Mothering on Perilous
Cecelia Loring is alone in the world after the death of her mother and has come to the Kentucky mountains in search of work. Although very depressed from her loss she soon becomes caretaker of the garden at a school and not many days later finds herself quite busy as housemother to a group of energetic boys that keep running away from the school because of homesickness, especially Nucky, who seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders, worrying about not being at home to help his brother Blant "keep lookout" for the Cheevers, who have been at war with the Marrses for years over a piece of land. Can she find a way to make the boys feel at home so they will stay and get an educat...
Bertram Cope's Year
This novel was perhaps the most daring and affirmative LGBT literature of the first two decades of the 20th century in America. In this story, Bertram Cope is a young college instructor, about twenty-four years old ("certainly not a day over twenty-five"), who is pursued by men and women, both younger and older than himself. In writing this novel, Fuller had to carefuly craft his plot schemes so as not to offend the sensibilities of publishers. As a result, today's reader is left somewhat, but not entirely, confused about the precise feelings that characters develop for one another by the end of the book. Nevertheless, no publishing house would touch it, which ultimately required that Ful...
One Hundred Verses from Old Japan

In 12th-13th century Japan there lived a man named Fujiwara no Teika (sometimes called Sadaie), a well-regarded poet in a society that prized poetry. At one point in his life he compiled the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (often known simply as the Hyakunin Isshu), which means “A Hundred Poems by A Hundred Poets” (literally “A hundred people, one poem [each]“).

This collection of a hundred poems is known to almost all Japanese, and over the years it has been translated by many different people. One of the early translators of the collection was William Porter. His translation, first published in 1909, was titled “A Hundred Verses from Old Japan”.

Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Hyakunin isshu (百人一首) is a traditional style of compiling Japanese waka poetry where each contributor writes one poem for the anthology.

The Esperanto Teacher

The international language Esperanto was first released to the world in 1887, when L. L. Zamenhof published his first book, “Dr. Esperanto’s International Language”. Since that time, many learning books have been developed to help the beginner attain a proficiency in the language. Helen Fryer’s “Esperanto Teacher” is one of the earliest of these attempts in English. Divided into 45 short and easy lessons and supplemented with sections on joining words, exclamations, compound words, arrangement of words in a sentence, words used with the object, the 16 rules of grammar and list of common useful expressions, as well as a number of translated texts for the new Esperantist to practice his/...

In Kent with Charles Dickens

By his own admission, Thomas Frost found it hard to make a living from his writing, and no doubt he used the name of Dickens in the title of this book to boost sales. Frost tells a good tale, and the book is not only of interest to enthusiasts of Dickens and the county of Kent.

He includes some of Dickens’ own descriptions of locations, as well as regaling us with anecdotes about towns and villages which he visits, including an account of the last armed rising on British soil – the Battle of Bossenden Wood.

As well as accounts of his travels through the highways and byways of Kent in the footsteps of Dickens and his characters, he also wanders into the lanes of myth a...

Selected Poems

Good fences make good neighbors...” If, as a reader, this is one line you do remember, then the poet Robert Frost would have fulfilled his purpose. The highest goal of a poet, he claimed, was to “lodge a few poems where they would be hard to get rid of...

Unforgettable lines and indelible memories are connected with our encounters with America's best-loved and most popular poet. His wonderful pictures of rural life and the deeply philosophical insights they offer remain with us long after many others have faded.

Selected Poems by Robert Frost is a collection of eight poems, long and short, which provide a glimpse of his magnificent body of wo...

North of Boston

One of the first collections of poetry by Robert Frost, published in 1914.

  • The Fear (00:00:16)
  • The Self-seeker (00:05:27)
  • The Wood-pile (00:16:35)
  • Good Hours (00:18:47)
  • Fire and Ice

    Written by one of the most significant American poets, Fire and Ice proficiently tackles the continuous query about how the world will cease to exist, whether it will go up in flames, or succumb to the cruelty of ice. First published in Harper’s Magazine in 1920 and later included in his acclaimed anthology New Hampshire, Frost effectively employs the use of simple, yet evocative language that assigns each syllable a significant purpose in the poem, while simultaneously concentrating on a perplexing topic.

    Comprised of only nine lines, the lyrical poem introduces a narrator who presents the divided opinions on how the world will end, whilst also expressin...

    A Boy's Will
    Robert Frost preferred to describe the New England countryside using everyday language. He used both as tools to explore world views and life philosophies. A Boy's Will was his first poetry anthology.