Ever wonder how Robin Hood became Robin Hood? Well, now you can read how a young boy was molded into the famous hero who "robbed from the rich and gave to the poor". This imaginative story gives zesty details into the development and growth of the...

Chronicles the life of Richard II, born in 1367 in Bordeaux, France, who later wore the crown of King of England. (Summary by Cathy Barratt)...

A writer and physician, Charles John Samuel Thompson wrote several works on poisons which are still consulted today. He is especially informative on early historical poisons. This book discusses many cases of poisoning, famous and not so, as well as...

A tale written for children in 1885.It tells of a child of noble birth whose parents have fallen foul of the current royalty. He is placed in hiding and grows up with a bowyer and then apprenticed to an armourer just outside the gates of the City of...

A firsthand account of the deplorable conditions within the most infamous prisoner-of-war camp of the Confederacy. Though functioning only during the last year of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 of 45,000 incarcerated Union soldiers died under inhumane...

Best known under the title "The Friends Of The Friends" and chosen under that title for his classic fantasy anthology "Black Water" by Alberto Manguel as one of the best ghost stories ever written, this "ghost" story (that is, if it is "a ghost...

These are three imaginative SF stories by an author I admire a lot, William Tenn. Venus is a Man's World, (Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951), Project Hush (Galaxy Science Fiction, 1954_ and Of All Possible Worlds. (Galaxy, Sept 1956) - Summary by...

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is a short-story written by American writer Mark Twain and published in 1909. The story follows Captain Stormfield on his extremely long cosmic journey to heaven, his accidental misplacement, his short-lived...

In the American Civil War the Union victory in the ten-month campaign for the city of Petersburg, Virginia (June 1864-March 1865), led directly to the surrender of the Confederacy within two weeks. This 1970 National Park Service booklet tells the...

Iolanthe is a fairy banished from fairyland for the crime of marrying a mortal. Her half-fairy, half-human son Strephon is a fairy down to the waist, but his legs are human. He loves Phyllis, but she is courted by the whole House of Lords and the...

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was an English poet and critic best known for The Angel in the House, his narrative poem about an ideal happy marriage. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Freely adapted from Lord Byron’s Fragment of a Novel, J.R. Planché’s The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles predates Dracula in its depiction of the vampire as a seductive, sophisticated, and noble figure. It also helped popularize the character of...

The Story of the Amulet is a novel for children, written in 1906 by E. Nesbit. It is the final part of a trilogy of novels that also includes Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). In it the children re-encounter the...

A classic boys' adventure story, with two intrepid boys pursuing a jewel thief despite deadly perils and a haunted temple on a desolate island. The book has been made into an online game for modern-day treasure hunters. - Summary by Lynne Thompson...

Tressa Norne is an American living in China. After her life was spared during a revolution in the area, Tressa finds herself taken as a slave and forced to serve Erlik, a demon-god, and his cult. She ends up escaping back to America, but only to...

Although Lieh Tzu's work has evidently passed through the hands of many editors and gathered numerous accretions, there remains a considerable nucleus which in all probability was committed to writing by Lieh Tzu's immediate disciples, and is...

Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, but as he wrote in Polish many English-speakers are unfamiliar with his work. This short story collection is a sampler of five myths and legends which he collected. The "Life and Death"...

In this little book Freud discusses three areas of human sexuality: 1. Sexual pervisons or abberations. In this essay, Freud concludes that "a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and...

"I was, perhaps, the plainest girl in the room that night. I was also the happiest—up to one o'clock. Then my whole world crumbled, or, at least, suffered an eclipse. Why and how, I am about to relate." Thus begins this mystery told by Anna...

"Imagination is like a sail, as Mr. Joyce had said that evening; but sails are good and useful things sometimes, and carry their owners over deep waters and dark waves, which else might dampen, and drench, and drown." Twelve year old Isabella Bright...