Running for sixteen issues in 1919, 'The Thrill Book' was a magazine of 'strange, bizzare, occult, mysterious tales, ' but not quite a fantastic-fiction magazine, mixing various types of adventure stories with often outstanding fantasy, horror, and science fiction. This volume is a facsimile reprint of the first issue

FREAKS AND FANTASIES is a collection of short stories by Tod Robbins, who is known for writing the story "Spurs" that inspired the film, FREAKS. In his introduction, Chris Mikul tells you all about this mysterious writer who influenced so many pulp writers. The stories in the book are: Crimson Flowers - The Thrill Book, 1 October 1919 Silent, White and Beautiful - Smart Set, April 1918 Spurs - Munsey's Magazine, February 1923 Who Wants a Green Bottle? - All-Story Weekly, 12 December 1918 The Bibulous Baby - The Thrill Book, 1 July 1919 Wild Wullie the Waster - All-Story Weekly, 14 February 1920 Toys of Fate - Munsey's Magazine, January 1921 An Eccentric - The Thrill Book, 1 October 1919 (credited to 'Roy Leslie') The Whimpus - Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Septem-ber/October 1939 A Bit of a Banshee - Forum, December 1924 The Son of Shaemas O'Shea - Who Wants a Green Bottle? and Other Uneasy Tales (Philip Allan, 1926) A Voice from Beyond - The Thrill Book, 15 July 1919 Cock-Crow Inn - Mystery Magazine, 1 March 1926 The Confession - Thrills (Philip Allan, 1935)

From the late 1920s to late 1950s, the Broadway theatre was America's cultural epicenter. Television didn't exist and movies were novelties. Entertainment took the form of literature, music, and theatre. During this golden age of Broadway, actors and actresses became legends and starred in now classic plays. Laurence Olivier, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine were names to remember, etching plays into memory as they brought the words of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill to life. Joseph Cotton romanced Katherine Hepburn in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story while Laurette Taylor became The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield. Frederic March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards Jr. and Bradford Dillman showed us life among the ruins in Long Day's Journey Into Night. In All That Glittered, Ethan Mordden, long one of Broadway's best chroniclers, recreates the fascinating lost world of its golden age.

This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. Wisely chosen by the literary critic August Nemo for the book series 7 Best Short Stories, this omnibus contains the stories of the following writers: - Sheridan Le Fanu - H. and E. Heron - Charlotte Riddell - Flora Annie Steel - Amelia B. Edwards - Margaret Oliphant - Edward Bellamy - Arnold Bennett - S. Baring-Gould - Daniil Kharms - E.F. Benson - John Buchan - Ella D'Arcy - Jacques Futrelle - Frank Richard Stockton - John Kendrick Bangs - Kenneth Grahame - Julian Hawthorne - A. E. W. Mason - Richard Middleton - Pierre Louÿs - Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole - Ethel Richardson - Gertrude Stein - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Arthur Quiller-Couch - Mór Jókai - Andy Adams - Bertha Sinclair - Fitz James O'Brien - Eleanor H. Porter - Valery Bryusov - John Ulrich Giesy - Otis Adelbert Kline - Paul Laurence Dunbar - Frank Lucius Packard - Barry Pain - Gertrude Bennett - Francis Marion Crawford - William Pett Ridge - Gilbert Parker - Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford - Elizabeth Garver Jordan - Richard Austin Freeman - Alice Duer Miller - Leonard Merrick - Anthony Hope - Ethel Watts Mumford - Anne O'Hagan Shinn - B. M. Bower

Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales. Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.

Welcome to the Essential Novelists book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. For this book, the literary critic August Nemo has chosen the two most important and meaningful novels of Francis Stevens wich are Nightmare! nad The Heads of Cerberus. Gertrude Barrows Bennett, known by the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was a pioneering author of fantasy and science fiction. Bennett wrote a number of fantasies and has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy". Novels selected for this book: - Nightmare! - The Heads of Cerberus.This is one of many books in the series Essential Novelists. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the authors.

'Partners in Wonder' explores our knowledge of women and science fiction between 1936 and 1965. It describes the distinctly different form of science fiction that females produced, one that was both more utopian and more empathetic than that of their male counterparts.

"A trio of time-travelers land in Philadelphia's brutal totalitarian state of 2118. This 1919 classic was the first alternate-world fantasy, and H. P. Lovecraft hailed its author as among "the top grade of writers." Loaded with action and humor, the novel anticipates the work of Philip K. Dick. "A much-sought rarity." -- Analog"--

STRANGE TALES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR . . . When Strange Tales first appeared in 1931 as a pulp magazine, it was clearly something new. Edited by Harry Bates as a companion to Astounding Stories, it combined the supernatural horror and fantasy of Weird Tales with vigorous action plots. Had the Great Depression not intervened and killed it after seven issues, the whole history of fantastic fiction might have been different. Strange Tales rapidly attracted the most imaginative and capable writers of the day, including such Weird Tales regulars as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Hugh B. Cave, Ray Cummings, and numerous others. Certainly Strange Tales gave Weird Tales a serious run for its money. The March 1932 issue features work by Paul Ernst, Henry S. Whitehead, Gordon MacCreagh, and more. The fine cover by H.W. Wesso illustrates "The Duel of the Sorcerers," by Paul Ernst.

In this thorough history, the author demonstrates, via the popular literature (primarily pulp magazines and comic books) of the 1920s to about 1960, that the stories therein drew their definitions of heroism and villainy from an overarching, nativist fear of outsiders that had existed before World War I but intensified afterwards. These depictions were transferred to America's "new" enemies, both following U.S. entry into the Second World War and during the early stages of the Cold War. Anti-foreign narratives showed a growing emphasis on ideological, as opposed to racial or ethnic, differences--and early signs of the coming "multiculturalism"--indicating that pure racism was not the sole reason for nativist rhetoric in popular literature. The process of change in America's nativist sentiments, so virulent after the First World War, are revealed by the popular, inexpensive escapism of the time, pulp magazines and comic books.