After the death of an elderly Greek man who is an internationally famous art dealer and collector, his attorney discovers that his will is missing and notifies the district attorney. When Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Force''s Homicide Squad and his amateur detective son Ellery are called in, Ellery narrows down the possible location of the will to a single location: the dead man''s coffin. When it is exhumed, however, it contains no will but the surprising addition of a strangled ex-convict. Ellery performs an extended piece of deduction in public early on in the novel that concerns a number of used teacups, and is proved wrong. Stung by this embarrassing error, he keeps his deductions to himself for the remainder of the case. Subsequent clues involve color-blindness, a shred of the burned will, two copies of a Leonardo da Vinci painting differing only in skin tone, a thousand-dollar bill, a dead art dealer whose office door was either open or closed and, most importantly, an infinitesimal typing error. Ellery and his father lay a trap, unmasking the murderer— whose guilt will probably have been entirely unsuspected by most readers.

The Greek Coffin Mystery

Dictation Approximately 15,000 Words. This story is about the secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. The two women have a brief lesbian affair, and hatch a scheme to switch a paragraph form each of their bosses new works. Actors Approximately 8,000 words, originally published in The New Yorker, and later in “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about a post-middle-aged Jewish actor with an Irish-sounding stage name who has just landed the role of King Lear in an off-Broadway play written by the daughter of a famous Yiddish actor. At Fumicaro Approximately 11,000 words, originally published in The New Yorker and later in “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about an American from New York who goes to Fumicaro, Italy for a conference on Catholicism. He meets a young, Italian chambermaid who is pregnant out of wedlock and decides to marry her and take her back home to America. The story takes place in the 1930s after Benito Mussolini has taken over. The characters in the story portray an eerie ambivalence to the idea of fascism. What Happened to the Baby Approximately 10,000 words, published in The Atlantic and “Cynthia Ozick Collected Stories.” This story is about an elderly man who is in the middle of a life long ambition to create a new universal language called “GNU”, and his niece Vivian who has been charged by her mother to take care of him after his wife divorced him.

Dictation: A Quartet

Nova Express is a social commentary on human and machine control of life. The Nova Mob&mdash;Sammy the Butcher, Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and others&mdash;are viruses, "defined as the three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller." "which invade the human body and in the process produce language." These Nova Criminals represent society, culture, and government, and have taken control. Inspector Lee and the rest of the Nova Police are left fighting for the rest of humanity in the power struggle. "The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done." The police are focused on "first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival." The Nova Police depend upon the Nova Criminals for existence; if the criminals cease to exist, so do the police. "They act like apomorphine, the nonaddictive cure for morphine addiction that Burroughs used and then promoted for many years." Burroughs not only uses the Nova Police as a function for catching the Nova Criminals, he also adds satire about his own life and addictions. Control is the main theme of the novel, and Burroughs attempts to use language to break down the walls of culture, the biggest control machine. He uses inspector Lee to express his own thoughts about the world. "The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. [...] With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly." As Burroughs battles with the self and what is human, he finds that language is the only way to maintain dominance over the "powerful instruments of control," which are the most prevalent enemies of human society.

Nova Express

The Abortion is a genre novel parody concerning the librarian of a very unusual California library which accepts books in any form and from anyone who wishes to drop one off at the library—children submit tales told in crayon about their toys; teenagers tell tales of angst and old people drop by with their memoirs—described as "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing" in the novel. Summoned by a silver bell at all hours, submissions are catalogued at the librarian''s discretion; not by the Dewey Decimal system, but by placement on whichever magically dust-free shelf would, in the author''s judgment, serve best as the book''s home. One day a woman named Vida appears at the library''s door. Although shy and awkward she is described as the most beautiful woman in the world, who American admen "would have made into a national park if they would have gotten their hands on her." Vida falls in love with the reclusive librarian and soon becomes pregnant, necessitating a trip to Tijuana, Mexico to secure an abortion.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

Dr Watson is called upon late at night by a female friend of his wife. Her husband has been absent for several days and, as he is an opium addict, she is sure he has been indulging in a lengthy drug binge in a dangerous East End opium den. Frantic with worry, she seeks Dr. Watson''s help in fetching him home. Watson does this, but he also finds his friend Sherlock Holmes in the den, disguised as an old man, trying to extract information about a new case from the addicts in the den. Mr. Neville St. Clair, a respectable and punctual country businessman, has disappeared. Making the matter even more mysterious is that Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that she saw her husband at a second-floor window of the opium den, in Upper Swandam Lane, a rather rough part of town near the docks. He withdrew into the window immediately, and Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that there was something very wrong. Naturally, she tries to enter the building, but her way was blocked by the opium den''s owner, a Lascar. She quickly fetches the police, but they cannot find Mr. St. Clair. The room, in whose window she saw her husband, is that of a dirty, disfigured beggar, well known to the police, by the name of Hugh Boone. The police are about to put this report down a mistake of some kind when Mrs. St. Clair spots and identifies a box of wooden bricks that her husband said he would buy for their son. A further search turns up some of her husband''s clothes. Later, his coat, with the pockets full of several pounds'' worth of pennies and halfpennies, is found in the Thames just below the building. The beggar is arrested and locked up at the police station, and Holmes initially is quite convinced that Mr. St. Clair has been the unfortunate victim of murder. However, several days after Mr. St. Clair''s disappearance, his wife receives a letter in his own writing. The arrival of this letter forces Holmes to reconsider his conclusions, leading him eventually to an extraordinary solution. Taking a bath sponge to the police station in a Gladstone bag, Holmes washes Boone''s still-dirty face, causing his face to be revealed — the face of Neville St. Clair! Upon Mr. St. Clair''s immediate confession, this solves the mystery, and also creates a few problems. It seems that Mr. St. Clair has been leading a double life, one of respectability, and the other as a beggar. In his youth, he had been an actor before becoming a newspaper reporter. In order to research an article, he had disguised himself as a beggar for a short time, during which he earned a very large amount of money. Later in his life, he returned to the street to beg for several days in order to pay a large debt. Given a choice between his newspaper salary and his high beggar earnings, he eventually became a professional beggar. His takings were large enough that he was able to establish himself as a country gentleman, marry well, and begin a respectable family. His wife never knew what he did for a living, and Holmes agrees to preserve Mr. St. Clair''s secret as long as no more is heard of Hugh Boone.

The Man with the Twisted Lip

The headquarters of "The Hostel of Righteousness" is an old monastery on the small Greek island Kalivari. But this does not imply that the organization is a particularly holy one. On the contrary, Dr. Thaddeus Pilgrim and his followers are among the most unholy people you could have the misfortune of meeting. By chance, Willie Garvin and Modesty Blaise are targeted by Dr. Pilgrim, who has an obsession for creating "interesting scenarios". Dr. Pilgrim sends Sibyl and Kazim, his two top assassins, to England to capture Willie Garvin and bring him to Kalivari under heavy sedation. There Dr. Janos Tyl subjects Willie to the most diabolical brainwashing possible for him; he is made to think that a woman called Delilah has brutally murdered Modesty, and that he must now avenge Modesty''s death by killing Delilah. Willie is shown pictures of this she-devil Delilah, in reality pictures of Modesty Blaise. In other words, Willie is now programmed to kill Modesty on sight, at which point he will regain his memory, and presumably go insane when he realizes what he has done. Modesty manages to pick up Willie''s trail, and she eventually arrives at Kalivari, waiting until after dark to go ashore. Dr. Pilgrim has ensured that Modesty and Willie encounter each other in the old amphitheater, suddenly seeing each other when the spotlights are switched on. Willie doesn''t hesitate a moment, he draws his throwing knife and throws it. The story does not end here, and soon Dr. Pilgrim''s obsession with interesting scenarios goes horribly wrong (for him) when Sibyl and Kazim are killed in gladiator-style duels and Dr. Janos Tyl is felled by a heavy round shield thrown frisbee-style by Willie. And finally, the ungodly Dr. Pilgrim meets his fate at the hands of one of his own assassins.

Dead Man''s Handle

At over 500 pages long, the book is quite dense. By dividing the book into consistent sections, the author has allowed readers to digest it in sections. Of these, sections dealing with education, the elusive Japanese state, the all-pervasive bureaucracy, the middle class, ritual in society, and the press are regarded as the most important. Overall, Van Wolferen creates an image of a state where a complicated political-corporate relationship retards progress, and where the citizens forgo the social rights enjoyed in other developed countries out of a collective fear of foreign domination. Van Wolferen defines this image across various aspects of Japanese culture, and chronicles its origin through the history of the nation. He frequently cites examples, giving the book 57 pages of endnotes. Throughout, the author points out inefficiencies in the system, and compares it unfavorably to the standard Western system. Van Wolferen states examples that demonstrate the nature of power in Japan and how it is wielded. Japanese power is described as being held by a loose group of unaccountable elites who operate behind the scenes. Because this power is loosely held, those who wield it escape responsibility for the consequences when things go wrong as there is no one who can be held accountable. In particular, the author criticizes large Japanese businesses, and the Liberal Democratic Party, which he describes as being neither liberal nor democratic.

The Enigma of Japanese Power

A dirigible with a dead pilot has been passing over Victorian London in a decaying orbit for some years, arousing the interest of the Royal Society, as well as scientist-explorer Langdon St. Ives and the evangelist/counterfeiter Shiloh. Shiloh is convinced that the dirigible carries his father, a tiny space alien, but withholds this knowledge from vivisectionist Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who he is paying to reanimate Shiloh''s dead mother. Narbondo and the evil millionaire Kelso Drake have their own interest in the alien; Drake possesses its spacecraft, which he uses for perverse purposes in one of his chain of stop-and-go brothels. St. Ives and his friends of the Trismegistus Club are more concerned with the inheritance of Jack Owlesby, a fine young fellow affianced to Dorothy, the beautiful daughter of toymaker/inventor William Keeble, who builds jolly boxes for space aliens, oxygenators, and gigantic emeralds. Jack''s late father bequeathed him just such a gem, but also left behind dark knowledge developed in association with the evil Narbondo. St. Ives and the heroic tobacconist Theophilus Goodall suspect that Narbondo and his assistant, the pimply Willis Pule, are using this knowledge to raise the dead, possibly for nefarious purposes. When poor Bill Kraken steals what everyone assumes to be Owlesby''s emerald in a fit of alien-induced delirium tremens, the ambitions of Shiloh, Narbondo, Drake, and Pule collide with the heroism of St Ives and Goodall and the scientific greed of Parsons of the Royal Academy as Hampstead Heath turns into a carnival of flying skulls, crumbling ghouls, crashing spaceships, and the sparking perversity of the dreadful Marseilles Pinkle.

Homunculus

In this alternate history the corrupt US President Ferris F. Fremont (FFF for 666, ‘F’ being the 6th letter in the alphabet, see Number of the Beast) becomes Chief Executive in the late Nineteen-Sixties following Lyndon Johnson''s administration. The character is best described as an amalgam of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who abrogates civil liberties and human rights through positing a conspiracy theory centered around a (presumably) fictitious subversive organization known as "Aramchek". In addition to this, he is associated with a right-wing populist movement called "Friends of the American People" (FAPers). Ironically enough, the President''s paranoia and opportunism lead to the establishment of a real resistance movement that is organized through narrow-beam radio transmissions from a mysterious alien near-Earth satellite, by a superintelligent, extraterrestrial, but less than omnipotent being (or network) named VALIS. As with its successor, VALIS, this novel is autobiographical. Dick himself is a major character, though fictitious protagonist Nicholas Brady serves as a vehicle for Dick''s alleged gnostic theophany on February 11, 1974. In addition, Sadassa Silvia is a character who claims that Ferris Fremont is actually a communist covert agent recruited by Sadassa''s mother when Fremont was still a teenager. As with VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth deals with author Philip Dick''s highly personal style of Christianity (or Gnosticism). It further examines the moral and ethical repercussions of informing on trusting friends for the authorities. Also prominent is Dick''s dislike of the Republican Party, satirizing Nixon''s America as a Stalinist or neo-fascist police state. Fremont eventually captures and imprisons Dick and Brady after the latter attempts to produce and distribute a record that contains subliminal messages of revolt against the current dictatorship. Brady and Silvia are executed, and Dick narrates the concluding passage about his life in a concentration camp, where his supposedly latest work is actually penned by a ghost writer and regime-approved hack. Suddenly, however, he hears music blaring from a transistor radio which contains the same subliminal message. He and his friends, it turns out, were just a decoy set up by VALIS to detour the government from stopping a much more popular A-List band from releasing a similar record with a better-established recording company. As Dick realizes this and hears youngsters repeating the lyrics he realizes that salvation may lie within the hearts and minds of the next generation.

Radio Free Albemuth

Eldon Fochs is a 38-year-old accountant and lay provost. He is happily married with four children. Feshtig works as a therapist in an Institute of Psychoanalysis funded and controlled by the church. Fochs is persuaded to go to Feshtig by his wife, who has a growing suspicion that her husband harbours dark secrets. Fochs slowly reveals the contents of his dreams and his "disturbing thoughts" about children to Feshtig. He reveals two dreams; one when he strangles and dismembers a girl and another of a 12-year-old boy. In the dream, the boy comes into his office and Fochs brutally sodomises him. He frightens the boy with threats and forces him to admit to having been molested by an uncle, something that never happened. Fochs claims that in his dream he was guided by God. In the chapters where Fochs is in the first person, he describes how he assaulted and murdered a 14-year-old girl. He also describes his ecclesiastical superior confronting him with allegations from two mothers that he has molested their boys. He denies the allegations, and his superiors choose to believe him. Feshtig meets with one of the mothers and starts to counsel her son Nathan Mears, and he gradually uncovers the extent of the damage that Fochs has done to the young boy. As the abuse allegations reach the media, the pressure on the church mounts, but it does everything to protect itself and its reputation, going as far as to excommunicate the two mothers. The pressure on Fochs from his wife is more difficult to answer as she presses him on what he was doing the night the girl was murdered. Eventually he rams his car into a tree, having surreptitiously unclipped his wife’s seat belt. She is thrown through the window and killed. Feshtig reveals his conclusions to the police, but their DNA tests are inconclusive. Protected by the church, Fochs still contrives to spend time alone with young boys in order to molest them. He is eventually transferred to a teaching position in another city, free to carry on his abuse. As the novel ends, having assaulted his children’s babysitter, Fochs sinks to further level of depravity and starts a cycle of incest with his eldest daughter.

Father of Lies

Born on the voyage to America to his Italian father and French-born mother, Daniel Lavette grows up helping his father on a fishing boat. Tragedy strikes early one morning, however, when Dan wakes early to prepare the boat. The great San Francisco earthquake destroys vast swathes of the city including the small apartment where his parents where sleeping. Following a traumatic three days spent ferrying passengers across the bay to Oakland, he is taken in by friends of his father. The two immigrant families of Italian and Jewish origin use the money earned from the ferrying to start a financial empire and a bank, the Bank of Sonoma. Although Dan Lavette becomes quite rich, he does not stop. He wants to become multimillionaire and has many ideas in mind. He is an entrepreneur and seeks to find his place among the rich businessmen on Nob Hill. He asks for a loan from the larger Seldon Bank in San Francisco, but the owner declines it. During that meeting, Dan meets Jean, the exquisitely beautiful daughter of the owner, and both are smitten with each other. Soon after, they are married, against the will of Jean''s mother, who is very segregationist and looks down on immigrants and those of poor pedigree. Dan Lavette grows increasingly wealthy, but his happiness is short-lived. After they have two children, Jean ceases to love him and grows cold to his advances. Dan hired a Chinese bookkeeper, Feng Wo, to assist him at the start of his business dealings, but only receives an invitation for dinner at Wo’s house after several years. Because Jean shares her mother’s distaste for other ethnicities, Dan attends alone. At the dinner, Dan enjoys the company of Wo’s daughter, May Ling, laughing and feeling more at ease than he had since his first days with Jean. After visiting her a few times at the library where she works, Dan falls in love with May Ling. They engage in an affair and they have a child together. So that she may have all of his energies to herself, May Ling wants him to divorce Jean. Dan broaches the idea to Jean, but is flatly declined as divorce is not something the Seldon family participates in. Even after she discovers the affair and has trysts of her own, she will not divorce him and holds onto the marriage as a ploy for leverage. The empire Dan started with his friend, Mark Levy, of the his fishing boats and Levy’s goods store, continues to grow. The Levy and Lavette Company (later L&L Shipping) get into the business of shipping bulk cargo and profit from assisting the Allied cause during the shipping explosion needed during World War I. Sensing the end of the war, Dan convinces Mark to sell the cargo ships. Doing so before the cargo market collapses, the company greatly profits and uses the money to start to a classy department store. Adding to this, the pair diversify by adding luxury cruise liners and building a hotel on Waikiki Beach. They also begin one of the first airlines of the west coast. Impressed with the raging stock market of the late 1920s, the duo issue shares to list their company on the exchange and begin playing the market on margin. This fiscal bubble soon bursts in the crash of 1929 that begins the Great Depression. Many banks close, including The Bank of Sonoma, started by his lifelong Italian friend with the proceeds of the earthquake ferry service. Unable to honor his deposits due to the bank run, his friend dies a heart attack. His Jewish compatriot and business partner, Levy, also dies soon after hearing of his daughters death. Following this tragic news, Dan grows sullen. When May Ling gives him an ultimatum to divorce Jean or lose her and his son, Dan cannot act and May Ling moves to Los Angeles. As the heir to and subsequent chairwoman of the Seldon Bank, Jean calls the loans that are keep Levy and Lavette afloat. Although Jean offers him a position as head of the remnant of the company, Dan cannot accept her handout and refuses. Jean grants his request for a divorce and he signs away his share of their communal assets. Bereft of all his money and torn inside by the emotional destruction of his world, Dan wanders the streets as a vagabond in search of work and even spends three months in prison after fighting off some muggers. When a former employee and boat owner gives him a meal and a job, Dan returns to his first love as a fisherman. Having finally grown up, Dan rises from the depths of his humiliation to seek out May Ling. Venturing to Los Angeles, he meets May Ling and they are finally married. At the close of the story, Dan and Jean’s daughter visits and begins rekindling a relationship with her father.

The Immigrants

The book contains three major parts: #A description of her early life as the daughter of the powerful General Mohamed Oufkir and adoptive daughter to the Moroccan king Hassan II. She was taken into the palace as a child to be a companion to the king''s daughter, Princess Amina. Although she led the life of a princess during these years, she was not one, and she always longed to go home to her real family. She was eventually released for two years to live with her family. #The details of her family''s lives in a various desert prisons. While Malika was living with her family, her father was involved in a coup d''etat attempt on the king. Her father was then executed and she and her five siblings, mother, and two maids, were political prisoners for the next twenty years. #A description of the escape of four of the siblings, the house arrest of the entire family in Morocco, and their final escape to freedom. As the right hand man of king Hassan II in the 1960s and early 1970s, Oufkir led government supervision of politicians, unionists and the religious establishment. He forcefully repressed political protest through police and military clampdowns, pervasive government espionage, show trials, and numerous extralegal measures such as killings and forced disappearances. A feared figure in dissident circles, he was considered extraordinarily close to power. One of his most famous victims is believed to have been celebrated third-world politician Mehdi Ben Brka, who was "disappeared" in Paris in 1965. A French court convicted him of the murder. In 1967, Oufkir was named interior minister, vastly increasing his power through direct control over most of the security establishment. After a failed republican military coup in 1971 he was named chief of staff and minister of defense, and set about purging the army and promoting his personal supporters. His domination of the Moroccan political scene was now near-complete, with the king ever more reliant on him to contain mounting discontent. The following year, he turned on the monarchy, ordering the Moroccan air force to open fire at the king''s jet and organizing a takeover on the ground. Hassan survived, however, and some sources indicate he personally shot Oufkir after securing power. The official line, however, was and is that Oufkir committed suicide upon hearing of the coup''s failure While the book describes the life of its protagonist, it also discusses the nature of freedom. From someone who has lived most of her life as a prisoner, readers come to learn that real freedom is a question of the mind. The book was formerly banned in Morocco, but it is now reportedly available.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Greek Coffin Mystery

By Frederic Dannay

Dictation: A Quartet

By Cynthia Ozick

Nova Express

By William S. Burroughs

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

By Richard Brautigan

The Man with the Twisted Lip

By Arthur Conan Doyle

Dead Man's Handle

By Peter O''Donnell

The Enigma of Japanese Power

By Karel van Wolferen

Homunculus

By James Blaylock

Radio Free Albemuth

By Philip K. Dick

Father of Lies

By Brian Evenson

The Immigrants

By Howard Fast

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

No Author Listed