"The Cask of Amontillado" (sometimes spelled "The Casque of Amontillado") is a short story, written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book.The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year (possibly sometime during the eighteenth century) and concerns the deadly revenge taken by the narrator on a friend who he claims has insulted him. Like several of Poe's stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination wit...

Falkner charts a young woman's education under a tyrannical father figure.

The author relates how, traveling the Sahara, he's encountered a remarkable vehicle & pilot, David Innes, a man with a remarkable story to tell. Innes is a mining heir who finances an experimental "iron mole," an excavating vehicle designed by his elderly inventor friend Abner Perry. In a test, they discover the vehicle cannot be turned. It burrows 500 miles into the Earth, emerging into the unknown interior world of Pellucidar. In Burroughs' concept, Earth is a hollow shell with Pellucida...

The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849, has remained mysterious: the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed. On October 3, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died at 5 a.m. on Sunday, October 7. Poe was never coherent enough to explain how he ...

When Tarzan is orphaned as a baby deep in the African jungle, the apes adopt him and raise him as their own. By the time the boy is ten, he can swing through the trees and talk to the animals. By the time he is eighteen, he has the strength of a lion and rules the apes as their king. But Tarzan knows he's different. Will he ever discover his true identity?

Blueblooded mama's boy Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is swept overboard during a south seas voyage for his lifelong ill health. He finds himself on a jungle island. His bookish education has not prepared him to cope with these surroundings, and he is a coward. He is terrified when he encounters primitive, violent men, ape-like throwbacks in mankind's evolutionary history.

Old acquaintances, made in the two other stories, reappear: Tars Tarkas, Tardos Mors and others. There is a happy ending to the story in the union of the Warlord, the title conferred upon John Carter, with Dejah Thoris.

Inspired by the Moskstraumen, it is couched as a story within a story, a tale told at the summit of a mountain climb. The story is told by an old man who reveals that he only appears old - "You suppose me a very old man," he says, "but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves." The narrator, convinced by the power of the whirlpools he sees in the ocean beyond, is then told of the "old" man's fi...

Starting out as a harrowing wartime sea adventure, Burroughs’s story ultimately develops into a lost world story reminiscent of such novels as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Burroughs adds his own twist by postulating a unique biological system for his lost world, in which the slow progress of evolution in the world outside is recapitulated as a matter of individual metamorphosis.

Here Tarzan returns to Opar, the source of the gold for lost Atlantis. Ages ago Atlantis sunk beneath the waves -- but the denizens of Opar still mine the gold of this lost colony. Tarzan, following greedy pair -- one Belgian, one Arab -- into the jungle, where they stumble into the lost city. Bad enough -- and then Tarzan injures his head in a fight and loses his memory. That's great news for La, the high priestess for the Flaming God, who's had a serious crush on the apeman since their f...

The Efficiency Expert, an often overlooked by Burroughs' fans, is a cracking tale of young Jimmy Torrance, an upstanding college graduate in post-World War I Chicago who inadvertently rubs shoulders with mobsters and ends up framed for murder. Jimmy Torrance was a hero in college. A champion boxer, star of the baseball team and one of the most popular guys on campus. On graduating Jimmy refuses the help of his wealthy father, determined to be his own man. Unable to find a "respectable" job...

"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story is deemed guilty for an unnamed crime and put into a completely dark room. He passes out while trying to determine the size of the room. When he wakes up, he realizes there is a large, deep pit in the middle of the room. He loses consciousness again a...