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Fathers and Sons (Russian: Отцы и дети Ottsy i dety, IPA: [ɐˈtsɨ i ˈdʲetʲi]; archaic spelling Отцы и дѣти), also translated more literally as Fathers and Children, is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, one of his best-known works.  Arkady Kirsanov has just graduated from the University of Petersburg and returns with...

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris) is a French Romantic/Gothic novel by Victor Hugo published in1831. The title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centered.  The novel's original French title, Notre-Dame de Paris (the formal title of the Cathedral) indicates that the...

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in 1847–48,satirizing society in early 19th-century Britain. It follows the lives of two very different women, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, amid their friends and family. The novel is now considered a classic, and has inspired several film adaptations. In...

Le Rouge et le Noir (French pronunciation: ​[ləʁuʒ e lə nwaʁ]; French for The Red and the Black) is a historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in 1830. It chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially beyond his modest upbringing through a combination of talent, hard work, deception, and hypocrisy—yet...

Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in thenovel are fully realized. Balzac conceived his ambitious project, The Human...

Robinson Crusoe /ˌrɒbɪnsən ˈkruːsoʊ/ is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. It was published under the considerably longer original...

La Peau de chagrin (French pronunciation: ​[la po dəʃaɡʁɛ̃], The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass's Skin) is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his...

The Lady of the Camellias (French: La Dame aux camélias) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils, first published in 1848, and subsequently adapted for the stage. The Lady of the Camellias premiered at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris, France on February 2, 1852. The play was an instant success, and Giuseppe Verdi immediately set about putting the story to music. His work became...

Utopia (Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia) is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More (1478–1535) published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. The title De optimo rei publicae statu deque...

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley about eccentric scientist Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name...

Little Brother is a novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor Books. It was released on April 29, 2008. The novel is about fourteenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights. The novel is available for free on the...

The Wreck of the Golden Mary is the work of many hands but was originally started by Dickens. The story portrays an amazing voyage around Cape Horn, then north to the coast of California. The tale takes a stunning turn when the ship strikes an iceberg and passengers and crew languish in lifeboats. Dickens’s subtlety of style and picturesque depiction keeps reader rapt till the very...

The Return of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of 13 Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1903-1904, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The book was first published in February 1905 by McClure, Phillips & Co. (New York) then on March 7, 1905 by Georges Newnes, Ltd. (London). This was the first Holmes collection since 1893, when Holmes had "died" in The Final Problem. Having published The...

"SHE: Do you like Kipling? HE: I don't know, I've never Kippled!" If you've never read Rudyard Kipling's science fiction, then you've never Kippled. Having achieved international fame with The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Kim, and his Just So Stories, in 1905 Kipling serialized a thrilling science fiction novella, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D, in which the reader learns-while...

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...

The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it periodically from 1897 through 1908. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race". Twain wrote multiple versions of the story; each is unfinished and involves the character of "Satan".

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, literally Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus, as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax after...

The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 stories starring the fictional detective. The story is set in 1888. The Sign of the Four has a complex plot involving service in East India Company, India, theIndian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among...

The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. In 1908 Grahame retired from...

In response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Dickens advocated genocide against the Indian race writing the allegorical The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. In Perils Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre.