Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies…and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the longago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "adhocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest hightech touches. Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of evershifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes. Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a comingofage romantic comedy and a kickbutt cybernetic tour de force.

Ring Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and the theatre. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for his writing.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters from “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular, with semi-literate grammar and phonetic spelling. Like most of Lardner’s stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. Until 1920, Lardner continued to write follow-up stories about Jack Keefe, some of which were collected in the books Treat ‘Em Rough and The Real Dope, narrating Jack’s Army experiences in World War I.

Lardner later published such stories as “Haircut”, “Some Like Them Cold”, “The Golden Honeymoon”, “Alibi Ike”, “A Day with Conrad Green”, and dozens more. Sometimes narrated by a “wise boob”, with slyly satirical commentary on manners and morals (The Big Town), sometimes taking a poignant view (“Now and Then”, “Old Folk’s Christmas”), sometimes sliding into sheer noir (“Champion”), always entertaining. His frequent use of vernacular influenced sports fiction writing for generations to come.

He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted.[4] He spun humorous and sentimental tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit", "Benny Southstreet", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charley", "Dave the Dude", or "The Seldom Seen Kid". His distinctive vernacular style is known as "Runyonese": a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. He is credited with coining the phrase "Hooray Henry", a term now used in British English to describe an upper-class, loud-mouthed, arrogant twit.

The Red Cockade is a Dumas-like swashbuckling historical romance, set around 1789 in Cahors and Nimes at the time of the French Revolution, and tells of the adventures of an aristocrat sympathetic to the cause of the people. The San Francisco Chronicle said this one 'deserves a place among the best historical fiction of the latter part of this [the nineteenth] century.' One of Weyman's finest.

This work exposes several of the chief humbugs of the world, written in the entertaining and humorous style Barnum is known for. Found within are discussions relative to hoaxes, money manias, adventurers, medicine and quacks, religious humbugs, trade and business impositions, spiritualists, ghosts and witchcrafts, and personal reminiscences.

Mrs. Lucas, Lucia (pronounced Lu-CHEE-A) to her intimates, resides in the village of Riseholme, a pretty Elizabethan village in Worcestershire, where she vigorously guards her status as "Queen" despite occasional attempts from her subjects to overthrow her. Lucia’s dear friend Georgie Pillson both worships Lucia and occasionally works to subvert her power.

A very witty book, you feel affection for Lucia and her affectations but at the same time you want to see her taken down a notch.

The most well-known and well-liked of Gaskell's works, this softly humorous picture of an English country village was first serialized in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens in 1851. Based on the village of Gaskell's childhood, "Cranford" is narrated by a young woman visiting the town who describes the genteel poverty of two middle-aged spinster sisters, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah. Gaskell tells of their little adventures in a confidential and almost chatty tone, perfectly conveying their habits and standards of propriety, decency, and kindness in reduced circumstances. The colorful characters and subtle class distinctions of the village of Cranford are captured in this compassionate and hopeful portrayal of small-town English life.

and from a Goodreads review:
the humor is so sly. at times it's difficult to believe that this was written over 150 years ago. I guess that gentle social humor has always been with us.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians: the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths so real that readers accused him of including as characters in his drama real individuals whom they knew. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

The entire saga comprises three trilogies of books, of which this is the first. The other two ("A Modern Comedy" and "End of the Chapter") are available as separate downloads.

This first trilogy, "The Forsyte Saga", chronicles the life of three generations of the Forsyte family, a wealthy upper middle class English family, in the turbulent years between the 1880s and the 1920s - a time period during which English society was completely transformed. The books are set against the great events of the day - the Boer War and WWI, the rise of Labour, the death of Queen Victoria, and much more.

This book was originally published as three novels, with a short story "interlude" between each one, the structure being:

The Man of Property
(Interlude) Indian Summer of a Forsyte
In Chancery
(Interlude) Awakening
To Let