by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, F Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony Hope, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and H G Wells
The Mark Steyn Club was born twenty-four months ago in May 2017, which means we are now two, and moving full speed ahead with plans for our third year. As I always say, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone - and we now prefer more free content than at any other time in our sixteen-year history.
That said, we have cooked up a few bonus items for members only. This one was introduced in the first weeks of the Club two years ago, and it very quickly became one of the most popular features among our members. I was a little bit startled by that, but also thrilled and delighted. Tales for Our Time is a monthly audio series in which I revisit some classic fiction I've mentioned in books and columns over the years - old stories that nevertheless speak to our own age. We usually post an episode a day, and you can either enjoy it as a book at bedtime twenty minutes before you lower your lamp - or pile up the chapters and listen to the whole thing on a long car journey.
We're fine-tuning what we do as we go along, and, to mark our second birthday, we've introduced a new Tales for Our Times home page, with our various audio entertainments laid out in an easy-to-navigate Netflix-style "tile" format that, so far, listeners seem to be enjoying. Tomorrow night, Saturday, we'll have a Tales for Our Time special that comes by way of popular request, and next week we'll start a brand new tale, also by popular request. But, just ahead of that, here's an encore presentation of last year's first-birthday special - a sampler of some of the nightly serials from our first season, all prefaced by my introductions to the author and the book.
If you're a devoted follower of Tales for Our Time, I hope this will be a reminder of a rollicking first year. If you're a Mark Steyn Club member who's missed one or two or all of these, I hope it'll whet your appetite to take a prowl around the archive. And, if you're not a Mark Steyn Club member, I hope you'll enjoy this taste of one of the Club's favorite features. I start out where our series began two years ago - with Conan Doyle's tale of western hostages in the hands of the 19th century version of Isis, the followers of the Mahdi, in The Tragedy of the Korosko. Some of what follows will be very familiar - Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde; some of it won't be - Scott Fitzgerald's long out-of-print tale of The Rubber Check. But we hope you enjoy this hour-and-a-quarter's worth of excerpts from some of our most popular serials, as a Steyn Club birthday gift from me to you.
If you want actual birthday cake that will have to wait until September's Second Annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise, on which we hope to see at least a few of you.
To hear this Tales for Our Time sampler, simply click above. Our latest Tale for Our Time can be found here, and our third season starts next week. And please join me tomorrow for a brand new Tales for Our Time Saturday night special.
The crucial element of The Mark Steyn Club is the members - and we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in that first month two Mays ago who have been so eager to re-subscribe this May. We thank you all, but we always like to have new members too, and we've been gratified by the number who've chosen to join in this anniversary season. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here. And, if you have a friend of literary bent who might enjoy our monthly audio adventures, don't forget our special gift membership.
~For more Steyn Club second anniversary celebrations, please see:
The Mark Steyn Show
with George Papadopoulos
On the Town
Non-Stop Nearly Number Ones
Clubland Q&A
Universal Exports is Hiring
Steyn's Song of the Week
Tea for Two
Tales for Our Time
The Island of Dr Moreau
A Clubman's Notes
Now We Are Two
