Showing results by author "Frank Stockton" in All Categories

An exceptional collection of strange and uncanny tales which cast various slants on that most grisly of events, the execution.

When a passing magician tells the old Bee-Man of Orn that he has at some time been transformed from another state, he sets off to discover his own origins. Was he formerly a nobleman? A dragon? A giant? After much searching and many adventures, where his faithful bees help him, he finally discovers the truth. And it is not what either he or the magician expected....

"The Lady or the Tiger?" is the story of a king who devised a particularly inventive form of punishment. When a courtier dares to fall in love with the king's daughter, he is forced to choose between two doors: one with a lady behind it, and the other with a tiger.

In the ancient country of Orn an old man called the Bee-man spends his life in the company of bees. He lives humbly and contentedly until a Junior Sorcerer happens by with some disturbing news: The Bee-man, he says, has been transformed - he once was someone (or something) entirely different. But who? Or what? A giant or a prince? A dog or a dragon? The now restless Bee-man sets out on a quest to ascertain his original form, telling himself, "When I see it, I shall be drawn toward it."

The stories in this imaginative collection include: "The Queen's Museum", "The Christmas Truants", "The Griffin and the Minor Canon", "Old Pipes and the Dryad", "The Bee-Man of Orn", "The Clocks of Rondaine", "Christmas Before Last", "Prince Hassak's March", "The Philopena" and "The Accommodating Circumstance".

A double adventure written at the end of the 19th century, somewhat in the theme of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, telling of a submarine trip in the year 1947 to reach the North Pole and a project to examine the center of the Earth by boring a deep shaft. What they find at the core of the planet surprises the enterprising explorers.

Explore one of literature’s most enduring short stories in The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton. Set in a semi-barbaric kingdom, this suspenseful tale follows a young man forced to choose between two doors—one hiding a beautiful maiden, the other a deadly tiger.

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of the American male author whose time has now come again.

In this series we explore the many facets of love through literary talents that span both time and country. There are times when love is not a revelation and a calling from one soul to another but a carefully navigated path, or maybe a badly chosen path that decimates happiness. Which way will our literary leviathans take us? Inevitably it will be more than one.

There is something about the number 3. The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two. Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and literary avenues that classic authors were so adept at creating.

The Modern Age is one of information overload. Bombarded, surrounded, and battered by facts, figures, opinions and seemingly whatever else comes out of anyone’s head from all directions at all hours of the day and night. It’s exhausting. In the pens of such luminaries as Henry James, E M Delafield, C E Montague, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others we connect with old fashioned media from publishing and advertising to telegrams and radio and everything in between in ways that are surprising, enlightening but always entertaining.

In this volume our authors, including Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Winifred Holtby, Bernard Capes and many others bring forth creations and contraptions that are both amazing and abstract as well as diabolical and delightful.

Being an English author in a new and different culture seems to work its magic when these two are placed together in the same spot with a rich vocabulary; ideas seem more fully formed and characters have another edge to their existence. For the outsider looking in, more can be revealed and shared with ourselves.

This charming, funny and clever Christmas Holiday fantasy is narrated by Oscar nominated and Emmy Award Winning Special Makeup Effects Artist Edward E. French. Author Frank Richard Stockton, born April 5, 1834, was an American writer and humorist, best Remembered for his most famous fable, "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (1882), about a man sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with a king's beloved daughter.