National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Second Jungle Book is the sequel to Rudyard Kipling's acclaimed collection of stories about the Indian jungle. These new stories were published a year after the original, and mostly focus on the same characters including Mowgli, Baloo, and Beeghera. Similar to his first collection of fables, this sequel also contains a poem at the end of every story, showcasing Rudyard's knowledge of the politics of the time, as well as his passion for the Indian Jungle.

Here in one recording are both of L. Frank Baum's Santa Claus stories: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and A Kidnapped Santa Claus. In The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Baum gives us a glimpse into the magical history that surrounds the life story of Santa Claus. In A Kidnapped Santa Claus, we find out what happens when Santa is kidnapped shortly before Christmas.

Robinson Crusoe is the classic tale about one man's lust for adventure. Crusoe leaves his parents and hometown for the open sea in the year 1651. But the ocean can be unforgiving and Crusoe, unfortunately, learns this the hard way. Through a series of wild events he ends up shipwrecked on a shore in South America, being forced to salvage what he can in order to survive. Overcoming his despair, Crusoe begins a new life on this island searching for meaning and eventually finding redemption.

First published in a 1844 literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1845, The Purloined Letter is the third and final story that features Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin. In it, Dupin is approached by the prefect of the police to help with a case that involves a stolen letter containing compromising information.

Following the death of her father, Isabel Archer leaves the comforts of Albany, New York to stay with her aunt Lydia Touchett at her London estate. There she meets Lydia's rich husband, David, her cousin Ralph, and the Touchetts's proud neighbor, Lord Warburton. Soon, too, come marriage proposals from Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, the son of a wealthy mill owner. Although Isabel declines both offers, she eventually gives her hand to Gilbert Osmond, an American ex-pat in Florence.

First published in a 1842 literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843, The Pit and the Pendulum takes place during the Spanish Inquisition and follows the plight of a prisoner in a cell that has a pit and a pendulum. Unlike many of Poe's short stories, The Pit and the Pendulum does not rely on any supernatural elements to inspire fear but instead uses the narrator's heightened sensory experiences to do so.

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later - in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful.

Alexandra Bergsons, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, inherits her family's ailing farm in Hanover, Nebraska upon the death of her father. Over the years, she turns the farm into a successful enterprise. However, success has not brought peace, as passion and love intervene.

In the far future, an unnamed narrator, who along with what remains of the human race dwells uneasily in an underground fortress-city surrounded by brooding, chaotic, relentless Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, 'Ab-humans,' Brutes, and enormous slugs and spiders, follows a telepathic distress signal into the unfathomable darkness.

First published in a 1841 edition of Graham's Magazine, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is often cited as the first modern detective story. The first of three stories to center around C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's fictional detective, The Murders in the Rue Morgue involves Dupin's investigation of two women's murders.