Prospero’s Isle

Articles

• "The Sea-Wolf" (1904) by Jack London - 22 March

  This extraordinary tale of high seas and high emotions starts off calmly enough when the thirty-something, well-read and rather wealthy narrator embarks on a modern steam-driven ferry-boat in the Bay of San Francisco and muses on the efficient division of labour in modern society, whereby well-trained men can efficiently operate such magnificent and complex machines for the benefit of people like him in all security. But then a fog comes up, things do not at all follow the modern-comforts (...)

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• Jack London’s two war stories - December 2016

  Although Jack London was an experienced war correspondent, having covered the Japan-Russia conflict in 1904 and the Mexican Revolution in 1912, only 2 of his 198 short stories have soldiers and war as a central theme.
  But one of them is an absolute masterpiece that you will have trouble ever forgetting!
  1. An Old Soldier’s Story (1899).
  2. War (1911).
  Kindle and ePub versions are available for downloading below.
  1. AN OLD SOLDIER’S STORY A real incident which occurred in the life of (...)

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• Jack London’s in-depth exploration of the (shocking) living conditions in London’s East End: "The People of the Abyss" (1902) - December 2016

  In 1902 the 25-year-old Jack London, who was already a veteran of a year of vagrant "hobo" wanderings around the American continent when he was 17, of a year of sailing on a fishing boat in the Far Pacific when he was 18, and of a year in the Klondike gold-rush in Canada’s Far North when he was 21, found himself in London, where he had been sent by a Californian newspaper to cover the Boer war - which however had been concluded by the time he arrived there.
  So instead of exploring the (...)

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• A selection of South Seas/Hawaii stories by Jack London - November 2016

  Jack London loved sailing and spent a lot of time boating around not only his beloved Bay of San Francisco, but also and especially the innumerable South Sea islands and Hawaii, which were the subject of a sizeable portion of his oeuvre (33 short stories and several novels).
  He was particularly fascinated by the culture-shock both sides experienced as the Western/European/American values and mores and money-power had recently steam-rolled their way across the Pacific in those far-off (...)

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• Eleven of Jack London’s best Far North stories - October 2016

  The best of Jack London’s writings were mostly produced during his inspired decade 1899-1908, after the year he had spent in the Klondike region of Canada’s Northwest Territories participating in the great gold rush there.
  A majority (63) of the 107 short stories he wrote and published during that extraordinarily creative and prolific period were based on the harsh life and mostly-bitter experiences he had lived through and seen and heard about in that wild land.
  With the Klondike stories (...)

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• Survival in the Klondike – 10 great stories by Jack London - July 2016

  Jack London’s stories of life and adventure in the Far North, mostly set in the Klondike region of the Nothwest Terrtories in Canada during the great gold rush of 1898 there, all feature striking descriptions of the extreme climatic conditions experienced by the participants in that greatest of gold rushes.
  We have regrouped here the very best of all of his Klondike tales centered on the struggle for survival in that extraordinarily severe and hostile – and dangerous – clime.
  Kindle and (...)

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• Jack London’s funniest story : "That Spot" (1908) - July 2016

  Jack London is best known for his two adventurous Klondike novel(la)s The Call of the Wild (1905) and White Fang (1909), featuring exceptionally tough and survival-prone dogs not unlike their wild wolf forebearers.
  His great talent for getting into the heart and mind of mankind’s oldest conquest had already been evident in the many Klondike strories in which dogs and dog-teams are featured, but nowhere was his genius for capturing the individualities and personnalities of the canine genre (...)

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• "The Scarlet Plague" (1912): a powerful, early and little-known end-of-the-civilized-world science-fiction novella by Jack London - October 2015

  This exceptionally far-sighted vision of the plague-fall of civilization as we know it, first published in magazine format in 1912, was a brilliant precursor of the end-of-the-world variant of the science-fiction genre that has attracted so much attention in recent years.
  It was first published in book form as a novel in 1915, with a large number of dynamic, mostly full-page catch-the-moment-and-movement-in-action-style illustrations.
  It has ever since been classified as a novel, but with (...)

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• Jack London’s two great boxing stories: "A Piece of Steak" (1909) and "The Mexican" (1911) - July 2015

  Jack London only wrote two stories with a boxing theme, but what stories!
  Not only do they both get you inside the minds and hearts of the fighters and of their entourages - managers, promoters, betters and bloodthirsty spectators - more intensely and grippingly and insightfully than, well, just about anyone else has ever done, but they are both penetrated with a sense of something higher and of great significance: the vital sociological significance of food in a poverty-stricken (...)

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• The complete short stories of Jack London - synopses and ratings - June 2014

  Jack London (1876-1916) wrote an almost incredible number of short stories (198) before his premature death at the age of 40, as well as 21 novels and a considerable number of essays, plays, poems, and articles. The sheer volume of his output and the wide variety of his subjects, ranging from the Klondike (42% of his short stories), the South Seas/Hawaii (17%), Sailing, Hobos, Political Fiction and Crime Fiction to Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Boxing and others - and, it (...)

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• "The Hobo and the Fairy" (1911) - the full text of a memorable Hobo story by Jack London - May 2014

  During the great depression year of 1893 (the worst in the history of the United States until then), when he was only seventeen, Jack London (1876-1916) joined the nation-wide protest movement known as Kelly’s Army to march from San Francisco to Washington with thousands of others.
  He spent an entire year on the road, an experience which he summarized in his autobiographical memoir Jack London, by Himself as follows: “I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston, and up (...)

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• "The Heathen" (1909) - the full text of an unforgettable South Seas tale by Jack London - March 2014

  Jack London’s South Seas stories have many of the same basic themes as his better-known tales of the Klondike: the suffering and hardships of life in extreme climatic conditions, the innate cruelty and savagery of man, his extraordinary capacity for survival, race relations and the shock of cultures, the lure of lucre and the ephemeral essence of our brief passage through the vale of life - but in a widely different and even more exotic setting.
  If you are going to read only one of these (...)

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• An early science-fiction story by Jack London: "A Thousand Deaths" (1899) - February 2014

  This tale of a mad scientist’s medical experiments and inventions was the first story for which Jack London received payment from a magazine, an important milestone in the all-too-short career (he died at the age of 40) of this prolific author.
  It is one of only four of his vast output of short stories (198) that can be considered as "Science Fiction" .
  This quite remarkable story, dealing with typically-grim London themes of extreme suffering and near-death experiences, manages at the (...)

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• "Lost Face" (1908) - the full text of Jack London’s best short story - July 2013

  Jack London (1876-1916) is perhaps best remembered for his novels, notably the now-classic Klondike adventure novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) that put him on the literary map, and for his biting revolutionary opus Martin Eden (1909).
  But the depth and breadth of his talent is nowhere more evident than in the extensive output of short stories (198) that he produced throughout his relatively short career.
  And this story of violence and cruelty and ruse set in the (...)

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