Book download page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74742

Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize and wrote novels about wealthy people destroying each other's lives with manners.

She also wrote some damn good ghost stories.

Published in 1926, Here and Beyond collects six stories that move through supernatural horror, Gothic mystery, religion, marriage, obsession and dark comedy. And when Wharton decides to get creepy, she gets really creepy.

In “Miss Mary Pask,” a traveler makes his way through thick fog to an isolated house near Brittany's wonderfully named Bay of the Dead.

“Bewitched” heads into frozen rural New England, where a married farmer appears to be receiving visits from a former lover.

And “The Young Gentlemen” takes us into another strange household filled with secrets and the uncomfortable feeling that something isn't quite right.

The second half of the collection moves away from outright supernatural horror, but Wharton keeps digging into people, their relationships, their beliefs and all the peculiar ways they manage to make themselves miserable.

Amazon added a notice to the product pages for the new lineup of 2026 Kindles that states, “Wi-Fi and an Amazon account are required to set up your Kindle and download books”.

I thought maybe that was their way of saying that new Kindles cannot be used in an unregistered state like previous gen Kindles, but it turns out that’s not that case at all.

It’s still possible to use the new 2026 Kindles without registering them to an Amazon account, but they make you think you have to register them during the initial setup process. I forgot how to get past the registration screen since the last time I did this. At first I thought it wasn’t going to work, but I figured it out, so here’s how get past the initial setup process.

When setting up a new Kindle, there’s no obvious way to bypass the registration screen. The trick is to hold down the power button until the pop-up box appears where you can select “Restart“, and then your Kindle will boot to the homescreen instead of the registration screen.

However, you have to trigger the restart at the right time. You have to get to the screen that asks you to sign-in on the device, not the initial setup screen.

The first screen that appears asks if you want to sign-in on the device or set it up using your phone. Select the sign-in on device option, then enter your WiFi password. My Kindle downloaded a software update at this point, and then it restarted to the sign-in screen where it showed my name. That’s where you want to hold down the power button and restart.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to go through the process of setting up WiFi when I bypassed registration on my 12th gen Kindle Paperwhite earlier this year; I think it worked from the first screen where they ask if you want to sign-in on the device or use your phone, so something changed along the way.

Nevertheless, it’s still possible to use Kindles without registering them, despite Amazon making it seem like you have to sign-in with an Amazon account in order to use them.

You can still sideload ebooks and dictionaries and custom fonts, and use Kindles in an unregistered state if you want to. The main downside to doing so is there’s a nag screen that pops-up every time you go to the library that asks you to sign-in (I think that can be disabled if your Kindle is jailbroken), and you can’t use online features like Wikipedia lookup. But on the plus side, ad-supported models don’t show ads on the lockscreen—they show book covers instead. Another benefit with using unregistered Kindles is they no longer get software updates that break things, and you don’t have to worry about your sideloaded ebooks getting deleted if you use airplane mode for too long.

It's about the same size as an Xteink while being a more capable device that features a touch screen, a mic, and higher pixel density, only costs $50, and Crosspoint OS (eReader software made for the Xteink X4) supports it. So it can be turned into a great little e-reader.

E-paper has been having a bit of a moment recently. First, the Boox Palma shrank the form factor of eReaders down to something a bit more pocketable and less proprietary than the Kindle. Then, open source developers seized upon and installed custom firmware on the Xteink X4 and X3, cheap no-frills eReaders that snap to the back of your phone and are just enough for many people.

The X4 was clearly a huge success, as Xteink is following this up with the X3 Pro and X4 Pro and Boox has announced their micro ereader competitor the Boox Picco.

But bare bones e-paper is anyone’s game at this point, and so Seeed Studio has thrown their hat in the game with the reTerminal Sticky, an even cheaper and more capable small magnetic eInk display that leans in on the entire angle that made the X4 a viral sensation.

Book download page: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20230236

Before he wrote his most famous book, The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham was writing wonderfully strange pulp science fiction under the name John Beynon Harris, and in 1932 he decided to send humanity to Venus.

Hundreds of years after an earlier expedition disappeared, the spaceship Fyra reaches Venus and discovers something nobody expected.

Somehow the descendants of that lost expedition survived, but after centuries on Venus they've developed into very different societies. And they aren't exactly getting along. Throw in the planet's intelligent native inhabitants, strange aircraft, an alien wilderness and a new group of Earth explorers suddenly dropped into the middle of everything, and you've got a proper old-school planetary adventure.

This is a 1932 pulp story, so some of its ideas about race, "civilization," human development and colonialism have aged pretty badly. But still an interesting bit of science fiction.

Book download page: https://craphound.com/news/2012/09/17/free-creative-commons-licensed-downloads-of-rapture-of-the-nerds/

It's the late 21st century, and the Singularity has already happened. Huge numbers of people have abandoned biological bodies and uploaded themselves into vast posthuman computational civilizations spread throughout the solar system. About a billion stubborn old-fashioned humans remain on Earth.

Unfortunately, the uploaded superintelligences keep sending Earth technological ideas. Potentially civilization-destroying inventions capable of wrecking industries, cultures or society itself.

So Earth has created Tech Jury Service. Ordinary people get drafted to examine these technologies and decide whether humanity should actually be allowed to use them.

Our protagonist, Huw Jones, is hilariously inappropriate for the job. He's a cranky Welsh potter and something of a technophobe living in a world overflowing with posthuman technology. Then he gets selected for jury duty.

We're talking about uploaded humans, molecular machinery, artificial superintelligences, intelligent anarchist ants, body modification, gender changes, bizarre religions, courtroom insanity, conspiracies, technological viruses, simulated realities and eventually contact with something much larger than humanity's own posthuman civilization.

Everything is satirical, vulgar, extremely geeky and intentionally absurd. Doctorow himself described it as a comic novel about the Singularity that was partly a celebration of technophilia and partly an indictment of it.

.epub downloage page: https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.epub

.mobi downloage page (for older ereaders): https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.mobi

HTML page to read online: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601701h.html

Before Robert E. Howard was sending Conan into temples full of monsters and lunatic sorcerers, he wrote some weird-ass occult detective stories.

And in this story, Howard goes nuts with the weird-menace formula: poison cigarettes, cobras, assassins, opium dens, secret passages, hallucinogenic drugs, knife fights, torture chambers, a sacrificial altar, a supposedly dead criminal mastermind, and a dude running around with a freaking spiked mace.

Steve Harrison is investigating a string of bizarre murders when Joan La Tour shows him something very uncool: a page from the Black Book of the Dead.

Books with that title are never awesome in pulp stories. Five names are written on it. Three have already been crossed out.

The remaining two are Joan La Tour and Steve Harrison!

It gets worse, the man apparently responsible is Erlik Khan, the Lord of the Dead, a criminal mastermind Harrison had previously watched get stabbed and apparently burned to death.

Apparently that didn't take. Some people are just hard to kill, man.

Published in Super-Detective Stories in May 1934, and reads as if Conan accidentally got a job as a detective.

WARNING: this is a 1934 weird-menace story and contains some very dated racial language and stereotypes.

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79595

Before author Erle Stanley Gardner created Perry Mason, he was writing fast, ridiculous, violent pulp stories for Black Mask, and this story is a great example of just how wild his early stuff could get.

Black Barr is an infamous gunfighter dressed head to toe in black, riding a black horse, because apparently subtlety wasn't much of a concern in 1928. He takes the wrong fork in a trail and rides straight into a mess of crooked ranchers, hired killers, stolen land, and a woman trapped in a vicious scheme.

Barr could probably just turn around and continue on his way. But nah, that's not the pulp way. Instead, his solution involves six-shooters, night riding, getting shot, shooting other people, shooting still more people, and generally leaving the town of Caliente Flats with a smaller population than when he arrived.

And then there's Wing Lee, the mysterious stranger who calls himself the Devil's Deputy.

It's decent pulp, but it's very much 1928 pulp. Gardner knows how to keep a story moving. Some pretty good action and fun storytelling. Some of it's aged really badly though. Uses some pretty bad racial stereotypes and slurs that were common in fiction of the period.

Sample of writing style:

A white signboard hung at an angle from a small tree, fastened by a rusty nail, bleached by sun and wind, cracked and checked, and yet it still bore its message “Caliente Flats 10 M.” It was a sign such as is used by the Forestry Service to mark mountain fire trails. Yet the printing was not that of a government stencil. It was crude hand-lettering.

Another mile and a rider approached, coming up the trail, pressing his horse.

I stopped, swung to one side, and waited, hands ready, poised over my pistols. In the mountains of the West, particularly in those communities where the main means of communication are over horseback trails, it is well to be prepared for trouble when one meets another on the trail.

He saw me, scowled, averted his glance and passed in sullen silence. That, of itself, was unusual. The code of the West calls for a brief exchange of courtesies when two riders meet. More, there was a blood-stained bandage on his shoulder, and the blood was a bright scarlet, not the rusty red of dried blood. The man had been wounded, and the wound was bleeding even as he urged his mount up that trail, away from Caliente Flats.

I shrugged my shoulders and rode on.