Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

Dark Kensington had been dead for twenty-five years. It was a fact; everyone knew it. Then suddenly he reappeared, youthful, brilliant, ready to take over the Phoenix, the rebel group that worked to overthrow the tyranny that gripped the settlers on Mars.

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Adela Carthcart Volumes Ones and Two by George MacDonald

Adela Cathcart comes into contact with storytellers, and this is the result: a lexicon of stories that span two volumes. 

Wanderer of the Wasteland by Zane Grey
Zane Grey’s take on Homer’s Odyssey turns up in Wanderer of the Wasteland, the story of a boy named Adam who flees his past and a terrible crime. Adam seeks refuge in the desert, where life is unrelentingly hard and every day brings a battle against the alkali sands, scorching heat, lonely nights, no-account highway men, and tempting yet treacherous women. It’s a coming-of-age tale and a landscape painting and an adventure story, as well as a romance novel and an existentialist inquiry into the nature of man’s solitude and unhappiness. And GOLD! Lots of GOLD!

Nobody writes landscape better than Zane Grey. That makes sense given how much time and money he spent in the desert. The man knows the colors, the mountains, the various textures of sand, the cacti that sting, the flowers that bloom, the horny toads and eagles and condors and sheep. He paints word pictures, most of which translate successfully onto the page. He populates his desert with memorable characters, like Dismukes, a gold miner who toils in the canyons and furnace winds of the desert his whole life, working to save a half million dollars in gold dust, only to find that he is miserable anywhere else but the desert. His story is a tragedy, a cautionary fable about the hazards of too much work and not enough play. Or there is Jinny, a headstrong burro that Grey uses for comic relief. One amusing scene features Jinny getting into Adam’s dough, whereupon a chase ensues, wrecking the campsite, the man cursing the burro’s name as she gallops just out of reach, contentedly chewing his supper.

Adam himself makes a pretty good everyman, though he sometimes vacillates between emotional extremes in ways more befitting a romance novel than a western. He is no gunslinger. He’s a boy on a quest to discover why the desert holds such fascination for men. What’s eerie about Adam is how, in his headlong rush to punish himself over the crime that sent him into the desert to begin with, he denies himself the usual earthly pleasures and attachments. He turns down money. He turns away from women. Whenever he lands in a settlement of any kind, he soon enough turns nomad. Adam is almost a Buddhist in his ability to float above his appetites. I suspect that, sooner or later, every reader will lose patience with Adam’s hand-wringing, or stop believing in his purity.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.

Edith Wharton's books are HERE.

The Floating Outfit 15: McGraw's Inheritance by J.T. Edson

Series: The Floating Outfit

                             They were trying to cheat young Sandy McGraw. If it hadn’t been for his friends they might have succeeded in depriving him of the ranch he had inherited. But Sandy’s friends were the right people to have on your side. One was Red Blaze, who always managed to find more than his fair share of any fights in his vicinity. Another was Betty Hardin, granddaughter of Ole Devil Hardin and an expert at ju-jitsu and karate. And the third was none other than the man with the fastest draw in the west, Dusty Fog.
Even so, the three found themselves in trouble over … McGraw’s Inheritance!

Available ebook formats: epub mobi

Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton

The story centers on the relationship between thirty-four year old columnist Lee Clavering, and Mary Zattiany, a 58 year old woman who, through modern science, has regained her youth (although this is unknown at the beginning, but is fairly easily guessed). The story takes place within New York’s high society and there is much criticism of both the older and younger generations in the 1920s. The older generation is argued to be unreasonably caught up in convention while the younger generation is shown as being too eager to flout their straying from those same conventions.

The title Black Oxen comes from the play The Countess Cathleen by William Butler Yeats.

The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God the herdsman goads them on behind
And I am broken by their passing feet.

This is where things get odd and fascinating. Yeats and Atherton both received what was known as the Steinach treatment, which was supposed to do exactly what the operation in Black Oxen did: restore youth, not just in terms of physical appearance, but mental ability. Whether or not there was any validity to the procedure, Yeats and Atherton both believed that the procedure worked. In the case of Atherton (and her heroine), the procedure involved light x-ray irradiation of the ovaries. This was supposed to cause the production of hormones that stopped being produced after menopause, and therefore undo some of the aging process. Although Atherton did not publicly admit to having the treatment, that she did have it was an open secret. 

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Lifted Masks by Susan Glaspell

Lifted Masks is the only collection of short stories brought together by Susan Glaspell, a notable feminist playwright and one of the vital figures in the development of American letters in this century. This collection proved pivotal to Glaspell's development as a writer.
Focusing on detail and evocation of place and manner, the stories in Lifted Masks draw attention to Glaspell's midwestern roots and demonstrate her early development as a social critic. They reflect attitudes about human relationships prevalent in the early twentieth century—attitudes not yet influenced by the roars of the "sophisticated" twenties. Glaspell's representation of the relationship between power and responsibility and her portrayal of the victim and the marginalized underdog offer us dynamic, polyphonic views of class in a growing nation. Her assertion of the triumph of the individual over the pressures of urban expanse and corrupt government still seemed possible in a nation in the midst of finding its identity. While the emerging image of the individual as conqueror might seem naive, it is in itself informative and thought provoking, offering needed perspective in our jaded age.

Praise / Awards

• ". . . finely human pictures of human people, full of . . . tenderness and . . . laughter."
  —New York Times
• "Originally published in 1912, Lifted Masks is a polished example of the socially conscious fiction that was popular before cynicism invaded the 1920s. Glaspell's stories reflect the hopeful attitude toward human nature that prevailed in the midwest of her youth. Glaspell also convincingly depicts the widening social and economic disparities of the time, the urbanization, an the abuse of power that provoked the acts of courage and integrity that she celebrates. This republication, after 80 years, should spark renewed interest in the works of this eloquent but neglected writer."
  —Belles Lettres

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