"Dusky & Other Tales" by Jim Kjelgaard

 

Dusky & Other Tales by Jim Kjelgaard Vintage Lists, 2023   Dusky & Other Tales collects six of Jim Kjelgaard’s original short tales published by the famous pulp magazine, Short Stories: “The Wild Pack” (Mar. 10, 1944); “Reputation” (April 25, 1945); “Cheena” (Nov. 10, 1945); “Billy Dancer’s Bull” (Dec. 25, 1945); “Dusky” (Feb. 10, 1946); and “Arbey Holden Rides Again” (Mar. 10, 1947). Short Stories is considered as one of the big four pulp magazines by aficionados. The others are: Adventure, Argosy, and Blue Book. Short Stories began life in 1890 as a literary magazine. It published stories by highly regarded writers like Rudyard Kipling, Émile Zola, and Bret Harte. After being acquired by Doubleday in 1910, Short Stories became an “all-fiction” magazine, which is a fancy way of saying a genre magazine. While the magazine began publishing genre fiction, it was, perhaps, the most highly regarded of the pulps. Its stable of writers included luminaries such as Harold Lamb, Max Brand, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, James B. Hendryx, and Sax Rohmer. As the magazine market weakened in the 1950s, Short Stories switched to a “men’s magazine,” and rebranded itself with the obvious Short Stories: A Men’s Magazine in 1957, and then in 1959, shortly before its demise that same year, as Short Stories for Men. Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor to Short Stories during, and after, World War 2. The magazine published 25 stories with Kjelgaard’s byline. The first, “Month of Madness,” appeared in the May 10, 1942 issue and the last, “Larrigan Joe’s Poaching Ring,” saw print in the June 1950 issue. Like Kjelgaard’s young adult fiction, much of his output for Short Stories was centered around boys, animals, and nature. The stories included here a marvelous sampling of Kjelgaard’s work for Short Stories. “The Wild Pack,” which is told from the perspective of a blue jay, is about two dogs vying for control of the pack. “Reputation” is an Old West gunfighter tale with a refreshing twist. “Cheena” is a clever post-WW2 tale about wartime collaboration and vengeance. “Billy Dancer’s Bull” is something of a tall-tale about a wanna-be rancher and love, and “Arbey Holden Rides Again,” which is similar to Kjelgaard’s brilliant Handle Hoe Charlie stories, is a fun take on poachers and game wardens.

The Vintage Lists edition of Dusky & Other Tales is paired with Jim Kjelgaard’s excellent 1953 novel, The Spell of the White Sturgeon set on the wild shoreline of Lake Michigan in the mid-1850s. Part adventure story and part historical tale, The Spell of the White Sturgeon, introduces an 18-year-old orphan named Ramsay. Ramsay is traveling to Three Points, Wisconsin, where he has been promised a job, but arrives to find the job gone and he is forced to labor on a small family farm. But Ramsay’s prospects brighten when he saves a Dutch fisherman from drowning. Click here to purchase the Kindle version or here to purchase the paperback edition of The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales at Amazon.

"Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy" edited by J. LaRue

Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy edited by J. LaRue Vintage Lists, 2023     Introduction     A mythology in science fiction circles—academia and readership alike—claims women were excluded from the genre until the late-1960s and early-1970s, when writers like Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler jumped the sexism barrier that had kept women out. While these writers are culturally important, both inside and outside the genre, it is nonsense to imagine they appeared on the science fiction scene without precedence. The first woman to publish a story in a science fiction magazine was Clare Winger Harris when her tale, “The Fate of Poseidonia” was published in the June 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was that same pulp, Amazing Stories, that created the entire modern science fiction genre when its first issue hit newsstands in April 1926. And those first few years, between 1926 and 1929, were a dark period for women and science fiction because only 17 stories by six known female authors were published. The next ten years (1930 – 1939) weren’t much better with 62 stories by 25 women published, but the 1940s saw a significant gain with 209 stories by 47 female writers, and in the 1950s women exploded on the scene with 634 tales, by 154 writers. While these numbers represent a slim ratio of the total number of science fiction stories published during this period, it was a beginning that ultimately led to the celebration of women as some of the best writers in the genre.* This anthology, which is intended as a tribute and to bring attention to these early female writers, is a survey of the fiction published by the most respected science fiction magazine of the 1950s: Galaxy. Galaxy’s first issue reached newsstands in October 1950. The list of contributors for that issue included many of the genres’ brightest stars: Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber, and Isaac Asimov. It also started a trend of publishing women writers by publishing Katherine MacLean’s brilliant novelette, “Contagion” (which, unfortunately, isn’t included in this collection). Although three other marvelous stories by MacLean—“Pictures Don’t Lie” (Aug. 1951), “The Snowball Effect” (Sep. 1952), and “Games” (Mar. 1953)—are scattered across its pages. Over the rest of the 1950s, Galaxy published 30 stories written by thirteen women. The tales ranged from imaginative adventures—Rosel George Brown’s “From an Unseen Censor” (Sep. 1958)—to cultural critique, “One Way” by Miriam Allen deFord (Mar. 1955), to homegrown silliness, with a feminist bent, like Ruth Laura Wainwright’s “Green Grew the Lasses” (July 1953). These stories, along with thirteen others written by women and published by Galaxy in the 1950s, are reprinted in Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy. And frankly, they are some of the best tales to appear in Galaxy during its 30-year run. Included are gems by genre stars like Katherine MacLean, as mentioned above, and Betsy Curtis, and rising stars like Rosel George Brown. Each story and its author are briefly introduced and while some of the writers are little-known with only a few publishing credits, others had impressive careers both in and out of science fiction. Miriam Allen deFord—“One Way” (Mar. 1955) and “The Eel” (Apr. 1958)—was a suffragette, wrote for Nation, and won an Edgar Award for Best Crime Fact Book. Phyllis Sterling Smith—“What is POSAT” (Sep. 1951)—attended Stanford and Tufts, she worked for the Psychological Testing Corporation, and she was an energy consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency. Ann Warren Griffith—“Zeritsky’s Law” (Nov. 1951)—attended Barnard College, piloted as a WASP in WW2, and wrote for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. And those are only three of the 12 writers inside this anthology.   __________   *publishing statistics come from Partner in Wonder, by Eric Leif Davin (Lexington Books, 2006)   Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Table of Contents   “Games” by Katherine MacLean / “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs / “One Way” by Miriam Allen deFord / “Rough Translation” by Jean M. Janis / “Pictures Don’t Lie” by Katherine MacLean / “The Vilbar Party” by Evelyn E. Smith / “What is POSAT?” by Phyllis Sterling Smith / “Green Grew the Lasses” by Ruth Laura Wainwright / “The Trap” by Betsy Curtis / “Know Thy Neighbor” by Elisabeth R. Lewis / “Tea Tray in the Sky” by Evelyn E. Smith / “Homesick” by Lyn Venable / “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean / “Zeritsky’s Law” by Ann Griffith / “From an Unseen Censor” by Rosel George Brown / “The Eel” by Miriam Allen deFord   Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

"A Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner" by Daniel Chipman, L.L. D

 

A Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner by Daniel Chipman, L.L. D Vintage Lists, 2023 Introduction:  In the first several decades after the American Revolution, Seth Warner’s name was a footnote in most historical accounts of the American Colonies’ struggle for independence. His contributions were overshadowed by the mythical figure of his fellow Vermonter, Ethan Allen. In 1848, Daniel Chipman—the author of the book you are holding—politely called Warner’s absence in Vermont’s history as “unintentional errors,” but looking back it appears the Allen family, particularly Ethan and his brother Ira, made a concerted effort to amplify Ethan’s reputation at the expense of Seth Warner’s.      The traditional view of Seth Warner as a chivalrous, but unaccomplished, sidekick to Allen saw print in the early historical accounts of Vermont. This vision of Warner as nothing much was created and propagated by the Allens. Ethan, in his A Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), gave a single sentence to Warner’s capture of Fort Crown Point, while he spun his own victory at Fort Ticonderoga into a spectacle of personal heroism. He even included a brilliant one-liner for good measure: When asked by Ticonderoga’s British commander whose authority Allen was demanding the garrison’s surrender, Allen responded, “In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress.” Ira Allen, first as a source in Samuel Williams’s Natural and Civil History of Vermont (1794), and then in his own The Natural and Political History of the State of Vermont published in 1798, continued to minimize, often completely ignoring, Warner’s contributions to America’s struggle for independence.      And Warner’s contributions were significant, arguably eclipsing that of Ethan Allen’s. Warner was elected as the commander of Vermont’s militia, The Green Mountain Boys in 1775 in Dorset, Vermont. He fought the British valiantly from 1775, when Warner and his men captured Fort Crown Point in New York, until the illness that prematurely took his life forced him to retreat from his post in 1781. He volunteered to command the rearguard as the Northern Army retreated from Canada ahead of the British Army in 1777, taking care of the sick and injured all the way to Fort Ticonderoga. His leadership at the battle of Hubbardton on July 7, 1777, while technically a battlefield defeat for the Americans but a pyrrhic victory for the British, allowed their Northern Army to escape and fight another day ahead of Burgoyne’s troops. Warner’s regiment was pivotal in the Continental Army’s decisive victory at Bennington later that summer. Yet most casual readers of history know little or nothing about Seth Warner.      He was a strong and moral leader. His concern for those in his charge is obvious from the correspondence between he and George Washington, since each letter is asking for things his men needed, clothes especially. He was respected by his superior officers. General Stark, who led the Americans at Bennington, complimented Warner’s help in planning the engagement and his performance on the battlefield in a letter to General Gates. In his last years, Warner was afflicted with an illness that had nagged at him since the late-1770s. It developed into dementia, which many historians think may have been caused by exposure to mercury then used to cure animal hides, that robbed him of his faculties and his dignity.      While Seth Warner’s legacy is still shadowed by Ethan Allen, his star has risen in the eyes of those interested in the history of New England and the Revolutionary War. This rehabilitation of his reputation began with the book you are holding, Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner, by Daniel Chipman, published by L. W. Clark in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1848. Chipman, as a boy, had known Seth Warner and his desire in writing this slim biography was to correct those “unintentional errors” accepted as historical fact about Warner. Chipman’s writing is precise, interesting, and well-documented. It is a book that both entices and informs nearly 200 years after its first printing. The cover was designed by Karadraws.com Purchase the Kindle edition here or the paperback here at Amazon.