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This concise Townsend Library anthology features short stories which have been carefully edited to be more accessible to today's students. Each includes an enticing preview and a lively afterword. Acclaimed by educators nationwide, the Townsend Library is helping millions of young adults discover the pleasure and power of reading. ... Read more

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If having hallucinations is scary, then seeing them at school would be terrifying. But when the hallucinations talk back to you, that's the kind of fright you've come to expect from the world of Ghost Talker's Daydream. Come join Saiki Misaki, the albino dominatrix necromancer, as she jumps head-first into another supernatural mystery. This time around the case becomes more personal, as the power that gives Saiki the ability to see and talk to the dead is the very thing terrorizing her client.Prepare yourself for an anything-but-typical "speaks to ghosts" manga that will blow you away with beautiful and sensual art coupled with a terrifying story. Dark Horse Manga continues to deliver top-notch Japanese horror manga at its finest. From writer Saki Okuse (Twilight of the Dark Master) and artist Sankichi Meguro. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Another installment of a great series.
Ghost Talker's Daydream Vol. 3 definitely is a great continuation of the story of a woman with two raunchy jobs and a very special "gift" for attracting ghosts. Fans of this series will like the next installment.

an entertaining manga
Ghost Talker's Daydream is a good read if you like the out of the ordinary type of things like mystery/ghost stories not too scary but also not appropriate for kids of certain ages due to nudity just the usual that you see in movies T&A basically. The series is interesting there is comedy, action, and some sort of happy ending for each lil story they portray in this manga ... Read more

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Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) was a British writer, whose witty works satirizing Edwardian society and culture led him to be known as a master of the short story. Munro, better recognized by the pen name Saki, produced works that contrasted the conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the uncomplicated and sometimes cruel state of nature, a conflict which the latter usually won. This complete edition of short stories will entertain readers with its wonderfully intricate characters, rich political satire and fine narrative style. The book begins with Saki's first works, the "Reginald" stories, a small series of vignettes centered around the societal and cynical young Reginald. Also included are Saki's later and more popular story collections: "Reginald in Russia," the somewhat macabre tales of "The Chronicles of Clovis," Saki's best known "Beasts and Super-Beasts," "The Toys of Peace," and "The Square Egg." ... Read more

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Takeru Matsuyukis love of fantasy fiction turns into reality when he discovers he is a warrior reborn, locked in an epic battle between good and evil. The series moves toward its dramatic conclusion in this penultimate volume. One of the Seven Stars of the Hoku'itsu shows himself in Takeru's classroom! His goal: unleash the memories of the ancient monk Hotsuma, locked deep inside Takeru's head. The confrontation leads Takeru to climb the Tower once more, making another leap through space and time. At his final destination, he confronts the Master of the Seven Stars and learns of this mysterious figures own tragic story. ... Read more

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A Twist in the Tale (Selections: Dusk, The Necklace, An Occurance at Owl Creek, The Gift of the Magi) ... Read more

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Isse has come up with a plan to try to find the other members of the moon team. Surprisingly, his ad in a creepy cult magazine pays off, and he and Alice meet Daisuke and Sakura, who also appear in the moon dreams. From these two, the others learn the truth about a tragic past that threatens their present and future. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

PSME Vol. 2 Review
the book was in almost new condition. All it had was a mark but in great condition. i'd order something from this company again. ... Read more

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Are you ready to obtain your monetary dreams and financial security?

The fifth edition of The Credit Card Finance System unveils hidden secrets of self-financing that major credit card companies and banks don't want you to know.



Financial expert Jacob Saki will show you how to obtain investment capital, increase your profits, leverage your business contacts, and ultimately reach your financial goals.

You will learn everything you need to know about obtaining money to finance your small business.



Prepare yourself to enter into a world of inside secrets and wealth that only a privileged few know of all based around the key word of credit card money-earning potential: leverage.

The Credit Card Finance System provides countless benefits, as it jumpstarts your business and leads you in a precise way to benefit and grow your business.



Time tested and approved, Jacob Saki has developed proven ideas using credit cards to build businesses. By applying his ideas to make money, following his easy-to-apply guidance and program, you too can finally watch your wealth grow! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

FAMILY SECRETS
Takeru's mom wants him to get into prestigious Hanami High School, but that's going to take a lot of work, and all Takeru wants to do is write game scenarios and draw comics. He's also been working on a fantasy story entitled "The Force of Zero". To him, the stories he comes up with in his head are much more interesting and exciting than the real world. His mom wants him to go Hanami to learn English and become bilingual because Takeru's father is half-English. To satisfy his mom, Takeru reluctantly goes to the Hanami Open House with his best friend Daigo, where he falls for a girl he sees in the crowd. It's not long after that that Takeru's family and his perceptions of it begin to go up in flames! And who is this shrimpy little kid named Zen that keeps on stalking him?

Tower of the Future Volume 1 was a good read until it reaches its climax....halfway through the book!The author placed the scene way too early in the story, so every thing after that point is a letdown and borders on boring. Up until that point you had a lot of emotion and intensity and conflict but nothing really happens following it. Another strike against Tower is that Takeru is a jerk. An immature jerk who only thinks about himself. While this begins to change towards the end of the book, by then you've already found yourself not liking him. Volume 1 got my interest JUST enough to try one more volume. ... Read more

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Short excerpt: Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul… ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Move Over Wodehouse and Benson
I notice other reviewers here have gone into great detail about the plot and I can't do any better than they have done.This is a marvelous book.What I will say instead is that I was in supreme withdrawal mode from having finished JEEVES & WOOSTER by Wodehouse and then all of MAPP & LUCIA by Benson.These three, Wodehouse, Benson and Saki, were all English authors writing early in the twentieth century.(You can download some of their work for free in the public domain over at Project Guttenberg online.)

What sets all three authors immediately apart from anyone I've read in the last decade is that they can really write.Every word is well chosen.If these works were edited by anyone else, they were edited superbly (alas, a disappearing art in our own time).Also, all three were extremely witty and knew how to use irony as a literary device.All three also supremely understood the fine art of characterization.I can't even think of an author to compare them to who is writing today and that is not a compliment to the present day.The only other writer they remind me of is Jane Austen but more with her idiosyncratic characters than with her romantic ones (so more Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine and Mrs. Bennett instead of Darcy and Elizabeth).

Christopher Hitchens wrote a wonderful free article online about Saki over at the THE ATLANTIC.I highly recommend you go over there and read it.It will give you all the guidance you need about experiencing this wonderful author. Just put these words in the Google search engine: Saki Atlantic Christopher Hitchens.

Saki's relentless Humour

Comus Bassington and his mother aren't as rich as they seem and struggle to maintain a place in fashionable Edwardian society. Francesca tries to match her son to a suitable heiress, but Comus's irrascable self ruins her schemes.And then his friend Youghal wins the battle for the hand of Elaine de Frey...
Saki's cutting humour and satire is as savage and funny as ever as he caricatures the sensibilities of the Edwardian middle class.
As someone who has read all of Saki's short stories, it was a treat to find this-his only novel, although I found it poorly constructed as a novel and a bit of a hotch potch, starting off humourous and ending rather depressingly as a reflection on the misplaced importance of money and society and its ultimate fate.
There is also a completely mystifying chapter where Elaine meets the mysterious and worldly Keriway that is just a dead end with no relevence to the story-I had half expected him to sweep in at the last to save Elaine from her two ghastly suitors,but he fails to reappear. Also, we are overloaded with characters and caricatures that fit wonderfully into short stories but sit rather awkwardly against the plot in a novel.
Despite all the flaws, I was still delighted to read a fresh Saki work, though I would recommend it as something to read after you've read the short stories; its more of an afterwards than introduction to Saki's genius, but it still contains plenty of the humour that went on to inspire the 60's satarists of the absurd such as Peter Cook, David frost and Monty Python.

A good peek at Edwardian England
The Unbearable Bassington centers on Francesca Bassington, a woman obsessed with protecting her possessions, and her son Comus, a wise-cracking, irresponsible, and shallow young man who simultaneously charms and offends everyone with whom he comes in contact. Francesca has affection for her son, but wishes he could be remade as a responsible member of society, especially where such responsibility can lead to Francesca's continued well-being. Comus, however, manages both purposely and accidentally to thwart his mother's wishes, and in the end is sent into exile in Africa, where it is hoped he will make a career. Secondary characters abound, most notably Courtney Youghal, a mediocre but flashy politician with whom Comus has a shallow friendship, and who becomes Comus's rival for the hand of the wealthy Elaine de Frey. Francesca disapproves of Courtney, yet it is clear she wishes that her son were more like him. Ironically, although Comus's main shortcoming seems that he's an idler, he is no more so than his mother and her circle. It seems more to the point to say that Comus doesn't idle in the proper way.
Most of the book is a setup for the last few chapters, which deal with Comus's exile, and which are poignant in the best sense of the word. Essentially, Comus is doomed by his own nature, which will not allow him, as an adult, to fit into the society in which he was raised. I take strong issue with the idea, put forth by the previous reviewer, that Comus is Dorian Gray-like. The comparison is absurd. Comus is merely a puckish boy who doesn't fit, and so is sent away to be forgotten.

The book is a fairly complex study of human motivation, although it is somewhat undercut by Saki's need to clutter the text with political and cultural details that detract from its basic themes. Also present are Saki's ubiquitious bons mots which, while charming in his short stories, become tiresome as the book goes on. This carping aside, it is an insightful look at middle-class England in the waning days of the empire, just prior to the outbreak of World War I.

I think it's also something for us to read today, when perhaps our children aren't "achieving" as we think they should. That's why I reread it, and I'm glad I did.

BEARABLY SUBLIME
I turned to Saki after giving up on Ronald Firbank, and the contrast is instructive. In any Firbank, camp novelties abound (e.g., the British consul named Sir Something Somebody) yet they are unsupported by anything like a story, so in time the reader is driven away as if he were served bones without meat at a swank restaurant. Saki offers everything Firbank does not, and in his minute, satiric observance of the English upper class, he is the heir to Oscar Wilde. Saki rejects the phony moralism of "Dorian Gray" for the untroubled insouciance of Wilde's story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime." The result is "The Unbearable Bassington," a rare gem among Edwardian novels. In this teeming, perfect work, Saki not only inherits the mantle of Wilde; he trumps him decisively.

Start with a little perseverance. Chapter One of "Bassington" is tedious, unfocused, and discouraging, but get to the end of it and you are rewarded by Chapter Two, so alarmingly pungent it may be the finest quantum of prose in Saki's entire output. After that, the delights never end. A treasure-trove of epigrams twinkles in every fold of this marvelous story, a portrait of Edwardians as knowing as anything Wilde ever wrote. But we are shocked to discern real, pulsing lives behind Saki's screen of artifice. Wilde never cared about his characters as much as the language used to tell about them, whereas Saki cares about both characters and language, and delivers grandly on both.

BEARABLY SUBLIME
I turned to Saki after giving up on Ronald Firbank, and the contrast is instructive. In any Firbank, camp novelties abound (e.g., the British consul named Sir Something Somebody) yet they are unsupported by anything like a story, so in time the reader is driven away as if he were served bones without meat at a swank restaurant. Saki offers everything Firbank does not, and in his minute, satiric observance of the English upper class, he is the heir to Oscar Wilde. Saki rejects the phony moralism of "Dorian Gray" for the untroubled insouciance of Wilde's story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime." The result is "The Unbearable Bassington," a rare gem among Edwardian novels. In this teeming, perfect work, Saki not only inherits the mantle of Wilde; he trumps him decisively.

Start with a little perseverance. Chapter One of "Bassington" is tedious, unfocused, and discouraging, but get to the end of it and you are rewarded by Chapter Two, so alarmingly pungent it may be the finest quantum of prose in Saki's entire output. After that, the delights never end. A treasure-trove of epigrams twinkles in every fold of this marvelous story, a portrait of Edwardians as knowing as anything Wilde ever wrote. But we are shocked to discern real, pulsing lives behind Saki's screen of artifice. Wilde never cared about his characters as much as the language used to tell about them, whereas Saki cares about both characters and language, and delivers grandly on both. ... Read more

Product Description
In this volume, Hajime informs Jinpachi of Alice's engagement to Rin, angering Jinpachi, who thinks "Shuukaidou" has forced Alice into an engagement. When Alice confirms it, Jinpachi is goaded into confessing that he loves her, and advises her not to marry Rin out of gratitude and a sense of duty. Alice refuses to hear that Rin is Shuukaidou; for her Rin is just a boy whom she once almost killed. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Hiwatari started her career in 1982 when she was nineteen years old by sending in a manga story to the popular shôjo manga anthology, Hana to Yume. Entitled MAHOU TSUKAI WA SHITTEIRU (I Know A Magician), the story granted her access to a career as a manga artist. Following its success, Hiwatari got her big break with PLEASE SAVE MY EARTH. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One for all the freaks, total music heads, mystics, recluses and weirdos everywhere -- a great esoteric read.
I got a promo copy from the publishing company, hot off the presses --

It's a very good book. Unlike lots of rock books that go in for badly written hagiographies and pointless, silly mythologising of the records/artists, these authors write very well, with a great narrative and prose style.

If you are into garage freak rock it's a great read -- I have been a follower of underground rock for over thirty years, and there are loads of artists I have never, ever heard of here : clearly, these authors have been going through far flung cobweb covered bargain bins, dusty basement record shacks in obscure corners of our globe, collecter's meets and other such mystical Gnostic sources, to bring us their selection.

I didn't agree with all the assesement of who was, and who wasn't important in each sub genre, but over all, it's an engrossing and instructive read.

One for all the freaks, total music heads, mystics, recluses and weirdos everywhere -- a great esoteric read. ... Read more

Product Description
Brilliantly witty, frequently cruel and chilling, Saki's stories imaginatively portray encounters between the wild and the domestic. This selection of Saki's fiction combines a careful choice of his best short stories and his tragi-comic novella, The Unbearable Bassington. Offering an introduction and full notes, this is the only critical edition of Saki's work available. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Unbearable" disappointment
Saki's style is Roald Dahl by way of P.G. Wodehouse, which sounds great, but he comes up far short on both counts, in my opinion. I did end up only skimming this book because nothing was grabbing me. The pervasive animal imagery is also not my thing. In "Unbearable Bassington," I didn't get past the first couple of pages as the title character was already living up to his adjective too thoroughly. A pity, as I'd expected much, having recently come across a wonderfully glib Saki quote somewhere: "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation." (A quick Googling finds that seems to be his best line; a couple of other good ones are "He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death" and ""Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.")

I liked it alot.
It was great. My Favorite was the story titled the Interlopers? Wolves.. That was a good ending. ... Read more