"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe's stories which are aided by the supernatural. The traditional elements established in popular horror tales at the time are followed, but critical reception has been mixed. The tale has been adapted to film several times.
Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and interior designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth and the novella Ethan Frome.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the end of the 19th century. Wharton creates a portrait of a stunning beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her youthful blush is drawing to a close and her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."
The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. The story is set in the 1870s, around the time Wharton was a young girl. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937 and published in that form in 1938. Wharton's manuscript ends with Lizzy inviting Nan to a house party, to which Guy Thwaite has also been invited. The book was published in 1938 by Penguin Books in New York. After some time, Marion Mainwaring finished the novel, following Wharton's detailed outline, in 1993.
"The Exiles" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It was originally published as "The Mad Wizards of Mars" in Maclean's on September 15, 1949 and was reprinted, in revised form, the following year by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. First collected in The Illustrated Man (1951), it was later included in the collections R Is for Rocket (1962), Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003), A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005) and A Pleasure to Burn.
The Mount (1902) is a country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, the home of noted American author Edith Wharton, who designed the house and its grounds and considered it her "first real home." The estate, located in The Berkshires, is open to the public. The property was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
"Roman Fever" is a short story by American writer Edith Wharton. It was first published in Liberty magazine on November 10, 1934. A revised and expanded version of the story was published in Wharton's 1936 short story collection The World Over.
"The Spectacles" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1844. It is one of Poe's comedy tales.
The Penn State University Press, also known as The Pennsylvania State University Press, was established in 1956 and is a non-profit publisher of scholarly books and journals. It is the independent publishing branch of the Pennsylvania State University and is a division of the Penn State University Library system. Penn State University Press publishes books and journals of interest to scholars and general audiences. As a part of a land-grant university with a mandate to serve the citizens of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it also specializes in works about Penn State University, Pennsylvania, and the mid-Atlantic region. The areas of scholarship the Press is best known for are art history, medieval studies, Latin American studies, rhetoric and communication, religious studies, and Graphic Medicine. In 2016 the Press launched PSU Press Unlocked, an open access platform featuring over 70 books and journals. The Press acquired academic publisher Eisenbrauns, which specializes in ancient Near East and biblical studies, in November 2017. Eisenbrauns continues to publish as an imprint of the Press.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Moving Finger is a 1942 book by Agatha Christie.
The Greater Inclination was the earliest collection of short fiction by Edith Wharton. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons on 25 March 1899, the first printing of 1,250 sold out by June 1899. The collection consisted of eight works: seven short stories, and one short play in two acts.
To celebrate its 60th anniversary circa 1995, Penguin Books released several boxed sets of "Penguin 60s", miniature books about sixty pages in length. The books were also sold individually.
"The Iron Shroud" or less commonly known as the "Italian Revenge" is a short story of Gothic fiction written by William Mudford in 1830 and published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and also as a twenty four page chapbook. It is a classic predicament story about a noble Italian hero who is confined in a continuously and imperceptibly contracting iron torture chamber. In the story, the chamber walls and ceiling are slowly contracting, day by day, through mechanical means, to the point of eventually crushing and enveloping the victim, thus metaphorically becoming his iron shroud. The story is considered to have provided Edgar Allan Poe with the idea of the shrinking cell in his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" and it is viewed as Mudford's most famous tale.
Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort is a literary compilation composed, in part, from magazine articles by the American writer Edith Wharton on her time in France during the First World War, including her visits to the French sectors of the Western Front. "Four of the articles originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine" in 1915. "In Alsace" appeared the same year in The Saturday Evening Post. The book's final chapter had not been previously published. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort was published in 1915 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Rosalie Parker is an author, scriptwriter and editor who runs the Tartarus Press with R. B. Russell.
A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Ray Bradbury, first published August 17, 2010. A companion to novel Fahrenheit 451, it was later released under the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins publishing was in 2011.
La Grande Bretèche is a short story by Honoré de Balzac published in 1831. It is one of the Scènes de la vie privée of La Comédie humaine.
Bunner Sisters is a novella published by Edith Wharton.
Crucial Instances public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
