From his earliest literary experimentation, Arthur Machen refused to sit in his own time, clawing his way back to a past inhabited by false gods and terrifying fairies. The Hill of Dreams thus performs a kind of reverse archeology. Instead of the writerly excavation of character development and world-building, Machen entombs his main character, Lucian Taylor, in his own mind, cutting him off from the living world of sensation. Lucian journeys all the long way from the known to the unknown, into the ruins of an old Roman fort, imbued with the Celtic magic that stirred in the Welsh hills of Machen's childhood. From this idyll, the story becomes . . . .go to book page >>

Set in Italy during the Risorgimento, The Gadfly is a thrilling tale of betrayal and revolution. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious satirist, a hardworking lady radical and a Catholic cardinal with a dark secret. Published in 1897 by Irish writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (or ELV, as she preferred to be known), The Gadfly sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, though it has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world—until now. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smuggle guns over the border and, if you're anything like the Gadfly, you'll . . . .go to book page >>

Elsie Venner is your typical teenage girl. But unlike her classmates at the Apollinean Female Institute, her mother was bitten by a rattlesnake while pregnant. Not girl, not yet a woman and also not quite human, Elsie must battle a conflicted nature while suffering the advances of lovers, teachers, doctors and ministers, all intent on conquering and curing her. Elsie Venner was one of three medicated novels written by physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes. In this work, he coined the phrase Boston Brahmin, and dissected the eccentricities and hypocrisies of his local culture. Published after Darwin's On the Origin of Species . . . .go to book page >>