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An anthology of ten short stories of speculation that questions the existance of ghosts while wittily narrating the adventures or tales where men and ghosts co-exists. Edith Wharton’s ‘Tales of Men and Ghosts’ was first published in the year 1910.

At not more than a stone’s throw from a neat market town, in a certain shire of England, lived Francis Hartland, Esq. in a well-built square house, which was separated from the King’s high road, by a lawn of twenty acres. Round this lawn a double row of handsome elms lined a ring fence, and formed the outer boundary, in that part next the house, of a bank covered with all sorts of shrubs, which sloped in a gradually inclined plane, from the shining laurel to the dwarf cistus, and meta broad belt of gravel, hard and smooth as marble, through which no upstart weed ever dared to force its way.

A mendicant of unwholesome aspect crouched in the shadow of the narrow gateway at the entrance to the Sûk es-Saîgh, or gold and silver bazaar, having his one serviceable eye fixed in a malevolent stare upon something or someone immediately behind me.

It is part and parcel of my difficult profession to subdue all impulses and to think before acting. I sipped my coffee and selected a fresh cigarette from the silver box upon the rug beside me. In this interval I had decided that the one-eyed mendicant cherished in his bosom an implacable and murderous hatred for my genial friend, Ali Mohammed, the dealer in antiques; that he was unaware of my having divined his bloody secret; and that if I would profit by my accidental discovery, I must continue to feign complete ignorance of it.

A famous series by the celebrated English novelist Arnold Bennett. ‘Tales of the Five Towns’ is a series of short stories set in the posh Staffordshire Potteries towns. There lived a rich cast of businessmen, shopkeepers, mill and pottery owners and fading gentility. A must read for anybody curious about the author’s everlasting fame.

First published in the year 1922, the present book ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ is a collection of eleven short stories written by one of the most celebrated English novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, it includes one of his better-known short stories, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.

Many of the tales in this collection appeared either in the Indian Antiquary, the Calcutta Review, or the Legends of the Punjab. They were then in the form of literal translations, in many cases uncouth or even unpresentable to ears polite, in all scarcely intelligible to the untravelled English reader; for it must be remembered that, with the exception of the Adventures of Raja Rasâlu, all these stories are strictly folk-tales passing current among a people who can neither read nor write, and whose diction is full of colloquialisms, and, if we choose to call them so, vulgarisms. It would be manifestly unfair, for instance, to compare the literary standard of such tales with that of the Arabian Nights, the Tales of a Parrot, or similar works.

Lord Dunsany was one of the most influential fantasy authors of the twentieth century. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis he served during the great war. Collected here are twenty-nine stories of that terrible war. Dunsany saw the horrors of war and he was uniquely qualified to capture the experience in prose.

I do not know where I may be when this preface is read. As I write it in August 1916, I am at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry, recovering from a slight wound. But it does not greatly matter where I am; my dreams are here before you amongst the following pages; and writing in a day when life is cheap, dreams seem to me all the dearer, the only things that survive.

Just now the civilization of Europe seems almost to have ceased, and nothing seems to grow in her torn fields but death, yet this is only for a while and dreams will come back again and bloom as of old, all the more radiantly for this terrible ploughing, as the flowers will bloom again where the trenches are and the primroses shelter in shell-holes for many seasons, when weeping Liberty has come home to Flanders.

The tales in this book are of many kinds of wonder; of black magic, white magic and gray; ranging from the recital of strange and supernatural deeds and experiences to those that fore-shadow modern conquests of nature and those that utilize the marvellous to teach a moral lesson. Choose among them as you will, for as the Spaniards might say, “The book is at your feet; whatever you admire is yours!”

The world was a puddle of gloom and of shadowy things,
He sped till the red and the gold of invisible day
Was burnish and flames to the undermost spread of his wings,
So he outlighted the stars as he poised in the grey.
Nearer was he to the knowledge and splendour of God,
Mysteries sealed from the ken of the ancient and wise—
Beauties forbidden to those who are one with the clod—
All that there was of the Truth was revealed to his eyes.

First published in the year 1587, ‘Tamburlaine the Great — Part 1’ is a play written by one of the critically most acclaimed and appreciated playwrights of the sixteenth century, who was also a contemporary of the celebrated William Shakespeare. This play is a milestone in Elizabethan public drama; it marks a turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of the earlier Tudor dramatists, and a new interest in fresh and vivid language, memorable action, and intellectual complexity.

First published in the year 1853, the present children’s book of fiction ‘Tanglewood Tales’ by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne is a re-writing of well-known Greek myths. This book is a sequel to Hawthorne’s ‘A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys’.

Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

Tartuffe, or The Impostor, or The Hypocrite, first performed in 1664, is one of the most famous theatrical comedies by Molière. The characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among the greatest classical theatre roles.

Tarzan and the Foreign Legion is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-second in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan.

SABOR, the lioness, suckled her young—a single fuzzy ball, spotted like Sheeta, the leopard. She lay in the warm sunshine before the rocky cavern that was her lair, stretched out upon her side with half closed eyes, yet Sabor was alert. There had been three of these little, fuzzy balls at first—two daughters and a son—and Sabor and Numa, their sire, had been proud of them; proud and happy. But kills had not been plentiful, and Sabor, undernourished, had been unable to produce sufficient milk to nourish properly three lusty cubs, and then a cold rain had come, and the little ones had sickened. Only the strongest survived—the two daughters had died. Sabor had mourned, pacing to and fro beside the pitiful bits of bedraggled fur, whining and moaning. Now and again she would nose them with her muzzle as though she would awaken them from the long sleep that knows no waking. At last, however, she abandoned her efforts, and now her whole savage heart was filled with concern for the little male cub that remained to her. That was why Sabor was more alert than usual.

Lieutenant Albert Werper had only the prestige of the name he had dishonored to thank for his narrow escape from being cashiered.

The fantastic series of tales about Tarzan, who was adopted by a female ape after the death of his parents and reared by her in an ignorance of his human features, ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ is a classic fantasy series from early 20th century.

Tarzan the Magnificent is a book by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-first in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan.

Silent as the shadows through which he moved, the great beast slunk through the midnight jungle, his yellow-green eyes round and staring, his sinewy tail undulating behind him, his head lowered and flattened, and every muscle vibrant to the thrill of the hunt.

“They are very pretty, some of them,” said the Woman of the World; “not the sort of letters I should have written myself.”
“I should like to see a love-letter of yours,” interrupted the Minor Poet.
“It is very kind of you to say so,” replied the Woman of the World. “It never occurred to me that you would care for one.”
“It is what I have always maintained,” retorted the Minor Poet; “you have never really understood me.” -An excerpt

Affirmation is the core of prayer practice as taught by Jesus. In this understanding of prayer, Jesus raised us from being mere beggers, asking for things of the physical world from a God “out there.”

The present book titled ‘Telepathy and The Subliminal Self’ is an account of recent investigations regarding hypnotism, automatism, dreams, phantasms, and related phenomena. It was first published in the year 1897.

A Book of Wonders requires but a brief introduction. Our title-page tells its own tale and forms the best exposition of the contents of the volume.

Everything that is marvellous carries with it much that is instructive, and, in this sense, “Ten Thousand Wonderful Things,” may be made useful for the highest educational purposes. Events which happen in the regular course have no claim to a place in any work that professes to be a register of what is uncommon; and were we to select such Wonders only as are capable of familiar demonstration, we should destroy their right to be deemed wondrous, and, at the same time, defeat the very object which we profess to have in view. A marvel once explained away ceases to be a marvel. For this reason, while rejecting everything that is obviously fictitious and untrue, we have not hesitated to insert many incidents which appear at first sight to be wholly incredible.

The reader guesses beforehand whom the usher preceded in announcing the courier from Bretagne. This messenger was easily recognized. It was D’Artagnan, his clothes dusty, his face inflamed, his hair dripping with sweat, his legs stiff; he lifted his feet painfully at every step, on which resounded the clink of his blood-stained spurs. He perceived in the doorway he was passing through, the superintendent coming out. Fouquet bowed with a smile to him who, an hour before, was bringing him ruin and death. D’Artagnan found in his goodness of heart, and in his inexhaustible vigor of body, enough presence of mind to remember the kind reception of this man; he bowed then, also, much more from benevolence and compassion, than from respect. He felt upon his lips the word which had so many times been repeated to the Duc de Guise: “Fly.”

One of the most critically acclaimed and appreciated works around the lives of women in the late 19th century by Thomas Hardy, ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman’ was first published in 1891. It challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England and considered to be Hardy’s fictional masterpiece.

Published in 1909, this classic romance is set in Ithaca, New York. Living in a squatters shanty, shunned by the upstanding folk of Ithaca, Tessibel is nonetheless shocked when her father, a fisherman, is accused of murder. Barefoot, beautiful, and innocent, Tess sets out to clear his name. Along the way, she meet a Cornell man. Tess lives in a rotting shanty surrounded by fish bones. Her education is minimal. Her best friend is a toad. How can she compare with the brainy beauties he squires around?