Books published by Aegypan

Desperate to discover a cure for the cyclical 48-year-fever, known as Trailmen's fever, Dr. Randall Forth persuades a colleague, Dr. Jay Allison, to undergo hypnosis. He calls forth a secondary personality, Jason Allison, is gregarious and an experienced mountain climber, while Dr. Jay Allison is a cold, clinical man with no outdoor skills. Jason is asked to lead an expedition into the Hellers to collect medical volunteers from among the Trailmen. Accompanying him are Rafe Scott, Regis Hastur, Kyla Raineach, a Renunciate guide, and several others. During the trip, Jay/Jason yo-yos between his two personalities - one warm and charming, the other distant and clinical. Jason, the warm personality, falls in love with Kyla..... By the time I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows, alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the glass-brick. Habit and memory fitted names to all these; the bare office, the orange flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man before. He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the Terran Trade City. I didn't stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man. But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here. "Could I trouble you to tell me your name?"

Nobody really wrote most of the stories. People told them in all parts of the world long before Egyptian hieroglyphics or Cretan signs or Cyprian syllabaries, or alphabets were invented. They are older than reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers before men had any education to quarrel over. The grannies told them to the grandchildren, and when the grandchildren became grannies they repeated the same old tales to the new generation. Homer knew the stories and made up the 'Odyssey' out of half a dozen of them. All the history of Greece till about 800 B.C. is a string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and Heracles and Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a Cabinet des Fées, a collection of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them into 'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up himself, great as he was. Let ladies and gentlemen think of this when they sit down to write fairy tales, and have them nicely typed, and send them to Messrs. Longman & Co. to be published. They think that to write a new fairy tale is easy work. They are mistaken: the thing is impossible. Nobody can write a new fairy tale; you can only mix up and dress up the old, old stories, and put the characters into new dresses, as Miss Thackeray did so well in 'Five Old Friends.' If any big girl of fourteen reads this preface, let her insist on being presented with "Five Old Friends."

A novella, it was originally serialized in Weird Tales magazine from July to October 1936. It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan encountering a lost city in which the degenerate inhabitants are proactively resigned to their own destruction.One of the strangest stories ever written -- the tale of a barbarian adventurer, a woman pirate and a weird roofed city inhabited by the most peculiar race of men ever spawned! That was the Weird Tales editor's original terse blurb for this story's magazine publication. (There was another, longer less coherent, but it wouldn't fit here on the back cover.) Death! Decay! Red Nails really is something special. It's classic Conan! Conan lovers consider Red Nails to be one of the best, and you know, they make a point.

". . . All things whate'er they beHave order among themselves: and this is Form,That makes the universe resemble God."Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) was America's most widely read poet of the 19th century. Yet little remembered today is the ambitious and laborious project of his middle years: his translation for New World readers of Dante Alighieri's epic trilogy of a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.In Paradiso, the third and final book, Dante enters the realms of the upper Heavens, where he and others rail against the avarice, luxury and corruption of ecclesiastics -- and where no less than Saints Peter, James and John challenge Dante on questions of Faith, Hope, and Charity.Dante learns of the creation of the angels, the fall of Lucifer, and gains final insight into the mystery of human and divine nature, in this fitting sequel to Inferno and Purgatorio.