When best friends, Jack and Jill, tumble off their sled, their injuries cause them to be bedridden for many months. Their parents fill their days with the joys of Christmas preparations, a theatrical production and many other imaginative events.

Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject. The original publication spans only 150 pages, and the formatting leaves roughly half of each page blank. The spine is thread bound. It...

In Defense of Harriet Shelley is an excellent literary classic for all ages. Twain took much of his ideas and inspiration for his stories and tall tales from real experiences as a river boat pilot, his world travels, friendships, well known people, an educator and an early career as a journalist. A comical masterpiece by a legend of the past.

This book is the result of twelve years' experience in teaching university students to write special feature articles for newspapers and popular magazines. By applying the methods outlined in the following pages, young men and women have been able to prepare articles that have been accepted by many newspaper and magazine editors. The success that these students have achieved leads the author to...

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897) is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tries to protect ordinary citizens from insults by railroad conductors.

His Last Bow, published in September 1917, is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in Strand Magazine, and, amongst six other stories, was collected in an anthology titled His Last Bow, also called Reminiscensces of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The narration is in the third person, not, as usual, by Dr. Watson, and it is a spy story,...

Inspiring stories of heroes from various times and places relating their daring deeds, prompted by their high ideals. Perseus and Hercules are included from Greek mythology and David and Daniel from the Bible. Among the legendary heroes of the middle ages are St. George, King Arthur, Sir Galahad, Siegfried, Roland, Robin Hood, The Cid, and William Tell. Historical persons such as Alfred the...

This book is one of a series known as the Child’s own book of great musicians, written by Thomas Tapper, author of "Pictures from the Lives of the Great Composers for Children," "Music Talks with Children," "First Studies in Music Biography," and others. This series will be found not only to furnish a pleasing and interesting task for the children, but will teach them the main facts with...

Hard Times – For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book appraises English society and is aimed at highlighting the social and economic pressures of the times. Hard Times is unusual in several respects. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before...

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergymanJonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length...

This is the picture of a boy who was born in the north of the world. He loved his mother country and the music which the people sang. But he had music, all his own, that sang and sang in his heart. It was happy music and sad; solemn and joyous. You will hear it some day and love it all. Even when this little boy was in the primary school the music knocked at his heart's door as if it would...

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel. It is his second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, and it is a classic work of Victorian literature. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip. The novel was first published in serial form in Dickens's weekly...

Sam took the rebuke all the more meekly as he perceived the stiff black legs of a turkey poking-out from under my grandmother's apron while she was delivering it. To be exhorted and told of his shortcomings, and then furnished with a turkey at Thanksgiving, was a yearly part of his family program. In time he departed, not only with the turkey, but with us boys in procession after him, bearing a...

This satire on the U.S.A.'s myth of being the "Home of the Oppressed, where all men are free and equal", is unrelenting in its pursuit of justice through exposure. It draws a scathingly shameful portrait of how Chinese immigrants were treated in 19th century San Francisco. 

Glinda of Oz: In Which Are Related the Exciting Experiences of Princess Ozma of Oz, and Dorothy, in Their Hazardous Journey to the Home of the Flatheads, and to the Magic Isle of the Skeezers, and How They Were Rescued from Dire Peril by the Sorcery of Glinda the Good is the fourteenth Land of Oz book written by children's author L. Frank Baum, published on July 10, 1920. It is the last book of...

George Silverman's Explanation, published in instalments from January to March 1868, was one of the last pieces of fiction written by Charles Dickens, two years before his death. Silverman is born in a Preston cellar, and spends his early years locked in there, often left alone while his parents go out to seek work.

From the Earth to the Moon (French: De la terre à la lune) is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons aficionados, and their attempts to build an enormous sky-facing Columbiadspace gun and launch three people - the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet - in a projectile...

Following the Equator (sometimes titled More Tramps Abroad) is a non-fiction travelogue published by American author Mark Twain in 1897. Twain was practically bankrupt in 1894 due to a failed investment into a "revolutionary" typesetting machine. In an attempt to extricate himself from debt of $100,000 (equivalent of about $2.5 million in 2010) he undertook a tour of the British Empire in 1895,...

Eve's Diary is a comic short story by Mark Twain. It was first published in the 1905 Christmas issue of the magazine Harper's Bazaar, and in book format in June 1906 by Harper and Brothers publishing house. It is written in the style of a diary kept by the first woman in the biblical creation story, Eve, and is claimed to be "translated from the original MS." The "plot" of this novel is the...

The designing and making of Costume is a craft-sometimes artistic-with which we are all more or less concerned. It is also, in its own way, one of the living arts, that is, it is still carried forward experimentally by experts directly attached to the "business." It has not yet been subjected to rules of good taste formulated by Academies and Universities; but when Inigo Jones, the great...