If you are a student of English literature, you have read Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. You might have been puzzled by the sudden shifts in tone from slapstick comedy to dire tragedy; and you might have read a lot of nonsense in explanation of those shifts in the introduction to whatever edition of the play you picked up in a university bookstore—presuming, of course, that you read the thing in that long-gone and nearly forgotten era when university bookstores sold books.

What was missing from your study of the play was an examination of its source. The English prose romance of Doctor Faustus, loosely translated from a German original, was very popular in the late 1500s under the title The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. And if you do read it (it is very entertaining, by the way), you will at once see that Marlowe’s play had to be what it was, because he had to give the audience what they expected. If they showed up for Doctor Faustus and did not see him invisibly beating up the Pope, there would be a riot.

Unfortunately, the prose romance of Doctor Faustus has not been in print for a century and a half, so it was until now nearly impossible for professors of English literature to assign it to their students.

We say “until now,” because Dr. Boli, in the spirit of self-interested mercenary calculation that makes capitalism the best economic system ever devised by the absent mind of man, has brought the book back into print for you in an affordable and very legible paperback edition. It includes a learned introduction by William J. Thoms from his 1858 edition, in which he printed it as part of his large and expensive multi-volume anthology of Early English Prose Romances; but it has been completely reset in new type, each letter designed by Dr. Boli himself.

Naturally, universities will want to order copies in large quantities for the literature classes that are now bound to be studying this book intently. But as a special favor to his own readers, Dr. Boli is making an ebook version available free for instant download right here.

The English Prose Romance of Doctor Faustus
MOBI file for Amazon Kindle
EPUB file for every other ebook reader in the world

Fundamentalist (noun). An adherent of any religion who latches on to the extraneous details and decorative fripperies of the faith, to the utter neglect of the basic principles. A Christian fundamentalist insists on the literal truth of the creation hymn in Genesis while defying every precept in the Sermon on the Mount. An Islamic fundamentalist worries himself sick over whether the faithful can carry their groceries in paper bags (because infidels might have recycled the paper from old Korans, infidels being just the sort of people who would do that), while continuing to kick the poor and helpless in the teeth, which is the one thing known for a fact to make Allah mad as a hornet.

Etymologically, the word comes from a Latin term meaning having to do with the fundament. 

Fundamentalists are unpleasant, but fortunately you will never meet one. The word is used in modern English only to describe the religious beliefs of third parties not present in the current conversation.

Dear Dr. Boli: My Kindle reader suddenly started playing the Valse triste by Sibelius, and now it won’t stop. It just keeps playing the Valse triste over and over again. It’s kind of freaking me out. How can I make it stop? —Sincerely, Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

Dear Sir: You have not mentioned what it was that you were reading. Were you reading a particularly sad book, like something by Mrs. Henry Wood or perhaps Richard Nixon’s memoirs? Ebook readers are sentimental creatures most of the time anyway, but a steady diet of sad books can turn them from sentimental to morose if you are not careful. It sounds as though your Kindle may already be in the advanced stages. The only cure, or at least palliative, is to read only amusing books on the Kindle for the next few weeks. Fill it with the works of P. G. Wodehouse or Robert Benchley, and read your sad books on paper.