"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, and was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. It is considered one of Fitzgerald's finest stories and is frequently anthologized. In the Fitzgerald canon, it is considered to be in the "Gatsby-cluster," as many of its themes were later expanded upon in his famous novel The Great Gatsby in 1925. Writing his editor Max Perkins in June 1925, Fitzgerald described "Winter Dreams" as "A sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea."

Winter Dreams

FITZGERALD, FRANCIS SCOTT

Romance

Free Thought Books

"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920. It is one of eight short stories originally published in Fitzgerald's first collection, Flappers and Philosophers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920) Sally Carrol Happer, a young southern woman from the fictional city of Tarleton, Georgia, is bored with her unchanging environment. Her local friends are dismayed to learn she is engaged to Harry Bellamy, a man from an unspecified Northern town. She brushes off their concerns, alluding to her need for something more in her life, a need to see "things happen on a big scale." Sally Carrol travels to the North during the winter to visit Harry's home town and meet his family. The winter weather underscores her growing disillusion with the decision to move north, until her moment of epiphany in the town's local "Ice Palace". In the end, Sally Carrol returns home.

The Ice Palace

Literature & Fiction

It is the final part of a trilogy of novels that also includes Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). In it the children re-encounter the Psammead—the "it" in Five Children and It. As it no longer grants wishes to the children, however, its capacity is mainly advisory in relation to the children's other discovery, the Amulet, thus following a formula successfully established in The Phoenix and the Carpet.

The Story of the Amulet

Children's Books

NESBIT, EDITH

Action & Adventure

The story begins at dusk in Salem Village, Massachusetts as young Goodman Brown leaves Faith, his wife of three months, for some unknown errand in the forest. Faith pleads with her husband to stay with her, but he insists that the journey must be completed that night. In the forest he meets an older man, dressed in a similar manner and bearing a physical resemblance to himself. The man carries a black serpent-shaped staff. The two encounter Goody Cloyse, an older woman, whom Young Goodman had known as a boy and who had taught him catechism, in the woods. She complains about the need to walk and, evidently friendly with the stranger, accepts his snake staff and flies away to her destination. Other townspeople inhabit the woods that night, traveling in the same direction as Goodman Brown. When he hears his wife's voice in the trees, he calls out but is not answered. He then seems to fly through the forest, using a maple staff the stranger fashioned for him, arriving at a clearing at midnight to find all the townspeople assembled. At the ceremony (which may be a witches' sabbath) carried out at a flame-lit rocky altar, the newest acolytes are brought forth — Goodman Brown and Faith. They are the only two of the townspeople not yet initiated. Goodman Brown calls to heaven to resist and instantly the scene vanishes. Arriving back at his home in Salem the next morning, Goodman Brown is uncertain whether the previous night's events were real or a dream, but he is deeply shaken, and his belief he lives in a Christian community is distorted. He loses his faith in his wife, along with all of humanity. He lives his life an embittered and suspicious cynic, wary of everyone around him. The story concludes: "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave... they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."

Young Goodman Brown

Hawthorne,Nathaniel

Genre Fiction

The Warden concerns Mr Septimus Harding, the meek, elderly warden of Hiram's Hospital and precentor of Barchester Cathedral, in the fictional county of Barsetshire. Hiram's Hospital is an almshouse supported by a medieval charitable bequest to the Diocese of Barchester. The income maintains the almshouse itself, supports its twelve bedesmen, and, in addition, provides a comfortable abode and living for its warden. Mr Harding was appointed to this position through the patronage of his old friend the Bishop of Barchester, who is also the father of Archdeacon Grantly to whom Harding's older daughter, Susan, is married. The warden, who lives with his remaining child, an unmarried younger daughter Eleanor, performs his duties conscientiously. The story concerns the impact upon Harding and his circle when a zealous young reformer, John Bold, launches a campaign to expose the disparity in the apportionment of the charity's income between its object, the bedesmen, and its officer, Mr Harding. John Bold embarks on this campaign in a spirit of public duty despite his romantic involvement with Eleanor and previously cordial relations with Mr Harding. Bold starts a lawsuit and Mr Harding is advised by the indomitable Dr Grantly, his son-in-law, to stand his ground. Bold attempts to enlist the support of the press and engages the interest of The Jupiter (a newspaper representing The Times) whose editor, Tom Towers, pens editorials supporting reform of the charity, and presenting a portrait of Mr Harding as selfish and derelict in his conduct of his office. This image is taken up by commentators Dr Pessimist Anticant, and Mr Popular Sentiment, who have been seen as caricatures of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens respectively

The Warden

TROLLOPE, ANTHONY

The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up to the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx, the river that circles the underworld. The book begins with Charon, ferryman of the Styx being startled—and annoyed—by the arrival of a houseboat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed the boat's janitor. What follows are eleven more stories (for a total of twelve) which are set on the house boat. There is no central theme, and the purpose of the book appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history and mythology. In the twelfth chapter the house boat disappears, leading into the sequel, Pursuit of the House-Boat.

A House-Boat on the Styx

Bangs, John Kendrick

Short Stories & Anthologies

An astonishing story of love and mystery, which equals if not surpasses in interest those other lively stories of Mrs. Rinehart's. The novel is one of the sprightliest of the season and will add to the author's reputation as an inventor of 'queer' plots. Plot bullets •A commercial ship is refitted as a Yacht, with the aft passenger accommodations, in what becomes known as The After House. •There is bad feelings between the Captain, first mate and the owner. Alcohol makes the problem worse. •Three bloody, violent murders take place one night: The Captain, a maid and a friend of the owner, are killed with an ax. •Ralph Leslie, recovering from an illness, took a place on the ship, hoping that a sea voyage would hasten his recovery. He signs on as a general helper to the owner, since he has no sea experience. •After the murders, he is placed in charge, as the only person who may have no prejudice against anyone on-board. •The two immediate suspects are the first mate and the owner. •There was murder in the After House and now it must house the women passengers. •The tempers and suspicions of the crew and passengers intensify as strange occurrences continue..

The After House

RINEHART, MARY ROBERTS

The Devil's Disciple is an 1897 play written by Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw. The play is Shaw's eighth, and after Richard Mansfield's original 1897 American production it was his first financial success, which helped to affirm his career as a playwright. It was published in Shaw's 1901 collection Three Plays for Puritans together with Captain Brassbound's Conversion and Caesar and Cleopatra. Set in Colonial America during the Revolutionary era, the play tells the story of Richard Dudgeon, a local outcast and self-proclaimed "Devil's disciple". In a twist characteristic of Shaw's love of paradox, Dudgeon sacrifices himself in a Christ-like gesture despite his professed Infernal allegiance.

The Devil's Disciple

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

Classics

Boothby was once well known for his series of novels about Doctor Nikola, an occultist anti-hero seeking immortality and world domination. The adventures of Nikola were launched with the first episode of A Bid for Fortune which was serialised in The Windsor Magazine (a rival to The Strand Magazine). Nikola is described as dressing in "faultless evening dress, slender, having dark peculiar eyes and dark hair, and white toad-coloured skin." He lives in a bungalow on the Rue de Lafayette in Shanghai. Stanley L. Wood often illustrated the Nikola stories and his portraits depict Dr Nikola in white cravat and fur coat, with his perennial companion, the black cat Apollyon (named after a dark angel) – huge, baleful, gleaming-eyed – perched on Nikola's shoulder. Nikola – cosmopolitan, cultivated, universally feared – is highly intelligent but unscrupulous. John Clute writes that " The heart of the series is devoted to the Doctor's convoluted search for a Tibetan process that will resuscitate the dead and ensure immortality in the living, and there are some hints that – unhampered by compunctions, armed with psi powers and blessed with a powerful experimental intellect – he may have reached his goal."

Dr. Nikola's Experiment

Boothby, Guy Newell

Voice of Our Ancestors

Religion & Spirituality

Sorenson, Wulf

Himmler, Heinrich

New Age & Spirituality

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