Fiction Books

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration. The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was really some... more...

CHAPTER I. The first of the new meteors landed on the earth in November, 1940. It was discovered by a farmer in his field near Brookline, Massachusetts, shortly after daybreak on the morning of the 11th. Astronomically, the event was recorded by the observatory at Harvard as the sudden appearance of what apparently was a new star, increasing in the short space of a few hours from invisibility to a... more...

CHAPTER I. THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA. It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date 476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was... more...

Chapter 1   Sunday, April 5 6:49 a.m.   Alexa Hampton was awakened by a sensation in her chest. The alarm wasn't set to go off for another eleven minutes, but she knew her sleep was finished. Not again! She rolled over and slapped the blue pillowcase. That little sound from her heart and the twinges of angina, that catchall for heart discomfort, was happening more and more now, just as Dr.... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCES AMBLER JEVONS. “Ah! You don’t take the matter at all seriously!” I observed, a trifle annoyed. “Why should I?” asked my friend, Ambler Jevons, with a deep pull at his well-coloured briar. “What you’ve told me shows quite plainly that you have in the first place viewed one little circumstance with suspicion, then brooded over it until it has become magnified and now... more...

CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE. Franklin Pierce was born at Hillsborough, in the State of New Hampshire, on the 23d of November, 1804. His native county, at the period of his birth, covered a much more extensive territory than at present, and might reckon among its children many memorable men, and some illustrious ones. General Stark, the hero of Bennington, Daniel Webster, Levi Woodbury,... more...

I suppose there is no one of us who can honestly deny that he is interested in one way or another in the American short story. Indeed, it is hard to find a man anywhere who does not enjoy telling a good story. But there are some people born with the gift of telling a good story better than others, and of telling it in such a way that a great many people can enjoy its flavor. Most of you are acquainted... more...

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CHAPTER I. Mrs. Stevens is Frightened In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Red House was taking its siesta. There was a lazy murmur of bees in the flower-borders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms. From distant lawns came the whir of a mowing-machine, that most restful of all country sounds; making ease the sweeter in that it is taken while others are working. It was the hour... more...

CHAPTER I. Of how I, Nigel de Bessin, was brought up by the monks of the Vale in Guernsey Island, and how on a certain day the abbot gave me choice of two lives, and which I chose. This is the chronicle of me, Nigel de Bessin, of good Norman stock, being a cadet of the great house, whose elder branch is even to-day settled at St. Sauveur, in the Cotentin. And I write it for two reasons. First, for the... more...