Description Details
This poem tells a story that begins in 1823 - just after the Leavenworth campaign against the Arikara Indians - and follows an expedition of Major Andrew Henry during a series of arduous journeys over the Trans-Missouri region. The poem focuses upon the relationship between two trappers - Hugh Glass and Jamie - who, after fighting and hunting together, consequently develop a close friendship. The poem revolves around the betrayal of Hugh by Jamie: who leaves Hugh alone as good as dead to die by the Missouri. But Hugh lives - and recovers against all odds, pushing on with murderous intent to track down the ex-friend who left him helpless and expiring. The final canto describes the moving denouement: Hugh and Jamie both are forced to recognize their own weaknesses, and then come to terms with the implications of their individual realizations. (Introduction by Godsend)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Poetry

Description Details
The Hunting of the Snark is a long nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll describing the adventures of ten weirdly assorted characters as they pursue an elusive creature known as a snark. (Summary by Shawn Craig Smith)...

Excerpt Details
Poetry, Humor

Description Details
volunteers bring you 10 recordings of A Baby Running Barefoot by D. H. Lawrence. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of September 7th, 2008....

Excerpt Details
Poetry

Description Details
The Compleat Angler is a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in prose and verse. Walton did not profess to be an expert with the fly, but in the use of the live worm, the grasshopper and the frog Piscator could speak as a master. There were originally only two interlocutors in the opening scene, Piscator and Viator; but in the second edition, as if in answer to an objection that Piscator had it too much in his own way in praise of angling, he introduced the falconer, Auceps, changed Viator into Venator and made the new companions each dilate on the joys of his favourite sport....

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Instruction

Description Details
The plot centres around Laevsky, who is living in a small seaside town in the Caucasus after running away with another man's wife, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, amid dreams of starting a new life. The dreams have come to nothing as Laevsky idles away his life drinking and playing cards, and Nadyezhda begins to have other affairs. Laevsky's scheme to run away again, this time without his mistress, brings him into conflict with the rationalist Von Koren, who believes in Darwinian principles of natural selection and extinction of the weak and useless. Matters come to a head when an outburst from Laevsky leads to a duel. Von Koren is determined to teach Laevksy a lesson. (Introduction by Phil)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Literature

Description Details
The Rosary is a beautiful love story. Gareth Dalmain falls in love with the Honorable Jane Champion. She loves him back, but does not trust his love, as is known to be a great lover of beauty, and she - alas - is very plain. Just as she decides to trust him, she receives news that he has been blinded in a hunting accident. She wants to go visit him, but he will not receive her, as he wants only her love - not her pity. With the help of their mutual friend and doctor, she gets the position as his nurse under a presumed name, and thereby gets to know the 'new' Gareth. (Summary by Maria Elmvang)...

Excerpt Details
Romance

Description Details
This collection of 63 writings by Mark Twain was published in 1875. Among other sketches, it contains The Jumping Frog in the original English, followed by a French translation (read here by Caroline Mittler) which Twain re-translated into English, showing how the French translation of his work was badly flawed. In many of these sketches, Twain shows his talent for outrageous and hilarious inventiveness, often in reaction to current events. (Summary by John Greenman)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Humor

Description Details
Having left Sherlock Holmes apparently deceased at the conclusion of The Final Problem (in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), we now find that he is alive after all! In this collection, first published in 1905, the great detective causes Watson to faint (The Empty House), demonstrates that cryptography is elementary (The Dancing Men), and gets engaged (Charles Augustus Milverton). Join in the fun as Holmes deduces his way through these thirteen adventures. (summary by Laurie Anne Walden)...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, Mystery, Short stories

Description Details
It's 1865 in the city of San Francisco. Pretty, young Ellie Fenwick is walking to the market early one morning to surprise her father with some fresh mushrooms. As she passes a gambling house, she hears a gunshot and two young men emerge. One man falls dead on the pavement and the other is Johnny Montgomery, a handsome young man Ellie recognizes from seeing him previously at a dance. Johnny is holding a smoking pistol in his hand. This incident propels the proper young Ellie into a world of prisons and courtrooms as a murder trial unfolds and the fate of Johnny may rest with her testimony. But, what is the connection with the mysterious Spanish Woman, who lives in a grand house and supposedly has friends in 'high places'? Who else was in the gambling house at that time of the morning before it had opened? What about the whispered conversations between Ellie's father, Mr. Fenwick, and his friend, Mr. Bingley, a prominent attorney prosecuting the case? Things are not always what they may seem... (Introduction by Lee Ann Howlett)...

Excerpt Details
Mystery

Description Details
A doctor, an architect, an engineer, and a geologist step into a space car. In their new invention, they set off on an expediton to Mercury, planning to visit Venus on the return voyage. On Mercury they find a strange city eerily abandoned. Sculptures of giant figures alarm them. In a building they discover a machine. The engineer gets it running, and blaring out of the machine a thundering voice speaking Mercurian begins to sound in a way that conveys to them that it is telling a story. After an enormous effort the men translate the audio book. Here is the story translated from the Mercurian’s recording explaining what happened to him, and the story of the space travelers of what happened next. (Summary by A. Gramour)...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, Science fiction

Description Details
Norie's series of piloting and sailing directions was something of a staple in the chart-room of 19th century British (and other) merchant vessels. The description of landmarks and ports, as well as the rules and regulations provide another viewpoint to an earlier age. Please note that these piloting directions are rather completely out of date. They are given here for purposes of historical interest only, and should not be used for navigation purposes. (Summary by P Hirvonen)...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, History, Instruction, Travel

Description Details
volunteers bring you 17 recordings of O Hollow Hollow Hollow by W.S. Gilbert. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 8, 2012. Here is a poem by the fleshly poet, Bunthorne, from the opera Patience, by Gilbert and Sullivan. Who better to introduce it than the poet himself: BUNTHORNE. It is a wild, weird, fleshy thing; yet very tender, very yearning, very precious. It is called, Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow! PATIENCE Is it a hunting song? BUNTHORNE. A hunting song? No, it is not a hunting song. It is the wail of the poet's heart on discovering that everything is commonplace. To understand it, cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies. Bunthorne was considered to have been modelled on Oscar Wilde, but more recent reseach has suggested that this claim is not correct. ( Summary by Algy Pug )...

Excerpt Details
Humor, Literature, Nature, Satire, Poetry

Description Details
The mask is the one which we all wear, even though unconsciously, to hide our thoughts and feelings. Alison Terry wore one, though she had never realized it until she faced a crisis in her life. Alison, a girl of sympathetic mood and action whose keen intelligence is overbalanced by the inexperience of innocence and a sheltered upbringing, goes to New York with her erratic husband, Phil Howland. She passes through various stages of disillusionment inevitably resulting from cheap boarding-house life, association with the undesirable friends of her husband, and the discovery that Phil himself is selfish and lacking in ambition, a man whose chief interests seem to lie in restaurant-life and gambling. Then comes tragedy in the loss of their little child in a horrible accident for which Phil is responsible. The splendid strength with which Alison forces him to forgive himself and the subsequent loneliness and suffering, lead to the establishment of a mutual bond of sympathy, understanding and encouragement which starts them on the road to their ultimate happiness. Miss Irwin has written a story that rings true, and its publishers recomme...

Excerpt Details
Romance

Description Details
The American Senator is a novel written in 1875 by Anthony Trollope. Although not one of Trollope's better-known works, it is notable for its depictions of rural English life and for its many detailed fox hunting scenes. In its anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, it presents a scathing but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a woman who has abandoned virtually all scruples in her quest for a husband. Through the eponymous Senator, Trollope offers comments on the irrational aspects of English life. (Description by Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
volunteers bring you 23 recordings of Upon His Mistress Dancing by James Shirley. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January, 15, 2012. James Shirley (sometimes spelt Sherley) was a prolific English playwright and poet who was active in the first half of the seventeenth century. (Summary by Lucy Perry)...

Excerpt Details
Poetry, Romance

Description Details
This is an early novel by the phenomenally successful author of frontier, western and sports stories. It deals with historical characters and incidents in the Ohio Valley in the late 18th century, especially with the foundation of Gnaddenhutten, a missionary village intended to bring Christianity to the Indians of Ohio, despite the violent opposition of both Indians and white renegades. This turbulent adventure romance features the heroics of a semi-legendary frontiersman, Lewis Wetzel, who attempts to protect the settlers from hostile Native Americans and the vicious white outlaws the Girty brothers. (Introduction by Leonard Wilson)...

Excerpt Details
Historical Fiction

Description Details
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Despite James’s diminutives, the novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in character development. Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who lived in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast. (summary from Gutenberg e-text)...

Excerpt Details
History

Description Details
Jeremy Garnet, a second-rate novelist, gets talked into joining his old pal Stanley Featheringstonehaugh Ukridge in an insane plan to start a chicken ranch. Garnet should bail out on his crazy friend, but he falls in love with one of Ukridge's neighbors, Phyllis. Soon he is up to his neck in sick chickens, bad debts, a hostile future father-in-law, a sinister plot, and dirty golf. It all gets a bit thick, what? (Summary by Mark Nelson)...

Excerpt Details
Comedy

Description Details
Do remember reading a panic-mongering news story a while back about genetically engineered “Frankengrass” “escaping” from the golf course where it had been planted? That news story was foreshadowed decades previously in the form of prophetic fiction wherein a pushy salesman, a cash-strapped scientist, and a clump of crabgrass accidentally merge forces with apocalyptic consequences. A triple-genre combo of science fiction, horror, and satire, Greener Than You Think is a forgotten classic that resonates beautifully with modern times. This is a faithful reading of a 1947 first edition text. (Summary by Lee Elliot)...

Excerpt Details
Horror/Ghost stories, Science fiction, Satire

Description Details
Cyril Gordon, a young and handsome secret service agent is running from pursuers who desperately want the information he holds. He hides out from them in a church, and then finds himself married to a woman he’s never seen before. A sweet and sometimes, funny, romance, with several exciting chases. (Summary by Gail Mattern)...

Excerpt Details
Adventure, Fiction, Romance, Religion, Spy stories