Queen of the Con tells the true story of Cassie Chadwick, a successful swindler and “one of the top 10 imposters of all time,” according to Time magazine. Born Betsy Bigley in 1857 in Canada, she first operated as Madame Devere, a European clairvoyant, and in 1890 was arrested for defrauding a Toledo bank of $20,000. In the mid-1890s, while working as a madam in Cleveland, Cassie met and married a widowed physician with a coveted Euclid Avenue address.

Queen Victoria’s Stalker is the first full-length account of the Boy Jones’s persistent stalking of Queen Victoria and the journalism and literature inspired by his intrusions. By comparing this case to other instances of celebrity stalking and discussing various theories of stalking mentality, Jan Bondeson offers a fresh analysis of this unique and unclassifiable case.

Tolkien’s concern with time—past and present, real and “faerie”—captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness. Reading his work, we “fall wide asleep” into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world. Flieger explores Tolkien’s use of dream as time-travel in his unfinished stories The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers as well as in The Lord of the Rings and his shorter fiction and poetry.