In "The Yellow Sign", a painter and his model become ensnared in a series of eerie events linked to a mysterious, unsettling symbol. As they uncover more about The King in Yellow, an enigmatic play that drives people to madness, their lives spiral into paranoia and terror. The story explores themes of fate, madness, and the supernatural as they face a grotesque figure from the artist's nightmares.
This massive collection brings together the entire body of Robert W. Chambers' weird fiction works including material unprinted since the 1890's. Chambers is a landmark author in the field of horror literature because of his King in Yellow collection. That book represents but a small portion of his weird fiction work, and these stories are intimately connected with the Cthulhu Mythos -- introducing Hali, Carcosa, and Hastur. Short stories from The King in Yellow, The Maker of Moons, The Mystery of Choice, The Tracer of Lost Persons, The Tree of Heaven, and two complete books, In Search of the Unknown and Police!!! This book contains all the immortal tales of Robert W. Chambers, including "The Repairer of Reputations," "The Yellow Sign," and "The Mask." These titles are often found in survey anthologies. In addition to the six stories reprinted from The King in Yellow (1895), this book also offers more than two dozen other stories and episodes, about 650 pages in all. These narratives rarely have appeared in print. Some have not been published in nearly a century. A Chambers novel, The Slayer of Souls (1920), is not included in this short story collection.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. It features her pioneering feminist masterpiece, her neglected stories contemporary with The Yellow Wall-Paper, and her later explorations of `the woman of fifty'. The introduction to this edition places Gilman in the cultural and historical context of the American divided self, her Beecher heritage, and her contribution to the female Gothic.
A milestone of American supernatural fiction from the author who has been hailed as the link between Poe and Stephen King. 12 gripping stories, with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler.
"In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers is a chilling tale about a man who attends a church service, only to be pursued by a menacing organist. As he flees through the streets, the sense of dread intensifies. The boundaries between reality and nightmare blur as the protagonist confronts an overwhelming, inexplicable terror, leading to a haunting conclusion that questions the nature of existence itself.
"The Demoiselle d'Ys" by Robert W. Chambers is a chilling tale of the supernatural, woven into the haunting atmosphere of France. The story follows the narrator as he becomes enchanted—and disturbed—by a mysterious woman in a french mansion. Her elusive beauty and strange connection to a legendary curse draw him into a web of suspense and unease, exploring themes of obsession, otherworldly allure, and the spectral remnants of the past.
A collector of rare books shares his personal experiences with twenty important volumes and other literary items, including a signed copy of Sylvia Plath's The Colossus, a copy of Nabokov's Lolita from Graham Greene, and the sale of J. R. R. Tolkien's college gown.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the key texts in American women's fiction and also a rallying cry for feminism. Since its original printing in 1892, it has been routinely anthologized in collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks. This volume gathers nine other equally momentous stories by a diverse group of renowned American women authors who changed the world with their compelling tales. These ten stories testify to the power of the imagination to create personal transformation and political change. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American author of novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She was also a utopian feminist who gained fame and developed a social circle of like-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement as she lectured widely for social reform. She is most known today for her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper."Ulrich Baer earned a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Yale. A widely published author, he is University Professor at New York University, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. He has written numerous books on poetry, photography and cultural politics, and edited and translated Rainer Maria Rilke's The Dark Interval, Letters on Life, and Letters to a Young Poet. He hosts leading writers and artists on the "Think About It" podcast. In the Warbler Press Contemplations series, he has published: Nietzsche, Rilke, Dickinson, Wilde, and Shakespeare on Love.
The story details the descent of a young woman into madness. Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after experiencing symptoms of "temporary nervous depression". The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it". She and her husband move into an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery. Her husband chooses for them to sleep there due to its multitude of windows, which provide the air so needed in her recovery. In addition to the couple, John's sister Jennie is present; she serves as their housekeeper. Like most nurseries at the time the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. The narrator attributes all these to children, as most of the damage is isolated to their reach. Ultimately, though, readers are left unsure as to the source of the room's state, leading them to see the ambiguities in the unreliability of the narrator.The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room - its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.After many moments of tension between John and his sister, the story climaxes with the final day in the house. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She excitedly exclaims, "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane", causing her husband to faint as she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the personification of the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.
