Fiction Books

Spaceship crews should be selected on the basis of their non-irritating qualities as individuals. No chronic complainers, no hypochondriacs, no bugs on cleanliness—particularly no one-man parties. I speak from bitter experience. Because on the first expedition to Mars, Hugh Allenby damned near drove us nuts with his puns. We finally got so we just ignored them. But no one can ignore that classic last... more...

I Little George was making hills of sand in one of the walks; he took it up with both his hands, made it into a pyramid, and then put a chestnut leaf on the top, and his father, sitting on an iron chair was looking at him with concentrated and affectionate attention, and saw nobody but him in that small public garden which was full of people. All along the circular road other children were occupied in... more...

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the... more...

hen he was nine, Vogel almost killed another boy who inadvertently scattered his half-completed jigsaw puzzle. At sixteen, he discovered the mysteries of the Danish Gambit, and cried. At twenty-two, he crouched in a foxhole on Okinawa, oblivious to the death bursting about him, squinting in a painful ecstasy at the tattered fragment of newspaper on his knee. His sergeant screamed in agony, then died at... more...

INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS. In the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Philebus, the Parmenides, and the Sophist, we may observe the tendency of Plato to combine two or more subjects or different aspects of the same subject in a single dialogue. In the Sophist and Statesman especially we note that the discussion is partly regarded as an illustration of method, and that analogies are brought from afar which... more...

CHAPTER IT I crave the indulgence of the reader whilst I explain as briefly as possible the plan upon which I have written this short life of the great sovereign who firmly established the Mughal dynasty in India. The original conception of such an empire was not Akbar's own. His grandfather, Bábar, had conquered a great portion of India, but during the five years which elapsed between the... more...

HENRY ESMOND [Illustration: HENRY ESMOND AND THE CASTLEWOODS.] When Francis, fourth Viscount Castlewood, came to his title, and, presently after, to take possession of his house of Castlewood, County Hants, in the year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until my Lady Viscountess lighted upon him, going... more...

I. Real and Ideal—these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving, which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real—the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal—the ideal which may mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he... more...

Puck's Song See you the dimpled track that runs,All hollow through the wheat?O that was where they hauled the gunsThat smote King Philip's fleet! See you our little mill that clacks,So busy by the brook?She has ground her corn and paid her taxEver since Domesday Book. See you our stilly woods of oak,And the dread ditch beside?O that was where the Saxons broke,On the day that Harold died! See... more...

It was a big, coffin-shaped plywood box that looked like it weighed a ton. This brawny type just dumped it through the door of the police station and started away. I looked up from the blotter and shouted at the trucker's vanishing back. "What the hell is that?" "How should I know?" he said as he swung up into the cab. "I just deliver, I don't X-ray 'em. It came on... more...