Written by Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom depicts the story of a nineteenth-century girl, Rose Campbell, finding her way in society. Sequel to Eight Cousins. The story begins when Rose returns home from a long trip to Europe. Everyone has changed. As a joke, Rose lines up her seven cousins to take a long look at them, just as they did with her when they first met. The youngest accidentally...

Demons (Russian: Бесы, Bésy) is an anti-nihilistic novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1871-2. Although titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoyevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demons. An extremely political book, Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial Russia in the late...

The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens. In 1859 Dickens founded a new journal called All the Year Round and the Uncommercial Traveller articles would be among his main contributions. He seems to have chosen the title and persona of the Uncommercial Traveller as a result of a speech he gave on 22 December 1859 to the Commercial...

This collection of excerpts from Dickens' novels, first published in 1909, includes: Trotty Veck and Meg, Tiny Tim, The Runaway Couple, Little Dorritt, The Toy-Maker and His Blind Daughter, Little Nell, Little David Copperfield, Jenny Wren, Pip's Adventure, Todgers, Dick Sweviller and the Marchioness, Mr. Wadle's Servant Joe, and The Bravve and Honest Boy Oliver Twist.

The Beetle (or The Beetle: A Mystery) is an 1897 horror novel by the British writer Richard Marsh, in which a polymorphous Ancient Egyptian entity seeks revenge on a British Member of Parliament. It initially out-sold Bram Stoker's similar horror story Dracula, which appeared the same year. The story is told from four points of view, which generally flow from each other with limited scene...

Mansfield Park is the third novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. When the novel reached a second edition in 1816, its publication was taken over by John Murray, who also...

Nicholas Nickleby; or, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is a novel by Charles Dickens. Originally published as aserial from 1838 to 1839, it was Dickens' third novel. The novel centres on the life and adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a young man who must support his mother and sister after his father dies. Nicholas Nickleby's father dies unexpectedly after losing all of his money in...

This text is based on the book “Grimm’s household tales with the author’s notes.” By Grimm Jakob Ludwig Karl. Translated by Margaret Hunt. This text includes all Grimm’s fairy tales and 10 children’s legends. The Margaret Hunt’s translation is very true to the German original. 

Ellie Dunn, her father, and her fiancé are invited to one of Hesione Hushabye’s infamous dinner parties, to be held at the house of her father, the eccentric Captain Shotover, an inventor in his late 80s who is trying to create a "psychic ray" that will destroy dynamite. The house is built in the shape of the stern of a ship. Lady Utterword, Shotover's other daughter, arrives from...

Jo's Boys, and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men" is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1886. The novel is the final book in the unofficial Little Women series. In it, Jo's "children," now grown, are caught up in real world troubles. It is also the only Alcott novel that has not had a movie adaption. The book mostly follows the lives of Plumfield boys who...

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children...

A Song of the English was collected in The Seven Seas, published simultaneously in London and the USA on 30 October 1896: London, Methuen & Co. New York, D. Appleton & Co.(In 1892/3, Kipling had instructed Appleton & Co to use English spelling for any of his work that they published.) A separate edition of the poem, including the six subsidiary poems, was published by Hodder and...

The Land of the Blue Flower was not called by that name until the tall, strong, beautiful King Amor came down from his castle on the mountain crag and began to reign. Before that time it was called King Mordreth's Land, and as the first King Mor-dreth had been a fierce and cruel king this seemed a gloomy name...

"Here's your breakfast, miss. I hope it's right. Your mother showed me how to fix it, and said I'd find a cup up here." "Take that blue one. I have not much appetite, and can't eat if things are not nice and pretty. I like the flowers. I've been longing for some ever since I saw them last night." The first speaker was a red-haired, freckled-faced girl, in a brown calico dress and white apron,...

Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with...

The Ancient Allan is a novel by H Rider Haggard. Sitting beside entrancing Lady Ragnall while the smoke of an ancient Egyptian herb grows thick around them, Allan Quatermain finds himself departing the world he know and entering into his strangest adventure. In a mystic transformation, he comes to his senses in an earlier incarnation... as Shabaka, hunter of lions -- scion of the rulers of...

The House of the Dead (Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novelpublished in 1861 in the journal Vremyaby Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberianprison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The...

This book is in the public domain, so you can download it from several sites on the web. This book was first published in 1906, the printed version has 138 pages and has pictures in it, the e-book versions have no pictures. The book is easy to read and tells you about the history of different kind of fabrics, it also has chapters on more practical isues, such as: what kind of clothes are suitable...

The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (published 1888) is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. The Phantom 'Rickshaw After an affair with a Mrs. Agnes Keith-Wessington in Simla, the narrator, Jack, repudiates her and eventually becomes engaged to Miss Kitty Mannering. Yet Mrs. Wessington continually reappears in Jack's life, begging him to reconsider, insisting that it was...

While the three ghosts that visited Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens' most famous apparitions, his interest in the supernatural did not end there. Three Ghost Stories is just that: a collection of three different stories that are true Gothic classics. The three stories, The Signal Man, The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder were sensational for their time and continue to hold up well,...