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  <author id="37">
    <name>Stevenson, Robert Louis</name>
    <birth>1850</birth>
    <death>1894</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>16</books>
    <downloads>156495</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850&#8211;December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who &quot;seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins&quot;, as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="692">
    <name>Hesse, Hermann</name>
    <birth>1877</birth>
    <death>1962</death>
    <language>de</language>
    <books>3</books>
    <downloads>39908</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Hermann Hesse (2 July 1877&#8212;9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="757">
    <name>Lord Dunsany</name>
    <birth>1878</birth>
    <death>1957</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>9</books>
    <downloads>16794</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (24 July 1878 &#8211; 25 October 1957) was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, notable for his work, mostly in fantasy, published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays.
&lt;br /&gt;Born to one of the oldest titles in the Irish peerage, Dunsany lived much of his life at perhaps Ireland's longest-inhabited home, Dunsany Castle near Tara, worked with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, received an honourary doctorate from Trinity College, was chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland, and travelled and hunted extensively. He died in Dublin after an attack of appendicitis.&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="953">
    <name>Chesterton, Gilbert Keith</name>
    <birth>1874</birth>
    <death>1936</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>8</books>
    <downloads>25434</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 &#8211; 14 June 1936) was one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction.
&lt;br /&gt;Chesterton has been called the &quot;prince of paradox.&quot; Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: &quot;Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories&#8212;first carefully turning them inside out.&quot; For example, Chesterton wrote the following:
&lt;br /&gt;Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
&lt;br /&gt;Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, as political thinker, cast aspersions on both Liberalism and Conservatism, saying:
&lt;br /&gt;The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
&lt;br /&gt;Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an &quot;orthodox&quot; Christian, and came to identify such a position with Catholicism more and more, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton's &quot;friendly enemy&quot; according to Time, said of him, &quot;He was a man of colossal genius&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="23">
    <name>Burroughs, Edgar Rice</name>
    <birth>1875</birth>
    <death>1950</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>68</books>
    <downloads>218408</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 &#8211; March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan, although he also produced works in many genres.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="245">
    <name>Howard, Robert Ervin</name>
    <birth>1906</birth>
    <death>1936</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>87</books>
    <downloads>144059</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 &#8211; June 11, 1936) was a classic American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote &quot;over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion&quot; and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of &quot;a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;He is well known for having created &#8212; in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales &#8212; the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Between Conan and his other heroes Howard created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a wide swath of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy. There is no evidence that Tolkien was influenced by the earlier author, however.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A full century after his birth, Howard remains a seminal figure, with his best work endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to other American masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="933">
    <name>Bramah Smith, Ernest</name>
    <birth>1868</birth>
    <death>1942</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>4</books>
    <downloads>4353</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Ernest Bramah (20 March 1868 - 27 June 1942), whose real name was Ernest Bramah Smith, was an English author. In total Bramah published 21 books and numerous short stories and features. His humorous works were ranked with Jerome K Jerome, and W.W. Jacobs; his detective stories with Conan Doyle; his politico-science fiction with H.G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood. George Orwell acknowledged that Bramah&#8217;s book What Might Have Been influenced his Nineteen Eighty-Four. He created the characters Kai Lung and Max Carrados.
&lt;br /&gt;Bramah was a recluse who refused to allow his public even the slightest glimpse of his private life &#8211; secrecy perhaps only matched by E.W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles, and today, J.D. Salinger.&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <book id="3643">
    <dc:title>The Wallet of Kai Lung</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="933">Ernest Bramah Smith</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3643</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1438504497</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1900</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Short Fiction</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Fantasy</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Collections</dc:subject>
    <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;The Wallet of Kai Lung is a collection of fantasy stories by Ernest Bramah, all but the last of which feature Kai Lung, an itinerant story-teller of ancient China. It was first published in hardcover in London by Grant Richards in 1900, and there have been numerous editions since. Its initial tale, The Transmutation of Ling, was also issued by the same publisher as a separate chapbook in 1911. The collection's importance in the history of fantasy literature was recognized by the anthologization of two of its tales in the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, edited by Lin Carter and published by Ballantine Books; &quot;The Vision of Yin&quot; in Discoveries in Fantasy (March, 1972), and &quot;The Transmutation of Ling&quot; in Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy Volume II (March, 1973).
&lt;br /&gt;Although the collection is presented in the fashion of a novel, with each of its component stories designated chapters, there is no overall plot aside from each of the first eight tales being presented as narratives told by Kai Lung at various points in his itinerant career. The final tale is represented as being from a manuscript left by its own separate first-person narrator, Kin Yen.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50 or in the USA (published before 1923).</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3643.png</cover>
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  </book>
  <author id="284">
    <name>Stapledon, William Olaf</name>
    <birth>1886</birth>
    <death>1950</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>15</books>
    <downloads>20653</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;He was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, the only son of William Clibbert Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said. He was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA in Modern History in 1909 and a Master's degree in 1913[citation needed]. After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School, he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1913.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;During World War I he served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919. On 16 July 1919 he married Agnes Zena Miller (1894-1984), an Australian cousin whom he had first met in 1903, and who maintained a correspondence with him throughout the war from her home in Sydney. They had a daughter, Mary Sydney Stapledon (1920-), and a son, John David Stapledon (1923-). In 1920 they moved to West Kirby, and in 1925 Stapledon was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool. He wrote A Modern Theory of Ethics, which was published in 1929. However he soon turned to fiction to present his ideas to a wider public. Last and First Men was very successful and prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, and followed it up with many more books on subjects associated with what is now called Transhumanism.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1940 the family built and moved into Simon's Field, in Caldy. After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocl/aw, Poland. He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement; after a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Olaf Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium; his widow Agnes and their children Mary and John scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of Olaf's, and a location that features in more than one of his books.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="181">
    <name>Lindsay, David</name>
    <birth>1876</birth>
    <death>1945</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>1</books>
    <downloads>3035</downloads>
  </author>
  <author id="286">
    <name>Hearn, Lafcadio</name>
    <birth>1850</birth>
    <death>1904</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>2</books>
    <downloads>5429</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (June 27, 1850 - September 26, 1904), also known as Koizumi Yakumo (&#23567;&#27849;&#20843;&#38642;) after gaining Japanese citizenship, was an author, best known for his books about Japan. He is especially well-known for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Early life&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hearn was born in Lefkada (the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands. He was the son of Surgeon-major Charles Hearn (of King's County, Ireland) and Rosa Antonia Kassimati, who had been born on Kythera, another of the Ionian Islands. His father was stationed in Lefkada during the British occupation of the islands. Lafcadio was initially baptized Patricio Lefcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn in the Greek Orthodox Church.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hearn moved to Dublin, Ireland, at the age of two. Artistic and rather bohemian tastes were in his blood. His father's brother Richard was at one time a well-known member of the Barbizon set of artists, though he made no mark as a painter due to his lack of energy. Young Hearn had a rather casual education, but in 1865 was at Ushaw Roman Catholic College, Durham. He was injured in a playground accident in his teens, causing loss of vision in his left eye.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Emigration&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The religious faith in which he was brought up was, however, soon lost, and at 19 he was sent to live in the United States of America, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a time, he lived in utter poverty, which may have contributed to his later paranoia and distrust of those around him. He eventually found a friend in the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin. With Watkin's help, Hearn picked up a living in the lower grades of newspaper work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Through the strength of his talent as a writer, Hearn quickly advanced through the newspaper ranks and became a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the paper from 1872 to 1875. With creative freedom in one of Cincinnati's largest circulating newspapers, he developed a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of sensitive, dark, and fascinating accounts of Cincinnati's disadvantaged. He continued to occupy himself with journalism and with out-of-the-way observation and reading, and meanwhile his erratic, romantic, and rather morbid idiosyncrasies developed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While in Cincinnati, he married Alethea (&quot;Mattie&quot;) Foley, a black woman, an illegal act at the time. When the scandal was discovered and publicized, he was fired from the Enquirer and went to work for the rival Cincinnati Commercial.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1874 Hearn and the young Henry Farny, later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated, and published a weekly journal of art, literature, and satire they titled Ye Giglampz that ran for nine issues. The Cincinnati Public Library reprinted a facsimile of all nine issues in 1983.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;New Orleans&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he initially wrote dispatches on his discoveries in the &quot;Gateway to the Tropics&quot; for the Cincinnati Commercial. He lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the Daily City Item and later for the Times Democrat. The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city's Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Vodou. His writings for national publications, such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine, helped mold the popular image of New Orleans as a colorful place with a distinct culture more akin to Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. His best-known Louisiana works are Gombo Zh&#232;bes, Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Cr&#233;ole (1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper's Monthly in 1888. Little known then, even today he is relatively unknown in New Orleans culture. However, more books have been written about him than any other former resident of New Orleans other than Louis Armstrong. His footprint in the history of Creole cooking is visible even today.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Harper's sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent in 1889. He spent two years in the islands and produced Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave (both 1890).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Later life in Japan&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1890, Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly broken off. It was in Japan, however, that he found his home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position in the summer of 1890 at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan. Most Japanese identify Hearn with Matsue, as it was here that his image of Japan was molded. Today, The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum (&#23567;&#27849;&#20843;&#38642;&#35352;&#24565;&#39208;) and Lafcadio Hearn's Old Residence (&#23567;&#27849;&#20843;&#38642;&#26087;&#23621;) are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist attractions. During his 15-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In late 1891, Hearn took another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October 1894 he secured a journalism position with the English-language Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial) University, a post he held until 1903. On September 26, 1904, he died of heart failure at the age of 54.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the late 19th century Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to the Western world. With the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, however, particularly at the Paris World's Fair in 1900, the West had an insatiable appetite for exotic Japan, and Hearn became known to the world through the depth, originality, sincerity, and charm of his writings. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing Japan, but as the man who offered the West some of its first glimpses into pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work still offers valuable insight today.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Legacy&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi adapted four Hearn tales into his 1965 film, Kwaidan.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Several Hearn stories have been adapted by Ping Chong into his trademark puppet theatre, including the 1999 Kwaidan and the 2002 OBON: Tales of Moonlight and Rain.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hearn's life and works were celebrated in The Dream of a Summer Day, a play that toured Ireland in April and May 2005, which was staged by the Storytellers Theatre Company and directed by Liam Halligan. It is a detailed dramatization of Hearn's life, with four of his ghost stories woven in.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Yone Noguchi is quoted as saying about Hearn, &quot;His Greek temperament and French culture became frost-bitten as a flower in the North.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is also a cultural center named for Hearn at the University of Durham.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hearn was a major translator of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Ian Fleming's You only Live Twice, James Bond retorts to his nemesis Blofeld's comment of &quot;Have you ever heard the Japanese expression kirisute gomen?&quot; with &quot;Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;[From Wikipedia.]&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="374">
    <name>Hodgson, William Hope</name>
    <birth>1877</birth>
    <death>1918</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>5</books>
    <downloads>7820</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;William Hope Hodgson (November 15, 1877 &#8211; April 1918) was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved some renown as a bodybuilder. He died in World War I at the age of 40.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hodgson was born in Blackmore End, Essex, the son of Samuel Hodgson, an Anglican priest, and Lissie Sarah Brown. He was the second of twelve children, three of whom died in infancy. The death of a child is a theme in several of Hodgson's works including the short stories &quot;The Valley of Lost Children&quot;, &quot;The Sea-Horses&quot;, and &quot;The Searcher of the End House&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hodgson's father was moved frequently, and served 11 different parishes in 21 years, including one in County Galway, Ireland. This setting was later featured in Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hodgson ran away from his boarding school at the age of thirteen in an effort to become a sailor. He was caught and returned to his family, but eventually received his father's permission to be apprenticed as a cabin boy and began a four-year apprenticeship in 1891. Hodgson's father died shortly thereafter, of throat cancer, leaving the family impoverished; while William was away, the family subsisted largely on charity. After his apprenticeship ended in 1895, Hodgson began two years of study in Liverpool, and was then able to pass the tests and receive his mate's certificate; he then began several more years as a sailor.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At sea, Hodgson experienced bullying. This led him to begin a program of personal training. According to Sam Moskowitz,&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;    The primary motivation of his body development was not health, but self-defence. His relatively short height and sensitive, almost beautiful face made him an irresistible target for bullying seamen. When they moved in to pulverize him, they would learn too late that they had come to grips with easily one of the most powerful men, pound for pound, in all England.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The theme of bullying of an apprentice by older seamen, and revenge taken, appeared frequently in his sea stories.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While away at sea, in addition to his exercises with weights and with a punching bag, Hodgson also practiced his photography, taking photographs of cyclones, lightning, sharks, aurora borealis, and the maggots that infested the food given to sailors. He also built up a stamp collection, practiced his marksmanship while hunting, and kept journals of his experiences at sea. In 1898 he was awarded the Royal Humane Society medal for heroism for saving another sailor who had fallen overboard in shark-infested waters.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1899, at the age of 22, he opened W. H. Hodgson's School of Physical Culture, in Blackburn, England, offering tailored exercise regimes for personal training. Among his customers were members of the Blackburn police force. In 1902, Hodgson himself appeared on stage with handcuffs and other restraining devices supplied by the Blackburn police department and applied the restraints to Harry Houdini, who had previously escaped from the Blackburn city jail. His behavior towards Houdini generated controversy; the escape artist had some difficulty removing his restraints, complaining that Hodgson had deliberately injured him and jammed the locks of his handcuffs.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hodgson was not shy of publicity, and in another notable stunt, rode a bicycle down a street so steep that it had stairs, an event written up in the local paper. Despite his reputation, he eventually found that he could not earn a living running his personal training business, which was seasonal in nature, and shut it down. He began instead writing articles such as &quot;Physical Culture versus Recreative Exercises&quot; (published in 1903). One of these articles, &quot;Health from Scientific Exercise,&quot; featured photographs of Hodgson himself demonstrating his exercises. The market for such articles seemed to be limited, however, so inspired by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Hodgson turned his attention to fiction, publishing his first short story, &quot;The Goddess of Death&quot;, in 1904, followed shortly by &quot;A Tropical Horror&quot; He also contributed to an article in The Grand Magazine, taking the &quot;No&quot; side in a debate on the topic &quot;Is the Mercantile Navy Worth Joining?&quot; In this piece, Hodgson laid out in detail his negative experiences at sea, including facts and figures about salaries. This led to a second article in The Nautical Magazine, an expos&#233; on the subject of apprenticeships; at the time, families often were forced to pay to have boys accepted as apprentices. Hodgson began to give paid lectures, illustrated with his photography in the form of colorized slides, about his experiences at sea.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Although he wrote a number of poems, only a handful were published during his lifetime; several, such as &quot;Madre Mia,&quot; appeared as dedications to his novels. Apparently cynical about the prospects of publishing his poetry, in 1906 he published an article in The Author magazine, suggesting that poets could earn money by writing inscriptions for tombstones. Many of his poems were published by his widow in two posthumous collections, but some 48 poems were not published until their appearance in the 2005 collection The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While his poetry did not see print, in 1906 the American magazine The Monthly Story Magazine published &quot;From the Tideless Sea&quot;&quot;, the first of Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories. Hodgson continued to sell stories to American magazines as well as British magazines for the remainder of his career, carefully managing the rights to his work in order to maximize his remuneration. Still living with his mother in relative poverty, his first published novel, The Boats of the &quot;Glen Carrig&quot;, appeared in 1907, to positive reviews. Hodgson also published '&quot;The Voice in the Night&quot; the same year, as well as &quot;Through the Vortex of a Cyclone&quot;, a realistic story inspired by Hodgson's experiences at sea and illustrated with tinted slides made from his own photographs. Hodgson also explored the subject of ships and cyclones in his story &quot;The Shamraken Homeward-Bounder&quot;, published in 1908. Also in 1908, Hodgson published an unusual satirical science fiction story &quot;Date 1965: Modern Warfare&quot;, a Swiftian satire in which it is suggested that war should be carried out by men fighting in pens with knives, and the corpses carefully salvaged for food, although in letters to the editor published at the time, he expressed strong patriotic sentiments.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;He published his second novel, The House on the Borderland in 1909, again to positive reviews; he also published &quot;Out of the Storm&quot;, a short horror story about &quot;the death-side of the sea,&quot; in which the protagonist drowning in a storm rants about the horrors of a storm at sea. According to Moskowitz,&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;    This story proved an emotional testament beyond all other evidence. Hodgson, whose literary success would be in a large measure based on the impressions he received at sea, actually hated and feared the waters with an intensity that was the passion of his life.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Also in 1909, Hodgson published another novel, The Ghost Pirates. In the foreword, he wrote&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;    ...completes what, perhaps, may be termed a trilogy; for, though very different in scope, each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship. This book, the author believes that he closes the door, so far as he is concerned, on a particular phase of constructive thought.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Bookman magazine in their review of the novel in 1909 included the comment&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;    We can only hope that Mr. Hodgson may be induced to reconsider his decision, for we know of nothing like the author's previous work in the whole of present-day literature.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Despite the critical success of his novels, Hodgson remained relatively poor. To try to bolster his income from short story sales, he began working on the first of his recurring characters: the Carnacki character, featured in several of his most famous stories. The first of these, &quot;The Gateway of the Monster&quot;, was published in 1910 in The Idler. In 1910 Hodgson also published &quot;The Captain of the Onion Boat&quot;, an unusual story that combines a nautical tale and a romance. He continued to publish many stories and non-fiction pieces, occasionally resorting to the use of recycled plot elements and situations, sometimes to the annoyance of his publishers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;His last novel to see publication, The Night Land, was published in 1912, although it likely had its genesis a number of years earlier. Hodgson also worked on a 10,000 word novelette version of the novel, now known as The Dream of X. He continued to branch out into related genres, publishing &quot;Judge Barclay's Wife&quot;, a western adventure, in the United States, as well as several non-supernatural mystery stories and the science fiction story &quot;&quot;The Derelict&quot;, and even war stories (several of the Captain Gault tales feature wartime themes).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In 1912, Hodgson married Betty Farnworth, known also as Bessie, a staff member for the women's magazine Home Notes. After a honeymoon in the south of France, they took up residence there, due in part to the low cost of living. Hodgson began a work entitled &quot;Captain Dang (An account of certain peculiar and somewhat memorable adventures)&quot; and continued to publish stories in multiple genres, although financial security continued to elude him.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Hodgson returned with his wife to England. He joined the University of London's Officer's Training Corps. Refusing to have anything to do with the sea despite his experience and Third Mate's certificate, he received a commission as a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. In 1916 he was thrown from a horse and suffered a broken jaw and a head injury; he received a mandatory discharged, and returned to writing. Refusing to remain on the sidelines, Hodgson recovered sufficiently to re-enlist. His published articles and stories from the time reflect his experience in war. He was killed by an artillery shell at Ypres in April of 1918; sources suggest either the 17th or 19th. He was eulogized in The Times on May 2, 1918.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <author id="1023">
    <name>Dick, Philip K.</name>
    <birth>1928</birth>
    <death>1982</death>
    <language>en</language>
    <books>6</books>
    <downloads>29161</downloads>
    <biography>&lt;p&gt;Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 &#8211; March 2, 1982) was an American science fiction novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in mysticism and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia, and mystical experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.
&lt;br /&gt;The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. &quot;I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,&quot; Dick wrote of these stories. &quot;In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.&quot;
&lt;br /&gt;In addition to thirty-six novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, many of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. In 2005, Time Magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.&lt;/p&gt;</biography>
  </author>
  <book id="2425">
    <dc:title>The Boats of the 'Glen-Carrig'</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="374">William Hope Hodgson</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2425</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1907</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Novels</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Horror</dc:subject>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA.</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2425.png</cover>
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  </book>
  <book id="2427">
    <dc:title>The Ghost Pirates</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="374">William Hope Hodgson</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2427</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1604245352</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1909</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Novels</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Horror</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Ghost Stories</dc:subject>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA.</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2427.png</cover>
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  </book>
  <book id="2426">
    <dc:title>Carnacki, The Ghost Finder</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="374">William Hope Hodgson</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2426</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1605970921</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1912</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Novels</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Crime/Mystery</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Horror</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Ghost Stories</dc:subject>
    <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;Detective stories in which the great Thomas Carnacki investigates the supernatural using scientific tools, such as photography, and tools that are augmented by theories of the supernatural, such as the electric pentacle, which uses vacuum tubes to repel supernatural forces.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA.</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2426.png</cover>
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      <pdf>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2426.pdf</pdf>
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  </book>
  <book id="2418">
    <dc:title>The House on the Borderland</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="374">William Hope Hodgson</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2418</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1605971669</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1907</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Novels</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Science Fiction</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Horror</dc:subject>
    <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;Hodgson wrote a trilogy consisting of Date 1965 Modern Warfare, The House on the Borderland, and The Ghost Pirates. The setting for The House on the Borderland is an ancient house in a lonely part of Ireland, where an old man lives alone with his sister and his pets. His diary is found and it tells the story of a huge cavern below the house filled with white pig like monsters. The old man has had to flight these creatures. He then sees his house in an alternate space-time plain that is isolated from the rest of his world. This haunting tale conveys intense isolations and loneliness.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA.</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2418.png</cover>
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  </book>
  <book id="2417">
    <dc:title>The Night Land</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="374">William Hope Hodgson</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2417</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1605971685</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1912</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Novels</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Science Fiction</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Horror</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Fantasy</dc:subject>
    <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;The Sun has gone out: the Earth is lit only by the glow of residual vulcanism. The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in a gigantic metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark. These are held back by a Circle of energy, known as the &quot;air clog,&quot; powered from the Earth's internal energy. For millennia, vast living shapes - the Watchers - have waited in the darkness near the pyramid: it is thought they are waiting for the inevitable time when the Circle's power finally weakens and dies. Other living things have been seen in the darkness beyond, some of unknown origins, and others that may once have been human.
&lt;br /&gt;To leave the protection of the Circle means almost certain death, or worse, but as the story commences, the narrator establishes mind contact with an inhabitant of another, forgotten, Redoubt, and sets off into the darkness to find her.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
    <dc:rights>This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 and in the USA.</dc:rights>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2417.png</cover>
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      <pdf>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2417.pdf</pdf>
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  </book>
  <book id="2057">
    <dc:title>Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Vol 2</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="286">Lafcadio Hearn</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2057</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:160206489X</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1894</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Non-Fiction</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>History</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Essay</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Travel</dc:subject>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2057.png</cover>
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  </book>
  <book id="2056">
    <dc:title>Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Vol 1</dc:title>
    <dc:author id="286">Lafcadio Hearn</dc:author>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2056</dc:identifier>
    <dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:isbn:1596056835</dc:identifier>
    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
    <dc:date>1871</dc:date>
    <dc:subject>Non-Fiction</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>History</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Essay</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Travel</dc:subject>
    <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;A Japanese magic-lantern show is essentially dramatic. It is a play of which the dialogue is uttered by invisible personages, the actors and the scenery being only luminous shadows. Wherefore it is peculiarly well suited to goblinries and weirdnessess of all kinds; and plays in which ghosts figure are the favourite subject. -from &quot;Of Ghosts and Goblins&quot;
&lt;br /&gt;In 1889, Westerner Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a journalistic assignment, and he fell so in love with the nation and its people that he never left. In 1894, just as Japan was truly opening to the West and global interest in Japanese culture was burgeoning, Hearn published this delightful series of essays glorifying what he called the &quot;rare charm of Japanese life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Beautifully written and a joy to read, Hearn's love letters to the land of the rising sun enchant with their sweetly lyrical descriptions of winter street fairs, puppet theaters, religious statuaries, even the Japanese smile and its particular allure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A wonderful journal of immersion on a foreign land, this will bewitch Japanophiles and travelers to the East.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
    <cover>http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2056.png</cover>
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