Books published by Wildside Press

For the twenty-second time since the great wave had washed him from the steamer's deck and hurled him, choking and sputtering, upon this inhospitable shore, Waldo Emerson saw the sun sinking rapidly toward the western horizon. Suddenly Waldo became conscious from the corner of his eye that something was creeping upon him from behind out of the dark cave before which he had fought. Simultaneously with the realization of it he swung his cudgel in a wicked blow at this new enemy as he turned to meet it. The creature dodged back and the blow that would have crushed its skull grazed a hairbreadth from its face. Waldo struck no second blow and the cold sweat sprang to his forehead when he realized how nearly he had come to murdering a young girl. She crouched now in the mouth of the cave, eying him fearfully. Waldo removed his tattered cap, bowing low. "I crave your pardon," he said. "I had no idea that there was a lady here. I am very glad that I did not injure you." But now his attention was required by more pressing affairs -- the cave men were returning to the attack. They carried stones this time, and, while some of them threw the missiles at Waldo, the others attempted to rush his position. It was then that the girl hurried back into the cave, only to reappear a moment later carrying some stone utensils in her arms.

El Kudz, as Arabs call Jerusalem, is, from a certain distance, as they also call it, shellabi kabir. Extremely beautiful. Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people. Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naïvely confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save our souls from hell and fill some fellow's purse. The jails are full.

Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralyzing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered and wanted to go indoors . . . It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions. But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary, and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. -- From Wells's introduction to THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER STORIES.

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman ' so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at ' in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons. With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there could be no understanding Fanny. For that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.

The ill nature of the cartoon, for instance, which showed Tish in a pair of khaki trousers on her back under a racing-car was quite uncalled for. Tish did not wear the khaki trousers; she merely took them along in case of emergency. Nor was it true that Tish took Aggie along as a mechanician and brutally pushed her off the car because she was not pumping enough oil. The fact was that Aggie sneezed on a curve and fell out of the car, and would no doubt have been killed had she not been thrown into a pile of sand. It was in early September that Eliza Bailey, my cousin, decided to go to London, ostensibly for a rest, but really to get some cretonne at Liberty's. Eliza wrote me at Lake Penzance asking me to go to Morris Valley and look after Bettina. . . .

For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-bye to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof. And then -- the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very gray -- Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off. "No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either."

Twelve Stories and a Dream -- "A Dream of Armageddon": "That book," he repeated, pointing a lean finger, "is about dreams. Dreams tell you nothing." I did not catch his meaning for a second. "They don't know," he added. I looked a little more attentively at his face. "There are dreams," he said, "and dreams."

The biological truth Wells has given us would slow down an alien encounters on Star Trek or Farscape, where intrepid adventurers rarely worry about local languages, much less breathing the local air. The aliens have invaded because they have a fondness for human blood, sucked from living beings (how they discovered they had a taste for us is unclear, but it makes dramatic theater, anyway). If you haven't read Wells, you need to; Wells created a landmark -- he is a thoughtful social commentator, a pioneer of what makes SF intellectually appealing, and a damned fine storyteller, too.The novel is the first-person narrative of both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and of his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians.

A century ago, H.G. Wells was one of the men who all but created the science fiction novel. Wells wrote three classics in four years: The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The Invisible Man, owes an obvious debt to Frankenstein, as it explores the nature of mankind, asking weather an invisible man still be bound by the morality that seems natural to us. Seems like a natural thing, doesn't it? But listen to the story Wells tells, and the doubt he places on a thing seemingly obvious: A researcher working (more or less) as a graduate student in physics, discovers a treatment that will make himself invisible. Griffin -- our invisible man -- may well be morally bankrupt before he takes the treatment. He begins by making himself invisible to avoid paying his rent -- and, as he sneaks out of the building, he sets it afire as a "lesson" for his landlord. He steals money entrusted to his father -- and causes his father to suicide in shame . . . but that's only the beginning . . .

It may be thought by some that in the pages which follow I have painted in too lurid colors the horrors of a foreign invasion of England. Realism in art, it may be argued, can be carried too far. I prefer to think that the majority of my readers will acquit me of a desire to be unduly sensational. It is necessary that England should be roused to a sense of her peril, and only by setting down without flinching the probable results of an invasion can this be done. This story, I may mention, has been written and published purely from a feeling of patriotism and duty. Mr. Alston Rivers' sensitive soul will be jarred to its foundations if it is a financial success. So will mine. But in a time of national danger we feel that the risk must be taken. After all, at the worst, it is a small sacrifice to make for our country. -- P.G. WODEHOUSE

"This robbery of the pots is a rum thing," said Vaughan, thoughtfully, when the last shreds of Plunkett's character had been put through the mincing-machine to the satisfaction of all concerned. "Yes. It's the sort of thing one doesn't think possible till it actually happens." "What the dickens made them put the things in the Pav. at all? They must have known it wouldn't be safe." "Well, you see, they usually cart them into the Board Room, I believe, only this time the governors were going to have a meeting there. They couldn't very well meet in a room with the table all covered with silver pots." "Don't see why." "Well, I suppose they could, really, but some of the governors are fairly nuts on strict form. There's that crock who makes the two-hour vote of thanks speeches on Prize Day. You can see him rising to a point of order, and fixing the Old 'Un with a fishy eye." "Well, anyhow, I don't see that they can blame a burglar for taking the pots if they simply chuck them in his way like that." "No. I say, we'd better weigh in with the Livy. The man Ward'll be round directly. Where's the dic? AND our invaluable friend, Mr. Bohn? Right. Now, you reel it off, and I'll keep an eye on the notes." And they settled down to the business of the day.

The Man Upstairs is a collection of short stories, it is a miscellaneous collection, not featuring any of Wodehouse's regular characters; most of the stories concern love and romance.There were three distinct stages in the evolution of Annette Brougham's attitude towards the knocking in the room above. In the beginning it had been merely a vague discomfort. Absorbed in the composition of her waltz, she had heard it almost subconsciously. The second stage set in when it became a physical pain like red-hot pincers wrenching her mind from her music. Finally, with a thrill in indignation, she knew it for what it was -- an insult. The unseen brute disliked her playing, and was intimating his views with a boot-heel. Defiantly, with her foot on the loud pedal, she struck -- almost slapped -- the keys once more. "Bang!" from the room above. "Bang! Bang!"Also includes "Something to Worry About," "Deep Waters," "When Doctors Disagree," "By Advice of Counsel," "Rough-Hew Them How We Will," "The Man Who Disliked Cats," "Ruth in Exile," "Archibald's Benefit," "The Man, the Maid, and the Miasma," "The Good Angel," "Pots o'Money," "Out of School," "Three from Dunsterville," "The Tuppenny Millionaire," "Ahead of Schedule," "Sir Agravaine," "The Goal-Keeper and the Plutocrat," and "In Alcala."Wodehouse worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career he would produce a novel in about three months but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared with comic poetry and musical comedy.

"This book marks an epoch in my literary career. It is written in blood. It is the outpouring of a soul as deeply seared by Fate's unkindness as the pretty on the dog-leg hole of the second nine was ever seared by my iron. It is the work of a very nearly desperate man, an eighteen-handicap man who has got to look extremely slippy if he doesn't want to find himself in the twenties again."

The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible that Mrs. Porter's name is not familiar to you. If this is the case, I am pained, but not surprised. If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter's mind worked backward and forward. She had one eye on the past, the other on the future. If she was strong on heredity, she was stronger on the future of the race. . . .

Jeeves -- my man, you know -- is really a most extraordinary chap. So capable. Honestly, I shouldn't know what to do without him. On broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked "Inquiries." You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stopping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience. . . . In _My Man Jeeves,_ affable, indolent Bertie Wooster and his precise, capable valet, Jeeves -- the ever cool and capable gentleman's gentleman Jeeves who pulls hapless Wooster's fat from the fire time and again -- weave themselves through a series of delightful adventures. But the adventures are almost beside the point: what the Jeevs stories are about is the relationship between these two men of very different classes and temperaments. Where Bertie is impetuous and feeble, Jeeves is cool-headed and poised. A motley clutch of buffoons accompanies Jeeves's accounts of Wooster's misunderstandings, gaffes, and backfiring plans.My Man Jeeves was first published in the United Kingdom in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Wooster."Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale." -- Evelyn Waugh

"Please, sir, it's about my salary." His age was twenty-two and his name was Roland Bleke. Mr. Fineberg, at his word, drew himself together much as a British square at Waterloo must have drawn itself together at the sight of a squadron of cuirassiers. "Salary?" he cried. "What about it? What's the matter with it? You get it, don't you?" "Yes, sir, but --" "Well? Don't stand there like an idiot. What is it?" "It's too much." Mr. Fineberg's brain reeled. It was improbable that the millennium could have arrived with a jerk; on the other hand, he had distinctly heard one of his clerks complain that his salary was too large. . . .A Man of Means is a collection of six short stories written in collaboration by P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill.

I would urge you to get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves, where you will encounter it fully in context and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life. I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you. Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about. And in opening my report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole, with the above spot of dialogue, I see that I have made the second of these two floaters. I shall have to hark back a bit. And taking it for all in all and weighing this against that, I suppose the affair may be said to have had its inception, if inception is the word I want, with that visit of mine to Cannes. If I hadn't gone to Cannes, I shouldn't have met the Bassett or bought that white mess jacket, and Angela wouldn't have met her shark, and Aunt Dahlia wouldn't have played baccarat. Yes, most decidedly, Cannes was the point d'appui. Stephen Fry, in an article titled "What ho! My hero, PG Wodehouse", remarks on the popularity of the work: The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language.. .

The story first appeared in the magazine The Captain, in two separate parts, collected together in the original version of the book; the first part, originally called Jackson Junior, was republished in 1953 under the title Mike at Wrykyn, while the second half, called The Lost Lambs in its serialized version, was released as Enter Psmith in 1935 and then as Mike and Psmith in 1953 - this marks the first appearance of the popular character of Psmith. "I am with you, Comrade Jackson. You won't mind my calling you Comrade, will you? I've just become a Socialist. It's a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it. We must stick together. We are companions in misfortune. Lost lambs. Sheep that have gone astray. Divided, we fall, together we may worry through. Have you seen Professor Radium yet?" "Our greatest humorous novelist, and indeed one of our greatest writers." -- Richard Gordon

At the start of this volume, Tarzan knows his inheritance as an English lord, but is determined to hide that since he truly believes that his cousin, William Cecil Clayton, would make a better lord and husband for his beloved Jane. He gets involved with a married Russian countess (there's a plan! -- oh, sure) who has issues with her criminal brother (Nicholas Rokoff -- a real villain, naturally, who becomes a regular in the series) and her older husband. As a consequence of his interaction with brother, Tarzan is lured into a room where he is attacked by a dozen Paris muggers. The scene that details this mugging is one of the great chapters in the literature of muggings. Tarzan fondly recalls his childhood and his foster ape mother with a friend, D'Arnot: "To you my friend, she would have appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful -- so gloriously does love transfigure its object."

At the end of A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first volume in Burroughs's Mars series, John Carter managed to get the factory that produces oxygen for Barsoom working again -- and collapsed. When he came to, he found himself back on earth, and separated from his beloved Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium. It's a decade later when Carter returns to Barsoom, and he finds himself in that part of the planet that the natives consider to be "heaven" -- which is no heaven at all. Carter has to reunite with his friend the fierce green warrior Tars Tarkas, fight with plant men and the great white apes of Barsoom, violate some significant religious taboos, survive the affections of an evil goddess, foment a slave revolt, fight in an arena, and still save Dejah Thoris in the middle of a giant air battle between the red, green, black and white people of Barsoom. . . . High adventure, Martian style.

As THE BEASTS OF TARZAN begins, Tarzan -- as Lord Greystoke -- is settled in civilized London. But two of his enemies, Nikolas Rokoff and henchman Alexis Paulvitch, are on his trail. The pair abducts Jane -- and Tarzan's son, Jack. Tarzan himself is stranded on a desert island, but with the help of Sheeta the panther and Akut the great ape he makes it back to the mainland. There he meets Mugambi, the giant chief of the Wagambi tribe, who becomes Tarzan's lifelong friend and ally. The group heads into the deep jungle after the kidnappers -- and when Tarzan finds them he lets the beast inside him wreck his vengeance. There's a beautiful irony, here -- Tarzan has come from the jungle into civilization, and his son must go from civilization to the jungle.

A ship's mutiny forces a young noble English couple out onto the African coast, and their child is born in the wild. When they die a short time later, the boy is adopted by an ape, and raised as her own. The boy, Tarzan, rises to dominance in the jungle . . . TARZAN OF THE APES is Edgar Rice Burroughs's exploration of mankind a it's seen from the perspective of a man reared outside civilization, and the insights he offers are often not flattering. Tarzan has all the features we look for in a hero -- he is handsome, brave, and stronger than any ordinary man. But he is an arrogant loner, prone to violence. TARZAN OF THE APES explores that which is within all of us, the primal drives and abilities that made for our survival -- Burroughs created a hero who, because of his immense potential and truly unique upbringing -- became a believable SUPERMAN. Burroughs told the tale in engaging prose which still sweeps us along.

In the previous volume, the Lord of the Jungle discovered the burnt corpse of his wife, Jane, after a visit to his African home by German soldiers. (One suspects that Burroughs never did like Jane; this sort of thing happened to her a lot.) In this volume, Tarzan learns that Jane was not murdered by the Germans but kidnaped -- and sets off in pursuit. As the novel begins, Tarzan has spent two months tracking his mate to Pal-ul-don ("Land of Men"), a hidden valley in Zaire, where he finds a land dinosaurs and men even stranger -- humanoids with tails. Ta-den is a hairless, white-skinned, Ho-don warrior; O-mat is a hairy, black skinned, Waz-don, chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world Tarzan becomes a captive -- but he impresses his captors so well that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru ("Tarzan the Terrible"). Meanwhile, a second visitor has come to Pal-ul-don -- wearing only a loin cloth and carrying an Enfield rifle along and a long knife. Pal-ul-don is where Jane is being held captive, of course. . . .

A unit of German soldiers stumble on the estate of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, in British East Africa in the fall of 1914. Tarzan and his son, Korak, are away, and Jane -- Lady Jane -- does not know that war has broken out between German and the British Empire. She welcomes them to her home. Meanwhile, Tarzan learns of the war in Nairobi and hurries home only to find the smoking ruins of his estate. Wasimbu, the son of Muviro, has been nailed to the wall, and the rest of the natives are all dead. Tarzan also finds the charred body of his wife, recognizable only by the rings on her fingers. Cursing the Germans, Tarzan swears vengeance and head into the wild, seeking revenge. During a tremendous thunderstorm, Tarzan kills a leopard -- and the Lord of the Jungle has returned . . . This is not your typical Burroughs yarn, where the hero pursues his beloved across a dangerous environment -- not at all.

When Abner Perry invents a vehicle that essentially drills through the earth, he takes it to his good friend (and independently wealthy man about town) David Ennis. And what else can they do? Drill down into the earth, of course. What they find there isn't what we'd expect: it's an inner world called Pellicidar, a place where the sun neither sets nor rises -- because what appears to be the sun is no sun at all, but the molten core of the earth. Pellucidar is a great fun fantasy world, full of dragons, apes, and reptiles and Weird Things. It's ruled by sorcerous royalty (the princess falls in love with Our Hero, of course) and of course our heros end up hip-deep in dragons. . . .