The Story Of The Inexperienced Ghost (aka The Inexperienced Ghost) is, on its face, merely a humourous ghost story. But I get the sense that there’s quite a bit of satire going on in it. It may be doing to the straight-up ghost story (in a far more lighthearted way) what The Red Room does to the Gothic Horror story.

Product Description: Mr Polly is an ordinary middle-aged man who is tired of his wife’s nagging and his dreary job as the owner of a regional gentleman’s outfitters. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, he concludes that the only way to escape his frustrating existence is by burning his shop to the ground, and killing himself...read more

Product Description: Star Begotten is a 1937 novel by H. G. Wells. It tells the story of a series of men who conjecture upon the possibility of the human race being altered by Martians to replace their own dying planet. The protagonist of the story Joseph Davis, who is an author of popular histories, becomes overtaken with suspicion that he and his family have already been exposed and are starting to change...read more

Product Description: THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces...read more

Edward Prendick is shipwrecked in the Pacific. Rescued by Doctor Moreau's assistant he is taken to the doctor's island home where he discovers the doctor has been experimenting on the animal inhabitants of the island, creating bizarre proto-humans...

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The world mends. In my younger days people believed in mahogany; some of my readers will remember it—a heavy, shining substance, having a singularly close resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move, and esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods. Such of us as were very poor and had no mahogany pretended to have mahogany; and the proper hepatite tint was got by veneering. That makes one incline to think it was the colour that pleased people. In those days there was a word "trashy," now almost lost to the world. My dear Aunt Charlotte used that epithet when, in her feminine way, she swore at people she did not like. "Trashy" and "paltry" and "Brummagem" was the very worst she could say of them. And she had, I remember, an intense aversion to plated goods and bronze halfpence. The halfpence of her youth had been vast and corpulent red-brown discs, which it was folly to speak of as small change. They were fine handsome coins, and almost as inconvenient as crown-pieces. I remember she corrected me once when I was very young. "Don't call a penny a copper, dear," she said; "copper is a metal. The pennies they have nowadays are bronze." It is odd how our childish impressions cling to us. I still regard bronze as a kind of upstart intruder, a mere trashy pretender among metals.[Pg 8]

Product Description: The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham is a short story by H. G. Wells. The narrator a young man called Edward Eden meets a strange old gentleman who says he wants him to be his heir, this strange meeting produces stranger results.....

Product Description: The Purple Pileus is a short story by H. G. Wells.The story tells of its curious effect on Mr. Coombes, an unassuming, inoffensive little man in the grocery line, and upon his wife, his wife's friends, his business, and his whole manner of life.

Mr. Ledbetters Vacation is a short story by Herbert Wells. Sometimes one can find his biggest trouble while trying to escape them all, at least for a while, like while taking a vacation. And Mr. Ledbetter’s story is right about that. What adventure had he found instead of rest? Read and find out!

Product Description: The narrator of the story hears about a shopkeeper, Mr. Skelmersdale, who everyone seems to believe has actually been to fairyland. Eventually, the narrator gains Skelmersdale’s trust and hears the story. After an argument with his girl, Skelmersdale wandered out to Aldington Knoll and fell asleep...read more

Product Description: Jimmy Goggles the God is a short story by Herbert Wells. It tells the story of Jimmy, a mortal man driven by desire to see the God Almighty himself. Many have tried to do so before him, but with no result. Will Jimmy be the one to succeed? Read and find out!

Product Description: Before the war and even during the war, Wells was something of an optimist. He was able to believe that folly would ultimately be conquered and that cruelty would be one day trampled under foot. The Peace of Versailles and the consequences of the Peace left him with vastly diminished faith...read more

Product Description: A story about a mountain climber who discovers a civilization where everyone is blind and who have developed unique ways of using their other senses. They notice that their new arrival is very different from them and insist that he surgically remove his eyes if he wants to stay in their community...read more

"Cavendish Academy," the school that had won the limited choice of Kipps' vanished mother, was established in a battered private house in the part of Hastings remotest from the sea; it was called an Academy for Young Gentlemen, and many of the young gentlemen had parents in "India," and other unverifiable places. Others were the sons of credulous widows, anxious, as Kipps' mother had been, to get something a little "superior" to a board school education as cheaply as possible; and others again were sent to demonstrate the dignity of their parents and guardians. And of course there were boys from France. Its "principal" was a lean, long creature of indifferent digestion and temper, who proclaimed himself on a gilt-lettered board in his front garden George Garden Woodrow, F.S.Sc., letters indicating that he had paid certain guineas for a bogus diploma. A bleak white-washed outhouse constituted his schoolroom, and the scholastic quality of its carved and worn desks and forms was enhanced by a slippery blackboard and two large yellow out-of-date maps, one of Africa and the other of Wiltshire, that he had picked up cheap at a sale. There were other maps and globes in his study, where he interviewed inquiring parents, but these his pupils never saw. And in a glass cupboard in the passage was several shillingsworth of test tubes and chemicals, a tripod, a glass retort, and a damaged Bunsen burner, manifesting that the "Scientific laboratory" mentioned in the prospectus was no idle boast.

The present outlook of human affairs is one that admits of broad generalizations and that seems to require broad generalizations. We are in one of those phases of experience which become cardinal in history. A series of immense and tragic events have shattered the self-complacency and challenged the will and intelligence of mankind. That easy general forward movement of human affairs which for several generations had seemed to justify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible progress, progress towards greater powers, greater happiness, and a continual enlargement of life, has been checked violently and perhaps arrested altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of the Great War has revealed an accumulation of destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous society, of which few of us had dreamt; and it has also revealed a profound incapacity to deal with and restrain these forces. The two years of want, confusion, and indecision [Pg 2]that have followed the Great War in Europe and Asia, and the uncertainties that have disturbed life even in the comparatively untouched American world, seem to many watchful minds even more ominous to our social order than the war itself. What is happening to our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and confident hopes with which the twentieth century opened, mark nothing more than a culmination of fortuitous good luck? Has the cycle of prosperity and progress closed? To what will this staggering and blundering, the hatreds and mischievous adventures of the present time, bring us? Is the world in the opening of long centuries of confusion and disaster such as ended the Western Roman Empire in Europe or the Han prosperity in China? And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or is the American (and Pacific?) system still sufficiently removed and still sufficiently autonomous to maintain a progressive movement of its own if the Old World collapse?

Clearly ahead of his time, H. G. Wells gave his great gifts to the world with his classic science fiction works, including this short story. "A Story of the Stone Age," takes the reader on an adventure of the past. Enjoy Well's amazing imagination as you discover what the Stone Age may have been like. Richard Foster Classics Collection *Matte cover