Edgar Rice Burroughs

At the start of this volume, Tarzan knows his inheritance as an English lord, but is determined to hide that since he truly believes that his cousin, William Cecil Clayton, would make a better lord and husband for his beloved Jane. He gets involved with a married Russian countess (there's a plan -- oh, sure) who has issues with her criminal brother (Nicholas Rokoff -- a real villain, naturally, who becomes a regular in the series) and her older husband. As a consequence of his interaction with brother, Tarzan is lured into a room where he is attacked by a dozen Paris muggers. The scene that details this mugging is one of the great chapters in the literature of muggings. Tarzan fondly recalls his childhood and his foster ape mother with a friend, D'Arnot: "To you my friend, she would have appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful -- so gloriously does love transfigure its object."

At the end of A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first volume in Burroughs's Mars series, John Carter managed to get the factory that produces oxygen for Barsoom working again -- and collapsed. When he came to, he found himself back on earth, and separated from his beloved Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium. It's a decade later when Carter returns to Barsoom, and he finds himself in that part of the planet that the natives consider to be "heaven" -- which is no heaven at all. Carter has to reunite with his friend the fierce green warrior Tars Tarkas, fight with plant men and the great white apes of Barsoom, violate some significant religious taboos, survive the affections of an evil goddess, foment a slave revolt, fight in an arena, and still save Dejah Thoris in the middle of a giant air battle between the red, green, black and white people of Barsoom. . . . High adventure, Martian style.

In the previous volume, the Lord of the Jungle discovered the burnt corpse of his wife, Jane, after a visit to his African home by German soldiers. (One suspects that Burroughs never did like Jane; this sort of thing happened to her a lot.) In this volume, Tarzan learns that Jane was not murdered by the Germans but kidnaped -- and sets off in pursuit. As the novel begins, Tarzan has spent two months tracking his mate to Pal-ul-don ("Land of Men"), a hidden valley in Zaire, where he finds a land dinosaurs and men even stranger -- humanoids with tails. Ta-den is a hairless, white-skinned, Ho-don warrior; O-mat is a hairy, black skinned, Waz-don, chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world Tarzan becomes a captive -- but he impresses his captors so well that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru ("Tarzan the Terrible"). Meanwhile, a second visitor has come to Pal-ul-don -- wearing only a loin cloth and carrying an Enfield rifle along and a long knife. Pal-ul-don is where Jane is being held captive, of course. . . .

. . . . between Tarzan's avenging of his ape foster mother's death and his becoming leader of his ape tribe. In JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, Burroughs gives us an Ape-Man who might have fit in a television sitcom or a domestic drama. We see a Tarzan whose character is barely hinted at in the events of Tarzan on the Apes -- this is a collection of stories that take place in the same years as that first novel, but show us a very different aspect of Tarzan. We see "Tarzan's First Love," a tale of a teenage Tarzan with a distracting crush on a big-but-beautiful female gorilla called Teeka. The Ape-Man (well, boy, actually) declares his love for her and battles a childhood friend for her favor. But in the end he comes to understand that some things are Just Not Meant To Be, and forsakes his childhood heart-throb . . . In "The God of Tarzan," the Ape-Man asks himself the meaning of life -- and attempts to track down God in the same way that he would follow the spoor of a wounded deer. In "Tarzan Rescues the Moon," Tarzan sees a lunar eclipse and in his efforts to rescue the moon, shoots arrows into the moon until the moon re-emerges from the eclipse. In the end, it's Tarzan's struggle to find real meanings in the world around him that distinguish him from the apes who are his adoptive kin -- and make him as fascinating today as he was a hundred years ago.

When adventurer Bowen Tyler was taken captive aboard an enemy submarine, he never dreamed that his voyage would end in the land that time forgot. It is a land called Caspak, a land of myth and fable: located somewhere on a mountainous island in the South Pacific, populated with winged, humanlike creatures, dinosaurs, ferocious beasts of prey, Neanderthals, "wild ape-men," and monstrous reptiles who all terrorize one another -- and Bowen Tyler, and the submarine's mixed crew of World War I-era adventurers. Stranded on the beach, they fight their way across the island, through dinosaurs and Bronze Age warriors, saber-toothed tigers and cunning beast-men. They dine on Plesiosaurus steaks and face incredible dangers, meet and fall in love with a jungle princess -- and unravel the incredible secret of Caspak. . . .

Virginia gentleman John Carter, unexpectedly transported to the perilous red planet, Mars, finds himself captured by the loveless Green Men of Thark. As Carter struggles to win his freedom and the affections of fellow captive Dejah Thoris, princess of the rival clan of Helium the fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance: warring Martian tribes collide and the beleaguered Atmosphere Factory grinds to a suffocating halt. Ray Bradbury, reminiscing on the enduring thrill of Burroughs s Martian adventure, writes, I stood on the lawns of summer, raised my hands, and cried for Mars, like John Carter, to take me home. I flew to the Red Planet and never returned. "

Ambushed in the cold moonlight of an Arizona night, Captain John Carter is inexplicably teleported to Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants. Legendary Barsoom—where hostile tribes of towering green warriors roam an arid landscape of dead cities and feuding city-states; where pilgrimages are made to a river of death that conceals a terrifying secret; where lifespans are measured in centuries; and where airships speed through the thinning atmosphere while duels are fought with swords below. Stranded and fighting for his life in a dying, savage world, John Carter embarks on one of the greatest adventures of all time as his destiny and Barsoom's become one. The first three books of Edgar Rice Burroughs's brilliantly conceived Barsoom series—A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars—are brought together here for the first time. The trilogy follows the saga of John Carter from his unexpected arrival on Barsoom through hair-raising adventures and startling discoveries from pole to pole of the planet.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote this tale of confused identity and royal intrigue in 1914 and 1915, as World War I was getting ready to happen: it means to be an homage to Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda. But, of course, it isn't Hope writing, but Burroughs: the events that led to the war inform the book, and it speaks to the real events happening as Burroughs wrote. That makes it a very different story from Hope's almost-whimsical novel. Part of the reason Burroughs left such a lasting mark on the world is because he was engaged in the events that surrounded him; the news troubled him deeply and personally. As well it might He was writing, as he always did, on fantastical topics; but it is the fantastic nature of the twentieth century that is the real text of the man's career.

In this sequel to At the Earth's Core, return to the world of Pellucidar—an exotic, savage land at the center of the Earth, an untamed wilderness where the sun never sets. When American explorer David Innes first discovered Pellucidar, he fell under the spell of the strange world, earning the respect of many, the undying hatred of a few, and the love of the beautiful Dian. Torn from her arms by trickery, Innes vows revenge and returns to the Inner World to seek his lost love. Innes breaks through the earth's outer crust, far from his beloved, and is forced to cross a fierce, unyielding world to reach her. Innes's epic journey through the many strange lands of Pellucidar, including the Land of Awful Shadow, which lies beneath the brilliantly conceived pendant moon, and his heart-pounding encounters with prehistoric beasts and strange peoples makes Pellucidar one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's most rousing adventures.