Fiction Books

If it was good enough for your grandfather, forget it ... it is much too good for anyone else! Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his... more...

Under a boat, high and dry at low tide, on the beach, John Wood was seated in the sand, sheltered from the sun in the boat's shadow, absorbed in the laying on of verdigris. The dull, worn color was rapidly giving place to a brilliant, shining green. Occasionally a scraper, which lay by, was taken up to remove the last trace of a barnacle. It was Wood's boat, but he was not a boatman; he... more...

Oberholser's "Bird Life of Louisiana" (La. Dept. Conserv. Bull. 28, 1938), was a notable contribution to the ornithology of the Gulf Coast region and the lower Mississippi Valley, for it gave not only a complete distributional synopsis of every species and subspecies of bird then known to occur in Louisiana but also nearly every record of a Louisiana bird up to 1938. However, at the time... more...

SIMON THE SOLITARY PASSENGER The train had come a long journey and the afternoon was wearing on. The passenger in the last third class compartment but one, looking out of the window sombrely and intently, saw nothing now but desolate brown hills and a winding lonely river, very northern looking under the autumnal sky. He was alone in the carriage, and if any one had happened to study his movements... more...

A LITTLE MATTER OF REAL ESTATE Four weeks of teaching in a lower East Side school had deprived Constance Bailey of many of the "Ideals in Education" which, during four years at college, she had trustingly acquired. But, despite many discouragements, despite an unintelligible dialect and an autocratic "Course of Study," she clung to an ambition to establish harmony in her kingdom and to... more...

Living as we do in the midst of a people, which, if not of unmixed English blood, is at least English in institutions, language and laws, where can we better read our destiny than in the pages of English history? “In our own hearts,” some will at once answer. But no, the thread of our fate is, to-day, more in the hands of the American people than in our own. The three nations, which have in modern... more...

Deep Space, 2568 CE For the first time in his century-long career, Fleet-Captain Arjen of Clan D'gameh disapproved of a mission he had been given. That his orders came straight from the Supreme made no difference to his feelings, nor did the First Speaker's assurance that the Circle of Lords deemed it vital to the survival of the Traiti race. It wasn't the goal of the mission that... more...

THE PLAY HOUSE Amelia Maxwell sat by the front-chamber window of the great house overlooking the road, and her own "story-an'-a-half" farther toward the west. Every day she was alone under her own roof, save at the times when old lady Knowles of the great house summoned her for work at fine sewing or braiding rags. All Amelia's kin were dead. Now she was used to their solemn absence,... more...

In the waiting windless dark, Lewis Stillman pressed into the building-front shadows along Wilshire Boulevard. Breathing softly, the automatic poised and ready in his hand, he advanced with animal stealth toward Western, gliding over the night-cool concrete, past ravaged clothing shops, drug and ten-cent stores, their windows shattered, their doors ajar and swinging. The city of Los Angeles, painted in... more...

CHAPTER I THE STOWAWAY An English mist was rolling lazily inland from the sea. It half enveloped the two great ocean liners that lay tugging at their moorings in the bay, and settled over the wharf with a grim determination to check, as far as possible, the traffic of the morning. But the activity of the wharf, while impeded, was in no wise stopped. The bustle, rattle, and shouting were, in fact,... more...