ABOUT THE AUTHORS

AESOP (620?-564? BC) was a Greek writer from Asia Minor who wrote dozens of fables, many of them featuring animal characters. The details of his life are murky, but the popularity of his stories has remained constant, both in the ancient world and in modern times.

WILLIAM LIVINGSTON ALDEN (1837-1908), an American writer, penned numerous essays and humorous short stories for publications such as Scribner’s, Atlantic, New York Times, and other newspapers. He’s remembered today as the founder of the sport of canoeing in the United States, beginning in 1871.

E. F. BENSON (1867-1940) was an English writer famous for his romantic novels, biographies, and supernatural stories, many of which contained satirical or even humorous elements. His two brothers also penned works of fantastic literature.

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?), an American newspaper writer, is best-known today for his Civil War stories (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), supernatural stories, and his sardonic humor (The Devil’s Dictionary)—although his greatest tale may be his disappearance in Mexico at the end of 1913, never to be heard from again.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD (1869-1951) was a British novelist and short story writer, best-known today for such chilling tales as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” “A Psychical Invasion” is taken from his series of weird stories about John Silence, one of very first serious investigators of supernatural phenomena depicted in modern weird literature.

SYDNEY J. BOUNDS (1920-2006) was an English author who penned some forty novels and hundreds of short stories, including popular science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns, mysteries, suspense, and young adult fiction, both under his real name and under pseudonyms. His Borgo Press books include Boomerang (2012), Time for Murder (2012), and The World Wrecker (2011).

JOHN RUSSELL FEARN (1908-1960) was one of the first British writers to break into the American pulp science fiction magazine market of the 1930s and ’40s, but he also wrote 180 novels and hundreds of short stories of fantasy, horror, westerns, romance, crime fiction, and suspense, under numerous pseudonyms. His most popular series features the Golden Amazon, a future human woman having great physical powers and intelligence. Borgo Press has published over sixty of his novels and collections to date, including the twenty-one-volume Golden Amazon Saga, the five-volume Black Maria classic crime novel series, and many other mysteries, science fiction, horror, and even romance novels.

G. T. FLEMING-ROBERTS (1910-1968), an American writer, penned at least 300 detective and mystery stories for the pulp magazines during the 1930s and ’40s, many of them under pseudonyms.

THE BROTHERS GRIMM (Jacob Grimm [1785-1863] and Wilhelm Grimm [1786-1859]) were German scholars and writers famous today for collecting and reworking and publishing such classic fairy tales as “The Frog Prince,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel,” among many others.

ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906-1936) is best-known today as the father of sword-and-sorcery fiction, with his creation of Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and several other larger-than-life characters. He also penned dozens of stories for the pulp magazines, including fantasy, SF, horror, suspense, mystery, and even boxing tales.

HELEN HUNT JACKSON (1830-1885) is famous today as the author of the classic AmerIndian romance novel, Ramona, which was one of a series of works which highlighted the systematic oppression faced by America’s indigenous population. She also penned many short stories for the popular U.S. magazines of her time.

ANDREW LANG (1844-1912) was an enormously prolific Scotch writer of criticism, poems, and fiction, but is best-known today for his classic series of twelve “color” compilations of fairy tales, beginning with the Blue Fairy Book (1889).

H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937), an American writer, is generally regarded as the creator of the modern tale of weird and supernatural fiction, primarily through his “Cthulhu Mythos” tales, many of them set in his native New England.

GARY LOVISI is an American writer of mystery, suspense, horror, western, and noir stories, and the influential editor of the magazines Hardboiled and Paperback Parade. His recent Borgo Press books include The Great Detective: His Further Adventures (editor; 2012), Battling Boxing Stories (editor; 2012), Driving Hell’s Highway (2011), Murder of a Bookman (2011), Violence Is the Only Solution (2011), Mars Needs Books! (2011), Gargoyle Nights (2011), and the forthcoming collection, Attitude. He’s been honored with the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

A. R. MORLAN, an American writer, is best-known for her two riveting novels of horror, Dark Journey and The Amulet, and the horror collections, The Chimera and the Shadowfox Griefer and Other Curious People, Ewerton Death Trip: A Walk Through the Dark Side of Town, The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos, The Hemingway Kittens and Other Feline Fancies and Fantasies, Of Vampires and Gentlemen: Tales of Erotic Horror, ’Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories, and The Second Most Beautiful Woman in the World and Other Fantastic Ladies, all available from Borgo Press. More collections of her unique visions of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and tattoos are forthcoming.

ANDRE NORTON (1912-2005) was an American librarian and writer of popular science fiction and fantasy series, especially the Witch World novels and the Time Traders sequence, plus a number of historical novels penned earlier in her career.

ELLIOTT O’DONNELL (1872-1965) wrote dozens of supernatural short stories and novels early in his writing career, but later became a well-known (and very popular) “ghost-hunter,” giving well-attended lectures on the topic, and producing numerous books claiming to document actual encounters with ghosts and similar phenomena.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.

MARCEL PRÉVOST (1862-1941) was a French writer, novelist, and dramatist who focused much of his attention on the plight of women in modern European society.

LORD REDESDALE (Algernon Freeman-Mitford [1837-1916]) served as Second Secretary in the British Legation at the time of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, and wrote a number of books about his experiences in the Far East. He was created a Baron in 1902. He was the great-uncle of writers Jessica and Nancy Mitford.

ROBERT REGINALD was born in Japan, and lived in many different places in his youth. A retired academic librarian, he now edits the Borgo Press imprint of Wildside Press (1,300+ books), and is the author of 140 volumes of history, criticism, and popular fiction, among them The War of Two Worlds Trilogy, the Nova Europa fantasy saga, two Phantom Detective novels, two Human-Knacker War Series novels, The Paperback Show Murders, and several story collections (including The Elder of Days: Tales of the Elders).

SAKI (H. H. Munro [1870-1916]) wrote clever and satirical stories of British society, such as the tales of Reginald and Clovis, two debonair men-about-town, as well as a future-war novel, When William Came. He is best-known today for such biting tales as “The Open Window,” “Sredni Vashtar,” “Gabriel-Ernest,” and “The Interlopers.”

PAMELA SARGENT is an award-winning American science fiction, fantasy, and historical writer. Her best-known work is the “Venus Trilogy,” comprising Venus of Dreams (1986), Venus of Shadows (1988), and Child of Venus (2001). Her Borgo Press book, Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories (2012), collects together the separately-published short stories in this award-winning series.

ERNEST THOMPSON SETON (1860-1946) was a well-known American writer, naturalist, artist, and founder of the Boy Scouts of America. He penned numerous short stories, novels, and nonfiction accounts of animal wildlife.

HENRY SLESAR (1927-2002), an American writer, was best-known for his hundreds of television scripts and short stories, particularly those tales penned for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His work is wry, satirical, humorous, and incisive.

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910) is best-known today for his classic American novels, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he also wrote hundreds of short works for the popular magazines of his day.