Book Description
Word count: 2336. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
What a strange and awful face it was!--what a thing of distorted passion and pain! What an agony was expressed in every line of the features!--agony in which the traces of a divine beauty lingered only to render the whole countenance more repellent and terrific! A kind of sentient solemnity, mingled with wrath and terror, glared from the painted eyes,--the lips, slightly parted in a cruel upward curve, seemed about to utter a shriek of menace,--the hair, drooping in black, thick clusters low on the brow, looked wet as with the dews of the rigor mortis,--and to add to the mysterious horror of the whole conception, the distinct outline of a death's-head was seen plainly through the rose-brown flesh-tints. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Ziska Zings!
Considered as one of her best fantasies, this fine tale of erotic horrors, transmigration of the soul and reincarnations from ancient Egypt culminates with a breathtaking climax in a secret underground chamber of a pyramid. A wild wonderful ride!

A Thrilling Tale
At first, "Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul" may seem like an odd title for what is, in essence, a romance. It is perfectly appropriate, however, when one learns that the story is about the darker side of the kind of love that "many waters cannot quench . . . nor can the floods drown"--the only kind of love that Marie Corelli believed in.

The story revolves around the mysterious Princess Ziska, who captivates the set of European tourists who are escaping their continent's harsh winter, in exotic Egypt. In particular, she draws three men towards her--Denzil Murray, a Scottish highlander; Armand Gervase, a French painter; and Dr. Maxwell Dean, an English historian and Egyptologist--for very different reasons.

During a costume ball, she comes as her namesake, Ziska-Charmazel, a woman who lived during the reign of Amenhotep. At this point it becomes clear that she has a diabolical agenda that involves one of these three men--her Twin Soul, the reincarnation of Araxes, a great Egyptian warrior and lover of Ziska-Charmazel.

Corelli tells this tale beautifully. The foreshadowing is excellent and the pace never lags. She keeps the reader in total suspense until the ending--which is proper, as "Ziska" is a mystery story (with some juicy horror elements). Unlike her more well-known reincarnation romance, "The Life Everlasting", which had a perfectly predictable ending (not necessarily a bad thing), "Ziska" has a conclusion that is anybody's guess.

It may _still_ be anybody's guess. Though this novel was written only a mere century or so ago, it is dedicated to the present incarnation of Araxes. Where _he_ is, there Ziska-Charmazel shall also be. It's a nice, spooky thought.

A Reincarnation Romance
a wonderful, silly book brimming with turn-of-the-century fascination for the mysteries of Egypt and what was then (and maybe still is!) alternative spiritualism. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
O people doomed and made desolate! he cried.. "O nation once mighty, brought low to the dust of destruction! Hear me, ye strong men and fair women!--and you, ye poor little children who never again shall see the sun rise on the thousand domes of Al-Kyris! Lift up the burden of bitter lamentation!--lift it up to the Heaven of Heavens, the Throne of the All-Seeing Glory, the Giver of Law, the Destroyer of Evil! Weep! ... weep for your sins and the sins of your sons and your daughters--cast off the jewels of pride,--rend the fine raiment, ... let your tears be abundant as the rain and dew! ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was the most popular novelist of the turn of the century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For thirty years she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite--Edmund Gosse dismissed her as "that little milliner"--but these opinions had no impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, with The Sorrows of Satan, she broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel sold 100,000 copies a year.

Idol of Suburbia returns Marie Corelli to conversations about the late-Victorian and Edwardian literary world. As Annette R. Federico points out, Corelli's participation in the cultural life of her time was highly creative, combative, and contradictory. Her ongoing war with highbrow literary critics and her management of her own image illuminate continuing debates about literary value, class hegemony, and gender politics at the fin de sicle.

In examining Corelli's celebrity and her protean literary talents in the context of a changing book market, Federico reveals the profusion of the late-Victorian literary imagination. She analyzes Corelli's participation in literary decadence, feminism, and New Woman fiction, and she discusses how seriously we should take her aesthetic and its literary influence. Federico asks why heterosexual love seems pathological in so many of Corelli's novels and assesses the validity of biographical and psychoanalytic explanations of her celibacy and her lifelong companionship with another woman.

Idol of Suburbia is the first full-length study to address these questions and to set Corelli within the framework of literary history and contemporary critical theory. ... Read more