The story of a circus elephant's journey through life  Bad Elephant Far Stream is an animal story for adults, a novel about the odyssey of a circus elephant, told from her own perspective, through her own eyes. Inspired by the true story of the circus elephant Topsy, it begins in the forests of Ceylon in the late 1860s with the capture of a baby elephant known to her own kind as Far Stream. She is taken to America and sent to the Adam Forepaugh Circus in Philadelphia. There, Far Stream embarks on a new life under the big top, appearing as “Topsy,” part of Forepaugh’s famed elephant dancing quadrille. She crisscrosses North America for thirty years with the circus, experiencing hardships, kidnapping, escapes and adventure. But when she comes to outweigh her keepers by a factor of forty—it’s hard not to hurt somebody. It’s hard not to be “bad.”   Praise for Bad Elephant Far Stream  “Meticulously researched and well told...an important story...I urge people to read this book.” (Stewart McFarlane, author of Of Mice and Zen: Animal Encounters in the Life of a Wandering Buddhist)  “Intriguing and haunting...Moving and thought-provoking ... an intense and emotional novel. A highly recommended read.” (Shalini’s Book Reviews)  “Well researched, well written and compelling...gripping, heart felt, and filled with compassion.” (Lynelle Clark Aspired Writer)  “Far Stream captured my heart immediately...I enjoyed this book so much that I had to research the story further.” (The Writers Lounge)  “This historically significant novel is one that will stick with me for a long while. It’s a must read for those who enjoy this genre.” (Pure Jonel: Bibliographic Ramblings of a Bookworm)  “I found myself having a hard time putting down the book as I wanted to find out what would happen next. Topsy's story was just that engrossing.” (If It Has Words)

Bad Elephant Far Stream

Literature & Fiction

Hawley, Samuel

Genre Fiction

Conquistador Press

“Magnificent!” (South China Morning Post) “A wonderful read!” (JoongAng Daily News) “The scope is truly vast!” (Seoul Magazine) “Like a prelude to Shogun!"(StrategyPage.com) “A feast!” (Shogun-ki) In May of 1592, Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent a 158,800-man army of invasion from Kyushu to Pusan on Korea’s southern tip. His objective: to conquer Korea, then China, and then the whole of Asia. The resulting seven years of fighting, known in Korea as imjin waeran, the “Imjin invasion,” after the year of the water dragon in which it began, dwarfed contemporary conflicts in Europe and was one of the most devastating wars to grip East Asia in the past thousand years. The Imjin War is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of this cataclysmic event, so little known in the West. It begins with the political and cultural background of Korea, Japan and China, explores the diplomatic impasse that led to the war, describes every major incident and battle from 1592 to 1598 and introduces a fascinating cast of characters along the way. There is Hideyoshi, hosting garden parties as his armies march toward Beijing; Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin, emerging from a prison cell to take on the Japanese navy with just thirteen ships; Chinese commander Zhao Chengxun, suffering defeat after promising to “scatter the Japanese to the four winds”; the courtesan Chu Non-gae, luring a samurai into her arms and then jumping into the Nam River with him locked in her embrace. One nation fighting to expand, another to survive. Shockwaves extending across China and beyond. The Imjin War is an epic tale of grand perspective and intimate detail of an upheaval that would shape East Asia for centuries to come.

The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

History

Asia

The Earthquake: A Science-Fiction Classic

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Holt-White, William

Science Fiction

A deeply personal meditation on death and the meaning of life First published in 1925, Skin For Skin is a deeply personal account of Llewelyn Powys' encounter with tuberculosis, which he contracted in 1909 at the age of twenty-five. In those days, prior to the discovery of antibiotics, TB - or consumption as it was then called - was a leading cause of death; for Powys, the bubbling sensation in his lungs and the blood in his mouth amounted to a sentence of death. In the pages of this uncompromising memoir we accompany him to a Swiss sanitarium to recover his health, then back to the south of England for a period of convalescence, hoping that the dreadful symptoms do not return. Hoping - but not praying. For Powys, an atheist, there is no comfort in a belief in God and an immortal soul, and so he finds himself staring into the abyss. The experience, as so much else in the book, is recounted in powerfully vivid, lyrical prose: "I would wake in the small hours of the morning swaddled in fear. With scared eyes I would peer into the darkness of my room, and into the unknown days before me, and come to realize, during those tense, suspended moments, how completely unattended, how intolerably alone we are, each one of us, like cattle herded into a merciless stockyard, to be driven into the shambles, separately, when our turn comes." And yet, despite the soulless darkness, there is reason for existence. As we see in Skin For Skin, Powys finds it in enjoying life to the fullest, in feasting upon it while he has it, in squeezing the last drop of joy from each day. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle concluded in its review of the book in 1925, "Rugged, brutal and yet, in spots, tender, Skin For Skin makes life worth living after all."

Skin For Skin

Biographies & Memoirs

Powys, Llewelyn

Memoirs

The Fight That Started the Movies: The World Heavyweight Championship, the Birth of Cinema and the First Feature Film

“Movie buffs and boxing buffs alike will relish this!”(Publishers Weekly) “An extremely well-researched tale.”(Kirkus Reviews) On March 17, 1897, in an open-air arena in Carson City, Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons fought for the heavyweight championship of the world. The contest was recorded by film pioneer Enoch Rector from inside an immense, human-powered camera called the “Veriscope,” the forgotten Neanderthal at the dawn of cinema history. Rector’s movie of the contest premiered two months later. Known today as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, it was the world’s first feature-length film. The Fight That Started the Movies is the untold story of Corbett’s and Fitzsimmons’ journey to that ring in Nevada and how the landmark film of their battle came to be made. It reveals how boxing played a key role in the birth of the movies, spurring the development of motion picture technology and pushing the concept of “film” from a twenty-second peephole show to a full-length attraction, “a complete evening’s entertainment,” projected on a screen. The cast of characters in the tale is rich and varied. There are inventors Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, William Dickson and Eugene Lauste, figuring out how to photographically capture and reproduce motion. There are the playboy brothers Otway and Gray Latham, who first saw the commercial potential of fight films, and their friend and partner Enoch Rector, who pushed that potential to its fruition. There are fighters Jim Corbett with his “scientific” methods of boxing; Bob Fitzsimmons with his thin legs and turnip-on-a-chain punch; hard-drinking John L. Sullivan and the original Jack Dempsey and the gifted but ultimately doomed Young Griffo. There are loud-mouthed fight managers and big-talking promoters, and Wild West legends like Bat Masterson and Judge Roy Bean when the story heads to the Rio Grande river. And finally, there is the audience, our collective ancestors, discovering that movies were more than just a curiosity to gape at, but a new and enduring form of entertainment to rival the theater.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

“Movie buffs and boxing buffs alike will relish this!” (Publishers Weekly)  “An extremely well-researched tale.” (Kirkus Reviews)  On March 17, 1897, in an open-air arena in Carson City, Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons fought for the heavyweight championship of the world. The contest was recorded by film pioneer Enoch Rector from inside an immense, human-powered camera called the “Veriscope,” the forgotten Neanderthal at the dawn of cinema history. Rector’s movie of the contest premiered two months later. Known today as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, it was the world’s first feature-length film.  The Fight That Started the Movies is the untold story of Corbett’s and Fitzsimmons’ journey to that ring in Nevada and how the landmark film of their battle came to be made. It reveals how boxing played a key role in the birth of the movies, spurring the development of motion picture technology and pushing the concept of “film” from a twenty-second peephole show to a full-length attraction, “a complete evening’s entertainment,” projected on a screen.  The cast of characters in the tale is rich and varied. There are inventors Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, William Dickson and Eugene Lauste, figuring out how to photographically capture and reproduce motion. There are the playboy brothers Otway and Gray Latham, who first saw the commercial potential of fight films, and their friend and partner Enoch Rector, who pushed that potential to fruition. There are fighters Jim Corbett with his “scientific” methods of boxing; Bob Fitzsimmons with his thin legs and turnip-on-a-chain punch; hard-drinking John L. Sullivan and the original Jack Dempsey and the gifted but ultimately doomed Young Griffo. There are loud-mouthed fight managers and big-talking promoters, and Wild West legends like Bat Masterson and Judge Roy Bean when the story heads to the Rio Grande river. And finally, there is the audience, our collective ancestors, discovering that movies were more than just a curiosity to gape at, but a new and enduring form of entertainment to rival the theater.

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