Mundy - Purple Pirate Talbot Mundy - A Soldier and a Gentleman Talbot Mundy - Winds of the World Talbot Mundy - King of the Khyber Rifles Talbot Mundy - Guns of the Gods Talbot Mundy - Caves of Terror Thorne Smith - Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit Thorne Smith - Biltmore Oswald: Very Much At Sea Thorne Smith - Birthday Present Thorne Smith - Did She Fall? Thorne Smith - Dream's End Thorne Smith - Haunts and By-Paths Thorne Smith - Rain In The Doorway Thorne Smith - Skin and Bones Thorne Smith - The Bishop's Jaegers Thorne Smith - The Glorious Pool Thorne Smith - The Night Life of the Gods Thorne Smith - The Stray Lamb Thorne Smith - The Jovial Ghosts: The Misadventures of Topper Thorne Smith - Topper Takes A Trip Thorne Smith - Turnabout Thorne Smith - Yonder's Henry Wilkie Collins - Antonina Wilkie Collins - Armadale Wilkie Collins - I Say No Wilkie Collins - Miss or Mrs Wilkie Collins - My Lady's Money Wilkie Collins - No Name Wilkie Collins - The Haunted Hotel Wilkie Collins - The Law and the Lady Leroy Yerxa - Death Rides At Night D. W. O'Brien - Flight From Farisha Gordon MacReagh - Out of Africa  (self re-collection) Peter Cheyney - Quick Draws  (self re-collection) Talbot Mundy - The Thrilling Adventures of Dick Anthony of Arran D. W. O'Brien - The Last Analysis M. P. Shiel - Children of the Wind Edgar Wallace - 1925: The Story of a Fatal Peace M. P. Shiel - Prince Zaleski Edgar Wallace - A Case For Angel, Esquire M. P. Shiel - Shapes in the Fire Edgar Wallace - A Deed of Gift M. P. Shiel - The Evil That Men Do Edgar Wallace - A Debt Discharged M. P. Shiel - The Last Miracle Edgar Wallace - A Dream M. P. Shiel - The Lord of the Sea Edgar Wallace - A Raid on a Gambling Hell