This book content includes:
A Christmas Tree
What Christmas is as we Grow Older
The Poor Relation's Story
The Child's Story
The Schoolboy's Story
Nobody's Story
The Lady of the Shroud is a novella by Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula), written in 1909.
The book is an epistolary novel, narrated in the first person via letters and diary extracts from various characters, but mainly Rupert. The initial sections, leading up to the reading of the uncle's will, told by other characters, suggest that Rupert is the black sheep of the family, and the conditions...
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The titular character descends into madness after disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. Based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king, the play has been widely adapted for the stage and motion pictures, with the title role coveted by...
Pictures from Italy is a travelogue by Charles Dickens, written in 1846. The book reveals the concerns of its author as he presents, according to Kate Flint, the country "like a chaotic magic-lantern show, fascinated both by the spectacle it offers, and by himself as spectator." In 1844, Dickens took a respite from writing novels and for several months traveled through France and Italy with his...
The title of this essay has it right - these are just a series of stories about a trip that Twain and some friends took to Bermuda from New York City. Twain wrote this for "The Atlantic" in 1877 and his wry style makes him an excellent travel companion.
In reality, Twain's story of the trip is the story of the people he meets along the way. Most of the stories are humorous, some are duds and...
Monday or Tuesday is a 1921 short story collection by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press. 1000 copies were printed with four full-page woodcuts by Vanessa Bell. Leonard Woolf called it one of the worst printed books ever published because of the typographical mistakes in it. Most mistakes were corrected for the US edition published by Harcourt Brace. It contained eight stories:
A...
Reprinted in its entirety for the first time since its original publication in 1862, Somebody's Luggage is a rediscovered gem from Dickens's later life.
Stumbling upon some luggage that has been left behind in the hotel where he works, a waiter searches through it to identify its owner. He fails to discover this, but he does find, secreted away in different parts of the luggage, quite a number...
Life on the Mississippi (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before theAmerican Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the War.
The book begins with a brief history of the river as reported by Europeans and Americans, beginning with the Spanish...
This book content includes:
The old curiousity shop
Oliver Twist
Barnaby Rudge
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Nicholas Nickleby
Dombey and son
The Pickwick papers
Little Dorrit
Martin Chuzzlewit
Our mutual friend
A tale of two cities
Bleak house
Hard times
The mystery of Edwin Drood
Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens, originally published between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens's ire is focused upon the institutions of debtors' prisons, in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is...
There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water.
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories is a collection of short semi-comic mystery stories that were written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1891. It includes:
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
The Canterville Ghost
The Sphinx Without a Secret
The Model Millionaire
In later editions, another story, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., was added to the collection.
Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious...
On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. For the sixth edition of 1872, the short title was changed to The Origin of Species....
Master of the World (French: Maître du monde), published in 1904, is one of the last novels by French pioneer science fiction writer, Jules Verne, and is a sequel to Robur the Conqueror. At the time Verne wrote the novel, his health was failing, and Master of the World is a "black novel," filled with the fear of the coming of tyrants like the novel's villain, Robur, and totalitarianism.
A...
The ironic satire of a decaying German duchy and its rejuvenation by the appearance of an independent-minded American woman. Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to mad woman, this novel is a microcosm of Europe before the Great War. The book's driving force is the development of a love between the young Prince, hidebound by tradition, and the exotic beautiful Imma. Written by Noble...
The Battle of Life: A Love Story is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1846. It is the fourth of his five "Christmas Books", coming after The Cricket on the Hearth and followed by The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.
The setting is an English village that stands on the site of an historic battle. Some characters refer to the battle as a metaphor for the struggles of life, hence...
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (commonly known as Martin Chuzzlewit) is a novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. It was originally serialised in 1843 and 1844. Dickens thought it to be his best work, but it was one of his least popular novels. Like nearly all of Dickens' novels, Martin Chuzzlewit was released to the public in monthly instalments....
This volume does not aim to contain all "the best American humorous short stories"; there are many other stories equally as good, I suppose, in much the same vein, scattered through the range of American literature. I have tried to keep a certain unity of aim and impression in selecting these stories. In the first place I determined that the pieces of brief fiction which I included must first of...
Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life", but is also about human values. In the opening chapters a body is found in theThames...