The Mermaid of Druid Lake, and Other Stories

Bump, Charles Weathers, 1872-1908Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
193K words
Chapters
20

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Life PhilosophySuspenseful AtmosphereImaginationSlow ReadingLight ReadingFantasy StoriesHeartwarming NarrativeShort StoriesExotic CultureFolk Legend

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Mermaid of Druid Lake, and Other Stories by Charles Weathers BumpAuthor: Bump, Charles Weathers, 1872-1908,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jan 26, 2010

Editor's review

This short-story collection comes from Charles Weathers Bump and belongs to American and Canadian literature; it now returns to readers as a free ebook through Project Gutenberg. The title story, "The Mermaid of Druid Lake," hints at fantasy and legend, while "and Other Stories" suggests a variety of subjects and tones. For readers familiar with Project Gutenberg, the value of such texts lies not only in the stories themselves but in preserving a facet of early twentieth-century American popular writing, conveying the narrative rhythm and imagination of short fiction of that era. It suits segmented reading on an electronic device, one or two stories at a time, whether as bedtime reading or as supplementary material for studying early American short fiction. Note that the original is in English and the publication information is quite old; read with an eye to literary history rather than expecting modern suspense.

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Reading tips

  1. Read story by story, pausing briefly after each to sense the differences in tone.
  2. If English is an obstacle, first learn the titles and general subjects, then proceed paragraph by paragraph with a dictionary.
  3. Treat the book as a sample of literary history and note early twentieth-century short-story narrative habits and word choice.
  4. Adjust font size and line spacing on your e-reader to reduce eye strain from long screen reading.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? According to Project Gutenberg, the book's language is English and it belongs to the American and Canadian literature category. The stories are in the original English, and the electronic edition provided does not include a Chinese translation, so readers need some English reading ability.
Is this book suitable as bedtime reading? It can serve as segmented bedtime reading. It is a short-story collection, and each piece is relatively self-contained, suitable for one or two at a time. However, the sentence patterns and word choice of older English may require more concentration for some readers; adjust to your own reading pace.
What is special about the Project Gutenberg edition? Project Gutenberg is the earliest project providing free ebooks, founded by Michael Hart in 1971. This book is one of the free electronic texts released by the project, easy to obtain on a computer or e-reader, but the edition presents the original text without a modern introduction or notes.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Bump, Charles Weathers, 1872-1908 Author · American · 1872–1908

Charles Weathers Bump (1872–1908) was an American writer and newspaper contributor. Public information about his life is limited: details of his early education, professional career, and literary output are largely difficult to trace, and later readers chiefly know this short-lived author through the works he left behind. The collection includes his representative work, The Mermaid of Druid Lake, and Other Stories. The mermaid imagery in the title, together with the "and Other Stories" framing, suggests a volume made up mainly of short stories, with themes leaning toward fantasy and legend. What is known indicates a close connection between his writing and newspaper work, and the pieces may have appeared first in newspapers or magazines before being gathered into a book. Given the scarcity of materials, the contemporary influence and later assessment of his work remain to be further examined.