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The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
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The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

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This early work by Arthur Conan Doyle was originally published in 1898 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'The Brazilian Cat' is a short story about an enormous and captivating black cat. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. It was between 1876 and 1881, while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, that he began writing short stories, and his first piece was published in 'Chambers's Edinburgh Journal' before he was 20. In 1887, Conan Doyle's first significant work, iA Study in Scarlet', appeared in 'Beeton's Christmas Annual'. It featured the first appearance of detective Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist who was to eventually make Conan Doyle's reputation. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 17, 2015
ISBN9781473399341
The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
Author

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish writer and physician, most famous for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes and long-suffering sidekick Dr Watson. Conan Doyle was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.

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    The Brazilian Cat (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - Arthur Conan Doyle

    The Brazilian Cat

    By Arthur Conan Doyle

    A Cryptofiction Classic

    Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

    This book is copyright and may not be

    reproduced or copied in any way without

    the express permission of the publisher in writing

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available

    from the British Library

    Introduction

    The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

    Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

    Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact (1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders (1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.

    The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It was in 1955 that Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans – known as the father of cryptozoology – published his On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he

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