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Title: Martin Birck’s Youth

Author: Hjalmar Söderberg

Description: Narrated in a collection of vignettes, the start of Martin Birck’s young life in Stockholm is filled with the joys and frustrations of children everywhere. As he ages, his idealism falls away in a series of small shocks: stories of local murders told by an older friend, having to hold his own in school, an encroaching disbelief in the Christian faith his mother has instilled in him. These, along with his perceived trajectory, lead to the shattering revelation: “So this is life.” ritten in 1901, Martin Birck’s Youth is split into three parts, covering Martin’s experiences as a child, a late teenager, and a young man. It seems at least partially based on Hjalmar Söderberg’s own life, and shares themes with his other work, including a deep interest in the psychology of his characters and a pervasive feeling of melancholy. These days it’s seen as one of Söderberg’s major works, alongside Doctor Glas and The Serious Game.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Arrow of Gold

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: The young narrator of The Arrow of Gold, a British seaman called Monsieur George, finds himself in Marseilles, France, in the 1870s during the time of the Third Carlist War. Supporters of the pretender are smuggling arms into Spain, and the narrator soon becomes entangled in this undercover plot. His benefactor is the mysterious Doña Rita, and their relationship is the plot’s focal point. The Arrow of Gold was published as a book in 1919 and serialized between 1918 and 1920. For inspiration, Conrad drew heavily on his personal experience, previously recounted in The Mirror of the Sea. One of Conrad’s final novels, the book met with some criticism in comparison to his earlier works, and is now mostly remembered for its autobiographical aspects.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Olney Hymns

Author: John Newton

Description: John Newton was a slave trader who had a dramatic conversion to Christianity, after which he studied to be a minister. He was then appointed to the rural parish of Olney, a community largely inhabited by the impoverished and uneducated. There he met William Cowper, an eminent poet who had moved to Olney after a bout of severe depression led him to convert to evangelical Christianity. He and Newton became friends, and Newton invited him to contribute to a hymnbook he was writing. Due to Cowper’s episodes of depression, he was only able to contribute a few hymns—of the 350, Cowper contributed only sixty-six. Cowper’s health delayed the book’s publication until 1779, by which time the hymns had been widely circulated among evangelical churches; by 1930, these Olney Hymns had gone through more than thirty-seven editions. Several of the hymns continue to be widely sung, most notably “Amazing Grace.” The hymns use simple meters and are easily sung, with Newton himself going so far as to say they were written for “plain people.” Their simplicity, ease of singing, and expression of deep, personal, and fervent faith served generations of Christian churches.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Lady Rose’s Daughter

Author: Mary Augusta Ward

Description: Mademoiselle Julie Le Breton is a complex, intelligent, ambitious woman secretly scheming to advance the career of a man she loves—but who is engaged to her cousin. She rebels against the subservient role she’s forced to play in society, and hides her illegitimacy by concealing her outcast parents. She repeatedly refuses the proposals of a steadfast intellectual struggling against his upper class heritage, even though such a marriage would restore her to her rightful place in society. As tumultuous events unfold, can Julie’s impulsive, passionate nature be tempered? Initially serialized in Harper’s Magazine, Lady Rose’s Daughter became the best-selling novel of 1903.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Pearl

Author:

Description: A father is heartbroken after losing his young daughter, whom he thinks of as a beautiful pearl he can never get back. One day, while grieving in a garden, he falls asleep and dreams of a strange, perfect world where he meets her again—only now she appears as a glowing, peaceful young woman in heaven. She tries to comfort him, explaining that she’s safe and happy with God, and that her place there isn’t something she earned but rather was given through divine love. The father desperately wants to be with her again, but he struggles to fully understand and accept what she’s saying. When he tries to cross a river to reach her, he suddenly awakes. The Pearl was written in the late 14th century by the unnamed Gawain Poet, the same author believed to have written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s a Middle English poem that reflects strong Christian beliefs, especially grief, salvation, and divine grace, which were central themes of medieval life. The poem is part of the “dream vision” tradition, where a narrator falls asleep and experiences a symbolic dream that reveals deeper spiritual truths.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: With the Empress Dowager of China

Author: Katharine A. Carl

Description: In 1903, Katharine A. Carl, an American painter, received an invitation from Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American minister to China, to be presented before the Chinese imperial court to paint a portrait of Cixi, the Empress Dowager, for exhibition at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. After an initial sketching session, Carl was invited by the Empress Dowager to stay with her imperial court, first for a matter of days, and then for an extended period of several months. In doing so, Carl became the first person to paint a Western-style portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi and was one of the only Westerners to have lived with the Chinese imperial court during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. With the Empress Dowager of China describes Carl’s travels and interactions with her court, including her recollections of the Empress Dowager’s reactions to crises like the Russo-Japanese War.

Subjects: nonfiction, travel

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Title: A Bride of a Summer’s Day

Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Description: The marriage of Ida Culvers to her first cousin Sefton seems like an opportune match: she receives his title, and he gets access to her fortune. But before setting out on their honeymoon, Ida asks for some time alone at her mother’s grave—and then promptly disappears. The only clue is a letter delivered to her father saying that she’s safe and with friends. That does little to assuage the worries of the family, and when a brooch of Ida’s shows up broken and missing gems, the hunt is definitely on. First published in 1891 in Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round magazine, A Bride of a Summer’s Day sees Catherine Louisa Pirkis continuing to develop her catalog of mystery stories, which would reach its height with Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. Pirkis here focuses on the worries of the upper class: while a detective does make an appearance, he’s only begrudgingly engaged for fear that the scandal would cause a loss of social standing; and when an explanation arrives, the Culvers’ telling first thought is to immediately stop the investigation.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Barnaby Rudge

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Barnaby Rudge opens in the English village of Chigwell in 1775, where an unsolved double murder casts a long shadow over the local community, and in particular Barnaby Rudge, the son of one of the victims. Five years later, London is consumed by the Gordon Riots of 1780, when Lord George Gordon led the Protestant Association in a protest against increased rights for Catholics that descended into days of mob violence. Into this maelstrom wanders Barnaby, a guileless young man with an intellectual disability, recognized across the countryside by his eccentric dress and by Grip, the raven riding on his shoulder. Easily led and hungry for excitement, Barnaby is drawn into the riots, marching under a banner he doesn’t understand towards consequences he can’t foresee. Dickens uses the riots to explore what happens when private resentments are given public sanction. The most ideologically passionate figures are revealed to be cynical manipulators, and the violence provides cover for characters pursuing entirely personal vendettas. The novel is also peopled with memorable figures from quieter walks of life, like Dolly Varden, the locksmith’s daughter, whose charm and vivacity have made her one of the most celebrated characters Dickens ever wrote. Her father Gabriel provides the novel’s moral center, a figure of stubborn decency who refuses to be bent by either domestic bullying or mob coercion, and whose integrity throws the surrounding corruption into sharp relief. Barnaby Rudge was the fifth of Dickens’s novels and his first venture into historical fiction, a form he returned to only once more in A Tale of Two Cities. It has long been among his less-read works, though Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd describes it as one of his most rewarding. The character of Grip the raven notably inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Raven” after reviewing the novel in 1841.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Ring Lardner

Description: Ring Lardner was a prolific 20th century American humorist and journalist best known for his baseball stories and reportage, whose corpus nevertheless spans a wide range of genres and styles. He began his professional career as a sports reporter, but his literary career began in earnest in 1913 when he took over the Chicago Tribune’s popular “In the Wake of the News” column, for which he wrote daily until 1919. His career as an author of short fiction took off when his Jack Keefe Stories became an instant hit in the Saturday Evening Post, launching his career as a magazine-first author of fiction that spanned over one hundred different stories published in the era’s most popular magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan. A disenchantment with baseball following the infamous game-fixing scandal involving his beloved Chicago White Sox in the 1919 World Series, followed by a tuberculosis diagnosis, mark a sharp decrease in the length of his stories, a pivot away from baseball as a subject, and a shift to a generally darker tone. This era, however, is when he wrote some of his most well-known and often-cited stories, like “Haircut” and “Some Like Them Cold,” the latter of which would later be adapted into his full-length stage play, June Moon. Lardner produced so many works of short fiction that stories would continue to appear in popular magazines for years after his death. Many of the stories in this edition have never been reprinted, remaining unavailable to readers for nearly a century.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, satire, shorts

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Title: Blind Corner

Author: Dornford Yates

Description: On his way back to England from an extended holiday in France, the young Richard Chandos stops his car on the side of the road for some lunch and a postprandial nap. He soon awakens to raised voices coming from the other side of the verge; an argument leads to a shot, and Chandos flees the scene with the dying man’s dog and a mysterious message. A couple of weeks later, Chandos and his hastily assembled team step onto the continent once more, on a mission to find a treasure trove hidden nearly two centuries ago. The only problem: a criminal gang, including the mysterious killer, isn’t far behind. Dornford Yates was already an established author of light comic short stories by the early 1920s, but decided to turn his hand to writing thrillers with Blind Corner, which would become the first book in the long-running Richard Chandos series. Following in the stylistic footsteps of Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Chandos is a well-to-do protagonist with enough funds to procure anything necessary to achieve his goals. Indeed, it sometimes seems that there’s little to distinguish him from his rivals for the treasure, apart from a sense of fair play and an unwillingness to shoot first.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Last and First Men

Author: Olaf Stapledon

Description: Last and First Men is an extended think piece about the possible future history of humankind, extending from the 1930s into the extreme far future, hundreds of millions of years from now. It’s supposedly narrated by one of the “Last Men,” and dictated to a modern-day “First Man” by a kind of time-travel telepathy. As time moves further and further into the future, Stapledon switches to overviews of vast stretches of time rather than detailing the events in the lives of individual people. As the march of time progresses over an immense period, many successive and wildly different versions of the human form evolve—or are created. This is Olaf Stapledon’s first work of fiction, and is considered a classic of the science fiction genre, influencing writers like C. S. Lewis, Brian Aldiss, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke and H. P. Lovecraft. A multimedia adaptation was created in 2017 by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and subsequently turned into a film in 2018.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Four Feathers

Author: A. E. W. Mason

Description: Recently engaged Harry Feversham, son of a soldier and descendant of a long line of soldiers, receives word that his regiment is going overseas. For complex reasons he suddenly resigns rather than be deployed. This action brands him a coward among his fellow officers and his fiancée, who present him with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice. To regain his honor, Feversham sets out for Egypt and Sudan, where he awaits opportunities to redeem himself. His daring adventures are beset with betrayal, torture, and imprisonment. Meanwhile, his fiancée is racked with regret, and tries to convince herself she no longer loves him, while simultaneously becoming romantically entangled with Feversham’s friend, a soldier in the regiment. The Four Feathers is recognized for its vivid settings, as well as its characters’ complex emotions and motivations. Mason had traveled widely in Egypt and Sudan by camel along caravan routes, visiting the places he describes so clearly in the novel.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Jenny

Author: Sigrid Undset

Description: Jenny Winge, a young Norwegian painter, seeks inspiration by joining a community of artists in Rome. But her world begins to unravel with the arrival of Helge Gram, a younger Norwegian whose romantic attention she accepts despite growing evidence of a mismatch. This precipitates a series of romantic crises that explore whether artistic ambition and moral idealism can coexist with romantic love.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Cruise of the Nona

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Description: Published in 1925, The Cruise of the Nona is one of British-French writer Hilaire Belloc’s travelogues, similar to his previous The Path to Rome and The Four Men. The Cruise of the Nona begins in Holyhead, Wales, and finally ends in his home county of Sussex. The cruise gives Belloc the opportunity to use his experiences with sailing, the sea, and the sights on land to reflect on a variety of topics. As he sails, he writes on religious belief, public leadership, the English character, youth, fools, literature, writers, and much more. Belloc writes with humor and wit, and turns a critical eye on much of early twentieth-century life, politics, culture, and religion.

Subjects: nonfiction, travel

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Title: Chance

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Flora de Barral is the daughter of a successful banker. When he’s tried and convicted of fraud, her prosperous life turns miserable. While on the brink of suicide, she meets an older sea captain and marries him as a means of escape. Her dramatic life is recounted by several characters, but mainly by Marlow, Conrad’s favorite recurring narrator. Chance, serialized in 1912 and published as a book the following year, is Conrad’s only novel with a female protagonist. It was also his first commercially successful novel, despite its complex narrative structure.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Description: Loveday Brooke, an “altogether nondescript” woman, is one of the detective agency Lynch Court’s most able investigators. Her shrewd brain and immense common sense make it easy to look past the obvious solution to get to the heart of the matter, whenever her skills are called for. In this collection of short stories, Miss Brooke solves cases that have stumped the local police, including burglaries, missing people, and even murders. Catherine Louisa Pirkis was already a successful author when she started penning the Loveday Brooke stories. Originally serialized in The Ludgate Monthly between 1893 and 1894, they were collected into this single volume later in 1894. The book received positive reviews from contemporary critics, including one who praised her as “outshining the detective Sherlock Holmes in preternatural prescience”—before concluding that she was unlikely to catch a husband if she carried on as a detective. Largely forgotten in the twentieth century, Loveday Brooke has seen a recent resurgence, with modern re-releases and praise as a example of a Victorian story that focuses on the work of a woman in a normally male-dominated industry.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Hoosier Schoolmaster

Author: Edward Eggleston

Description: Ralph Hartsook has taken a teaching job in Flat Creek. It’s a rough assignment—the last few teachers quit after getting beat up, or “licked,” by the stronger pupils. Ralph meets Bud Jones, one of the biggest and toughest pupils, who warns him how tough it’ll be to keep the school in order, and Ralph quickly decides he’ll have to win Bud over to his side. As events develop, Ralph notices Hannah, a young servant who is “bound” to the Jones family. Just as he starts to take a romantic interest, there’s a midnight burglary. Circumstances—and some conniving by corrupt officials—cause suspicion to fall on Ralph, and he soon finds that he must enlist the aid of his friends to help uncover the real culprits. In this novel Eggleston makes heavy use of local dialect, because while there was already plenty of literature focused on the culture of the Eastern United States, he wanted to portray life in what were then called the “Western” states, today’s Midwest. In a later edition he added footnotes, some long and descriptive, on the development of these rural speech patterns. Eggleston went on to write several more novels in this style.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Description: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was a respected author in pre-WWII Japan. He was well-read, and having received a Westernized education, his work blends traditional themes of Japanese culture with Western concepts. This edition collects the handful of English translations in the U.S. public domain of his nearly 200 short stories. The stories deal with a variety of themes and concepts: “The Nose” is a tale about vanity and perception of one’s image, “Rashōmon” deals with morality in the face of necessity, and “The Story of a Fallen Head” is an anti-war story. Akutagawa often ends his stories with a reflection related to the plot, spoken either by a character or by the narrator to the reader.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Plays

Author: Zeami Motokiyo

Description: Zeami Motokiyo is the most famous playwright in the Japanese theater form of Noh. In the nearly six hundred years since his death, the exact makeup of output has become uncertain; a majority of the Noh canon has been attributed to him at one point or another, but these days scholars believe he wrote somewhere between thirty and fifty plays. While Noh was built on earlier tradition, it was Zeami and his father—both actors and playwrights—who established the basis for its long-running current form. Zeami’s subjects are varied. They range from the historical (“Atsumori”), reinterpretation of classic fiction (“Suma Genji”), horror (“Yamanba”) or long-lasting love (“Takasago”). While these stories are related by the named actors, an off-stage chorus take on many roles, including narration, describing the scenes, and voicing the thoughts of the characters. Contained in this collection are the English translations of plays currently directly attributed to Zeami, and that are in the U.S. public domain, arranged in chronological order of translation.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Black No More

Author: George Schuyler

Description: After Dr. Junius Crookman invents the “Black-No-More” process to make black people look white through a process of “electrical nutrition and glandular control,” the United States of America is swept into social upheaval. Black Americans flock to Dr. Crookman’s hospitals, wishing to escape the confines of racial stigma and segregation, while white supremacist organizations scheme to uphold the existing socioeconomic order. One of the first patients to receive Dr. Crookman’s treatment is Max Disher, a black insurance agent who pines after a haughty white woman from Atlanta who rejects his request for a dance on account of his race. A picaresque novel, Black No More follows the misadventures of Max Disher and the ways in which he takes advantage of his new appearance in an unstable political climate. A biting satire of both white supremacist and black civil rights organizations, it has been identified as one of the first works of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic movement which explores the cultures of the African diaspora in relation to advances in science and technology.

Subjects: satire, science fiction

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Title: Cakes and Ale

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: hen social climber Alroy Kear is given a plum commission to write the biography of recently deceased and highly regarded author Edward Driffield by Driffield’s second wife, Kear needs background on Driffield’s early years. Kear reaches out to an acquaintance, fellow author William Ashenden, who knew Driffield and his first wife Rosie while Driffield was early in his career and still largely unknown. Set in London during interwar years, W. Somerset Maugham skillfully weaves an engaging and sometimes humorous satire of London’s literary society. Originally published as a serial, Cakes and Ale drew attention for its unflattering portrayals of London literary society’s snobbery, and for the main characters, who were widely held to be based on English novelists Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy. (This was initially denied, but later confirmed in part, by Maugham himself.) While Maugham felt this was one of his lesser works, he noted that it was his favorite based on his portrayal of the colorful character Rosie.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mary Olivier: A Life

Author: May Sinclair

Description: Mary Olivier’s life, interior and exterior, is presented from infancy through middle age. We watch as she forms her first impressions of her family and her place in it, and as she grapples with what she’s taught about the Anglican God and His requirements. As she grows, her insatiable curiosity and hunger for knowledge put her at odds with Victorian England’s expectations for women, its tolerance for alternative spiritual beliefs, and especially with what’s acceptable to her mother. May Sinclair was the pen name of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a pioneer of modernist poetry and prose, with the autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life being a particular example of the latter.

Subjects: fiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: The Documents in the Case

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: The household of George Harrison and his young wife is enlivened by their new lodgers, a novelist and a painter, who nonetheless have very different effects on the Harrisons’ domestic help. Mr. Harrison’s son by his first wife, an engineer working in Central Africa, receives letters from his father (also an engineer, and a self-taught gourmet chef) which take on new significance when a fatality occurs. By the time The Documents in the Case was conceived, Dorothy Sayers had already achieved fame as the creator of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. In the Spring of 1928, she had contact with Dr. Eustace Barton, a medical doctor who had already authored some medical mysteries of his own under the pen name “Robert Eustace.” Barton pitched a scientific idea for a plot, and suggested their collaboration. With her own interest in science and its intersection with philosophical questions and the life of faith, Sayers took up the proposal with enthusiasm. The form of the book is a departure for Sayers. The epistolary novel is a very old genre, but it committed Sayers to an unusual, but potentially creative form. The first of the “documents” is dated roughly to the time when the collaboration commenced, so the plot’s timeline is not far off “real time” for their writing. The scientific element—an important contribution from Barton—plays a central role in the story. Together, Sayers and Barton conducted chemical experiments to ensure the veracity of this element of the story. Given Sayers’s enthusiasm for the concepts and collaboration, she was left with regrets about the final result, not least since objections were raised to the science on which the solution rested. By the end of 1932, Dr. Barton was able to put those doubts to rest, and their solution was vindicated. Meanwhile, the epistolary form gives a new dimension to the reader’s attempt to solve the mystery, and Sayers’s powerful treatment of grand themes suggest a trajectory towards some of her later work.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: María

Author: Jorge Isaacs

Description: Efraín is a young man growing up on an idyllic hacienda in Colombia’s Valle de Cauca department. Among his large and loving family is María, the abandoned daughter of Efraín’s father’s cousin, raised by Efraín’s father. The two fall in love; but Maria is haunted by a condition inherited from her mother that threatens death at a young age, and Efraín is sent to faraway lands to complete his education. Will the two be able to see their love blossom? María, Isaacs’ only novel, is one of Colombia’s most famous literary works and one of the most important works of 19th century Latin American literature. It’s held up as a paragon of the costumbrist novel, a type of novel that depicts the everyday life of common people against a Romantic backdrop.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Princess and Curdie

Author: George MacDonald

Description: Following the events of The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie has returned to his provincial life of hard but satisfying work with his father in the king’s silver mines. When an act of youthful cruelty leads him to a meeting with Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother, he’s charged with a mysterious quest—one that will require strength, wit, and courage. Bestowed with a supernatural ability to aid him on his mission, Curdie and a ferocious new companion must journey to the capital where Princess Irene and her father, the king, face a grave threat to the entire kingdom.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: The Varieties of Religious Experience

Author: William James

Description: The Varieties of Religious Experience is the edited form of William James’s Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which he delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, between 1901 and 1902. James intended these lectures to more completely assess religion through a philosophical lens, but health problems forced him to curtail that goal, leaving the lectures largely a description of the many different ways people directly and immediately experience religion. These include ways like healthy-mindedness, saintliness, conversion, and mysticism. This work is one of the foundational texts of the field of psychology of religion, which developed alongside modern approaches to experimental psychology dating to the 1890s. The Varieties of Religious Experience has been in print since its publication and has an established place in the western canon.

Subjects: nonfiction, spirituality

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Title: The Inspector General

Author: Nikolai Gogol

Description: A small Russian town is a corrupt mess: prisoners aren’t being fed, invalids are left to die, trash piles up against monuments, the courthouse is being used to hold livestock, and all the officials are taking bribes. But suddenly everybody is put on alert by the news that an Inspector General from the central government is due to arrive, incognito—and when it’s discovered that a suspicious young man from St. Petersburg is staying at the town inn, all is thrown into disarray. With the governor trying to bribe him, the governor’s daughter trying to woo him, and the town’s merchants trying to convince him to usurp the governor himself, is this young man—the supposed Inspector General—all that he seems? Nikolai Gogol was known for his short fiction when he published The Inspector General; in a time of strict censorship. Permission to perform the play was obtained through personal approval by Czar Nicholas I, who was present at the play’s premiere in 1836. Widely regarded as one of the great plays not only of the Russian canon but in the history of comedic theater, The Inspector General has been adapted dozens of times for film, television, radio, and opera, and has been staged around the world.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Lusiads

Author: Luís de Camões

Description: The Lusiads (from Lusitania, a Roman province in Portugal and Spain), is perhaps the greatest work in the Portuguese language. First published in 1572, it deals, in poetic form, with the deeds of Portuguese navigators (and by extension Portugal herself) in Africa and Asia. Set during Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, the plot involves a conflict between the Olympian gods about whether the Portuguese will succeed in reaching Asia via a maritime route. Bacchus works against the navigators, disguising himself as a Muslim in order to attempt to destroy the fleet. He’s opposed by Venus and Mars, who favor Portugal. The poem is so influential that the most prestigious literary award in the Portuguese language is named after Luís de Camões. The Lusiads has since become the national epic of Portugal, occupying a similar place in its literary culture as the The Iliad for Greece and The Aeneid for Rome. It was one of the first works to receive copyright protection, being granted as a monopoly to Camões by King Sebastian for a period of ten years.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Venetians

Author: M. E. Braddon

Description: While enjoying Carnival in Venice, a gentleman named Vansittart meets a beautiful working-class woman. They’re enjoying a light-hearted meal in a cafe when her jealous lover unexpectedly attacks—and Vansittart fatally stabs him. Vansittart escapes, assumes a false identity, and resolves to keep the incident secret for the rest of his life. This traumatic event sends Vansittart on a journey of redemption filled with secrecy, jealousy, vengeance, and love. The Venetians is one of M. E. Braddon’s later Victorian sensation novels, a form that combines romance and realism and is the 19th century precursor to modern-day pulp fiction. The novel celebrates the beauty of Venice and its vibrant culture of the arts, and includes delightful contemporary descriptions of Venice, London, and multiple scenic locations across England and Europe.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Gallions Reach

Author: H. M. Tomlinson

Description: Jim Colet is a clerk at a London shipping company, frustrated with his job and his tyrannical boss, Mr. Perriam. One day, after enduring one of Perriam’s more abusive tirades, Colet snaps and strikes him in the face—only for Perriam to drop to the floor, stone dead. Colet is overwhelmed with guilt, but instead of turning himself in, he decides to stow away on a steamer bound for colonial Malaya. While the captain is unhappy to discover a stowaway, he’s also familiar with Perriam’s brutishness; and after Colet confesses to his crime, the captain offers Colet a job as the ship’s purser. Thus begins Colet’s adventure on the steamer Altair, where he’s to encounters myriad dangers on his way to, and in, the far east reaches of the British Empire. But all the while the ghost of his crime haunts him, and he struggles with a powerful yearning to return to the gray piers of London.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Murder by the Clock

Author: Rufus King

Description: hen Mrs. Endicott discovers a threatening note left on her husband’s desk, she summons Lieutenant Valcour to investigate. Upon his arrival, he discovers Herbert Endicott’s lifeless body stuffed in a cupboard. They call for the family physician, who tries one last-ditch effort to revive him: a shot of epinephrine to the heart successfully brings him back from the brink of death. But Herbert Endicott is still living on borrowed time. Someone still wants him dead, and it’s up to Lieutenant Valcour to find out who—before the clock runs out. Murder by the Clock is a classic whodunit and the first of eleven novels to feature King’s most famous character, French-Canadian N.Y.P.D. sleuth Lieutenant Valcour. The novel was adapted into a 1931 film of the same name.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

Author:

Description: Lazarillo de Tormes is not much older than ten when, after some unfortunate choices by his stepfather, he’s turned out of his house to become a seeing companion for a blind man who travels from place to place selling cures for all types of complaints. This works out pretty well for both of them until Lazarillo, having taken a liking to his new master’s jug of wine, takes one too many sips and is violently put in his place. Finding a second master only increases his difficulties, as this one is miserly with food to the point of danger; after another misadventure he has to move on again. Over the course of many archetypal masters, Lazarillo tells the story of his boyhood. Published anonymously in 1554, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities is generally held to be the first picaresque novella, and accrued considerable fame and notoriety. Its less-than-generous characterization of the priesthood saw the Inquisition place it on their list of banned books, although a couple of decades later an expurgated version was allowed. Even half a century later, Cervantes was still referencing the work in Don Quixote as something his readership would be assumed to be familiar with. hile the translator of this 1908 edition, Clements Markham, confidently explains in the introduction that this book was authored by Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the authorship remains disputed to this day.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Portent

Author: George MacDonald

Description: Duncan Campbell, a young Scotsman, is burdened by “second sight,” a hereditary gift manifesting as a terrifying auditory omen of a horse with a dangling shoe. Seeking a reprieve from these supernatural afflictions, he accepts a tutoring position at Hilton Hall in northern England. There, he becomes fascinated by the daughter of the house, a woman whose waking life is defined by a strange mental vacancy, but who possesses a profound and hidden soul while in a state of somnambulism. As Duncan attempts to bridge the gap between her two identities, he realizes that his ancestral legacy may have followed him across the border.

Subjects: fantasy, horror, mystery

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Title: Back to Methuselah

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: George Bernard Shaw published this series of five linked plays in a single volume in 1921. It was first performed in 1922 in New York. e begin in the year 4004 BC. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve discover death, and a serpent teaches them what it is to conceive new life. It is the early twentieth century. The brothers Barnabas are discussing the political need for people to live for three centuries when the leaders of the Liberal party arrive to convince one of them to run for Parliament. It is the year 2170. British public services are provided so effectively by the Chinese that government has become largely ceremonial and Parliament full of the insane. Life expectancy is 78, the public are expected to work from the age of 13 through to retirement at 43, and the Accountant General discovers that the Archbishop is 283 years old. It is the year 3000. An elderly short-lived man is visiting Ireland from Baghdad, the capitol of the British Commonwealth, with the British Prime Minister and the Emperor of Turania, who have come to ask for advice from the Oracle. He finds that even though everyone speaks the same language, he can’t communicate with the local long-lived population. It is the farthest future, the year 31,920. In idyllic surroundings people hatch, physically mature, spend four years playing and dancing, and then live for an eternity, changing their physical forms as they wish. A new child is born, a Festival of Art is held, and a youth has discovered how to breath life into artificial humans. hen staged, Back to Methuselah tends to be split across multiple evenings, or is heavily abridged; some critics have argued that it was intended to be read and not staged. In a lengthy preface Shaw discusses the need for humans to learn to live longer and to gain more wisdom to be able to govern effectively. In it he argues against both the theory of Darwinian evolution and the church, writing that the purpose of the plays is to “homeopathically educate” the population against Darwinist thinking when choosing their political leaders. His counterarguments are the Lamarckian view of evolution, his concept of the Life Force (which he previously explored in Man and Superman), and the importance of intentionally striving rather than accepting outcomes as down to chance.

Subjects: comedy, drama, science fiction

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Title: Home to Harlem

Author: Claude McKay

Description: Home to Harlem, the first published novel by the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay, follows the life of Jake, an African-American longshoreman who enlists with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I before deserting and returning to Harlem. Upon his return, Jake indulges in all of the sensual pleasures Harlem has to offer, including a series of sexual entanglements. Owing to its sexually explicit depiction of Harlem nightlife, Home to Harlem received a polarized reception from other African-American authors. Langston Hughes celebrated it as a book “which ought to give a second youth to the Negro Vogue,” whereas W. E. B. Du Bois declared that “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” It remains a classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sundering Flood

Author: William Morris

Description: Young Osberne seems destined for greatness. As a fearless boy, he shows a willingness to fight. He’s helped at key times in his life by a mysterious friend who appears briefly to give aid or to provide magical gifts. One day Osberne discovers a girl, Elfhild, who lives on the other side of the Sundering Flood, a strong and wide river that cannot be crossed. These two keep finding ways to secretly meet, though they can only converse over the unbridgeable gap. As they grow up, their love deepens. When violent events pull them each away from their homes, and from from each other, and into adventure, they hope that fate will somehow reunite them at last. The Sundering Flood is the last of William Morris’s novels, left as a manuscript before his death. The manuscript is considered unfinished: there are a few early plot elements that are never expanded upon, and some minor plot errors left uncorrected. His daughter May edited the manuscript and oversaw its publication in 1897, adding her own necessary changes to complete these unfinished threads. In later editions, she included editorial brackets to note where such changes and interpolations were made; these brackets are not retained in this edition. The Sundering Flood is one of the first novels to overlay supernatural elements over an imaginary world, and is also likely to be the first novel in its genre to include a map of its world as a frontispiece, making it a foundational text of the modern fantasy genre as we know it today.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Author:

Description: King Arthur’s court is celebrating a New Year’s feast when a mysterious knight suddenly appears at their table. His skin, hair, clothing, and even his horse are entirely green, and he carries a holly branch as well as a large axe, symbolizing both life and death. This Green Knight proposes a beheading game to test the courage and honor of Arthur’s knights: any knight may strike him with an axe, on the condition that the Green Knight may return the blow in one year and a day. To protect King Arthur, Sir Gawain, his nephew, accepts the challenge and beheads the Green Knight—only to watch the Green Knight calmly pick up his severed head and ride away astride his green horse. As the green giant rides away, he reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel the following year to receive his retribution. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English romance written by an unnamed poet now known as the Gawain Poet, who was likely from the northwest Midlands of England. The poem survives in a single manuscript, and reflects a blend of regional dialect, Christian morality, and courtly romance. Drawing on Arthurian legend, it centers on Sir Gawain, traditionally depicted as the ideal knight, while incorporating older Celtic folklore, especially the beheading game motif seen in Irish and Welsh tales. The work explores medieval chivalric values like honor, courage, and courtesy, but also questions their perfection by portraying human weakness. Through its combination of Christian symbolism, supernatural elements, and moral testing, the poem illustrates the cultural and literary influences that shaped late medieval England.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Cheyne Mystery

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: After lunch at a hotel in Plymouth, Maxwell Cheyne, a young and well-off country gentleman, is approached by a gentleman with a proposition. The meeting, however, is cut short after Cheyne passes out. On waking, he finds not only his pockets rifled but a message alerting him that his house has been burgled. The strange thing is that nothing of his seems to be missing; no jewelry or valuables have been taken, and all of his papers remain in place. The private detective hired to investigate is also stumped. It’s only when another attempt is made by the perpetrators that a trail is established—a trail that leads Cheyne to eventually seek the help of Scotland Yard and Inspector French. This novel once again pits Inspector French against the perpetrators of an underhanded plot that stretches out from England and into mainland Europe. Despite not arriving until the second half of the book, French quickly gets a grasp of the situation and starts reeling in the guilty through methodical analysis of the available evidence.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Freckles

Author: Gene Stratton-Porter

Description: The titular Freckles is an orphan missing his right hand who runs away from the future the orphanage set for him in favor of making his own. After finding his way to the Limberlost, an area of swamp land in Indiana, he finds a job, conducts himself with honor, and finds love, family, and joy. The swamp, however, is not without its dangers, and he must stay vigilant to protect those who are dear to him. Gene Stratton-Porter had great success with Freckles and its follow up, A Girl of the Limberlost. Freckles itself would go on to see five separate film adaptations as well as an adaptation into a Japanese manga series, Sobakasu no Shōnen.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Armed with Madness

Author: Mary Butts

Description: Five friends are staying at a remote cottage in the Cornish countryside, where they’re joined by an American. While helping clean out a local well, the six discover an ancient cup buried within. This cup seems to have a long and mysterious history—could it even be the fabled Holy Grail? Investigating the cup’s identity soon ignites simmering tensions among the group of uneasy “friends” as their personalities, desires, fears, and hopes begin to clash. In this highly modernist novel, Mary Butts adapts the grail myth to early 20th century England, flavored with tinges of Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, and fable. The prose, heavy with allusion, is abstract, kaleidoscopic, and dreamlike, inviting comparison to Virginia Woolf. Two of the main characters, the strong-willed Scylla and her brother Felix, are said to be stand-ins for Butts and her brother, who, like those two fictional bohemians, were down at heel scions of a formerly wealthy aristocratic bloodline. Armed with Madness was highly regarded by its contemporaries, appearing as an edition illustrated by Jean Cocteau and inviting praise for Butts’ forward-reaching prose style from the likes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound. Despite this, it has slipped into obscurity and remains frequently out of print.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Windfairies

Author: Mary De Morgan

Description: The Windfairies is Mary De Morgan’s third and final collection of fairy tales. Like its predecessors, it draws inspiration from other stories in the fairy tale genre. Among the tales in this collection are “Vain Kesta,” a story about pride and greed, “The Story of a Cat,” which tells of how a miser learns to care for other people, and the titular “The Windfairies,” a fairy tale in a more traditional mode that involves fairies and a young woman. Intelligent animals, supernatural beings, and moral lessons appear in some degree across all stories.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy, shorts

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Title: Styrbiorn the Strong

Author: E. R. Eddison

Description: The viking king Eric the Victorious rules his realm jointly with his brother, Olaf. Olaf’s queen gives birth to their only son, Biorn, and Olaf dies soon after; thus Eric adopts Biorn, giving him the epithet “Styrbiorn” because of his quick temper and stubborn disposition. As Styrbiorn matures, he seeks to seize the crown from his foster father Eric. But as his reputation for strength and valor grows, his haughtyness and tendency to anger and violence continually undermine his plans. Styrbiorn the Strong is an adaptation of this ancient Norse saga. E. R. Eddison writes in a purposefully archaic way, giving the novel the flavor of an oral retelling without much insight into the charaters’ inner monologues. But despite this flatter prose style, the characters remain textured, with complex motivations and rich emotional development.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: George MacDonald

Description: Scottish author and Christian minister George MacDonald is widely regarded as the grandfather of modern fantasy literature, with his imaginative scope laying the foundation for the genre. While he wrote many realistic novels depicting Scottish country life, his enduring legacy rests on his fairy tales and fantasy stories, which deeply influenced literary giants like W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and perhaps most notably, C. S. Lewis. Lewis famously wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his “master,” crediting MacDonald with “baptizing his imagination.” MacDonald’s writing is characterized by a distinctive blend of myth, theology, and the surreal. Unlike the rigid moralizing common in Victorian children’s literature, MacDonald believed that the imagination was a God-given faculty to be explored. His stories often operate on the logic of dreams, bypassing the intellect to speak directly to the subconscious. Ordered by date of first publication, this collection comprises George MacDonald’s complete body of short fiction. Included among these works is “Cross Purposes,” a whimsical fairy tale in which the Queen of Fairyland, weary of her well-behaved subjects, sends a graceful fairy and a mischievous goblin to bring mortal children to her court—an endeavour that leads to unexpected crossings of paths and enchanting misadventures. Also included is “The Shadows,” a haunting and allegorical tale that personifies shadows as wise, sorrowful beings who accompany and instruct a lonely man, offering profound reflections on human existence, suffering, and redemption. Taken together, these stories provide a comprehensive view of a writer whose work remains a cornerstone of the fantastic.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy, horror, shorts, spirituality

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Title: The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

Author: Mary De Morgan

Description: The Necklase of Princess Fiorimonde is Mary De Morgan’s second collection of fairy tales. Like her On a Pincushion, the stories in this collection draw inspiration from fairy tales both folkloric and literary, like the ones by Hans Christian Andersen. The fairy tales address a variety of themes, including greed in “The Bread of Discontent” and love and loyalty in “The Wanderings of Arasmon.”

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: Barlaam and Ioasaph

Author:

Description: Barlaam and Ioasaph, a hagiographic novel, was one of the most popular literary works in medieval Europe. It depicts the life of a cloistered young prince named Ioasaph (more often spelled “Josaphat”), who is converted to Christianity by the monk Barlaam, before he undergoes several trials that test his newfound faith. Although Barlaam and Ioasaph teaches Christian doctrine and quotes extensively from the Bible and later Christian sources, its plot can be traced back to an ancient Buddhist text: the name “Ioasaph” is derived from the Sanskrit word bodhisattva, referring to beings in Mahayana Buddhist cosmology who delay personal liberation from the cycle of reincarnation in order to save others. Ioasaph’s depiction retains traces of the Buddha’s story, for example how both Ioasaph and the Buddha are sealed up in their palaces by their fathers before they venture into the world to encounter sickness, age, and death. Unaware that Barlaam and Ioasaph was fictional, much less derived from another religious tradition, medieval Europeans treated them as historical persons and canonized them in both the Eastern and Western churches. Barlaam and Ioasaph are still recognized as saints in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religious calendars.

Subjects: fiction, spirituality

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Title: The Adventurous Simplicissimus

Author: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

Description: The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War hadn’t yet touched the life of the young boy living in the Spessart in seventeenth-century Germany, but when he accidentally leads a group of Landsknechte back to the family farm, disaster strikes, leaving him homeless and wandering the forest. A chance meeting with a hermit gives him a name—Simplicius Simplicissimus—and a new-found appreciation for the Christian faith; but this comparative calm is but a brief respite before he’s thrown back into the wider context of the ongoing war. Now a soldier, Simplicissimus is tossed from one adventure to the next, each more incredible than the last. Published in 1668 and 1669, The Adventurous Simplicissimus has had an enduring legacy both as a satirical picaresque novel, and as a historical recollection of the injustices of the Thirty Years’ War. Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen had been been a soldier during that conflict, but in later life he become a magistrate, giving him the opportunity to write and to reflect on his own experiences—something that’s also a key part of Simplicissimus’s own approach. These stories have received much praise over the years, and have even been considered to be the genesis of the adventure novel genre. Thomas Mann was a fan of its “involuntary magnificence” and Johann Strauss adapted the story into an operetta. The 1912 translation presented here is somewhat idiosyncratic; Goodrick seems to have chosen to simply decline to translate the handful of parts he found most boring or scandalous, and leaves out the majority of the sixth book as “monotonous,” with the exception of an appendix containing the final few chapters in which Simplicissimus is stranded on an uninhabited island. It would take another fifty years for an unexpurgated English translation to be published.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Privy Seal

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: Privy Seal: His Last Venture follows the journey of the once-innocent Katherine Howard as she comes to terms with her new position as mistress of King Henry VIII. Many of the events are seen through the eyes of the scholar Magister Udal as he navigates the dangerous personal and political intrigues of the court. Udal quickly finds his own safety is not assured as his fortunes become entangled with the rise of Katherine and the fall of Thomas Cromwell.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Anna of the Five Towns

Author: Arnold Bennett

Description: Anna of the Five Towns, first published in 1902, is one of Arnold Bennett’s earliest published works. It’s his first novel to take place in the Five Towns, a fictional district in Middle England based on the real Stoke-on-Trent, and the setting for many of his later books. The story takes place in an industrial district in late nineteenth-century England, where the rigid social structures and morals of the Methodist church define the area’s way of life. The novel follows Anna Tellwright, a young woman who lives with her younger sister and their authoritarian father. Her life takes a decisive turn when one day she unexpectedly inherits the fortune of her long-dead grandmother. The novel explores themes of personal autonomy, love, and social expectations, particularly as they affect women in an industrial society.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Continental Op Stories

Author: Dashiell Hammett

Description: Before there was Sam Spade, before there was Nick Charles, there was the unnamed operative in the Continental Detective Agency: the Continental Op. It was the Continental Op that, through a series of twenty-eight stories and two novels written in the mid to late 1920s, established Dashiel Hammett’s reputation as one of the finest crime writers of the century. The Continental Op is of below-average height and above-average weight, but is willing and able to mix it up with whatever ruffians he encounters on his assignments. Those assignments often look benign at first, but turn sinister in a hurry. Although based in San Francisco, the Op’s assignments take him all over California (“The Golden Horseshoe,” “The Gutting of Couffignal”), to Arizona (“Corkscrew”), and even to the Balkans (“This King Business”). Where the Op excels is at listening to a client, witness, or perpetrator, and identifying the inconsistencies and holes in their statements—inconsistencies and holes that readers rarely notice until the Op points them out. The Continental Op stories, with two exceptions, originally appeared in Black Mask, the pulp magazine started in 1920 that also launched the careers of Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other legendary crime writers.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: On a Pincushion

Author: Mary De Morgan

Description: In this collection Mary De Morgan brings seven stories adapted from the older tradition of fairy tales, featuring both supernatural elements and didactic material. The stories in this collection are diverse in plot and message, from the question of vanity in “The Story of Vain Lamorna” to a criticism of industrialization in “Siegfried and Handa.” Originally titled On a Pincushion, and Other Fairy Tales, this is De Morgan’s first collection of literary fairy tales.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: The Case with Nine Solutions

Author: J. J. Connington

Description: On a foggy night a doctor accidentally visits the wrong house and finds a man dying of a gunshot wound. He quickly calls Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield for help, and further murders are discovered as the case unfolds. The mystery deepens when advertisements in a secret code appear in the local paper, a witness is blackmailed, and possibly fabricated evidence comes in from an anonymous source. Then, a woman central to the case is drugged—and three of the main characters are chemists. The number of possible solutions to the case soon spirals into an ever-increasing number. The Case with Nine Solutions was first published in Britain in 1928. The technical science in this case, clearly explained, has its foundation in J. J. Connington’s background as a research chemist.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Counterfeiters

Author: André Gide

Description: The Counterfeiters is considered to be André Gide’s magnum opus. The plot kicks off in 1920s Paris when Bernard, a young man preparing for a school examination, decides to run away from home. As he bounces around the city with his school friends, he meets Édouard, a writer who’s composing a novel titled The Counterfeiters—a novel-within-a-novel. We’re soon introduced to more and more characters, and their relationships and aspirations begin to swirl in a complex interplay, including a ring of counterfeiters trying to pass fake gold coins, a series of homoerotic affairs, and a nefarious count. Gide was inspired by the Cubist movement in how he arranged the characters and plot, leading to unresolved plot lines, fractured timelines, and a kaleidoscopic narrative. Contemporary critics like E. M. Forster praised the attempt, but ultimately found it too confusing to be successful. The novel is also a roman-a-clef, in which Édouard is a stand-in for Gide himself, and some of his contemporaries like Jean Cocteau, Marc Allégret, and Eugénie Sokolnicka are reflected in various characters. The novel is also notable for its frank depiction of not one, but several homosexual relationships.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Dead Letter

Author: Metta Victor

Description: Written by Metta Victor under the pseudonym Seeley Regester in 1866, The Dead Letter, a wide-ranging “American Romance,” is considered to be the first full-length American detective novel. The young lawyer Richard Redfield becomes entangled in a murder investigation when the fiancee of a woman he has feelings for is knifed to death on her way to visit the family in upstate New York. Richard is both suspect and investigator, and engages the services of Mr. Burton, a successful detective from New York City. The action moves from a Hudson Valley village to the City, and farther along to California and Mexico, before the perpetrator is revealed.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Layton Court Mystery

Author: Anthony Berkeley

Description: The Layton Court Mystery introduces best friends Roger Sheringham and Alexander “Alec” Grierson, who join a distinguished roster of London society guests at the country estate of wealthy bachelor Victor Stanworth. The retreat takes a grim turn when Stanworth is discovered dead in his study with a gunshot wound to the head. At first glance, the scene suggests suicide: the study is locked from the inside, there are no signs of forced entry, and nothing unusual was reported the night before. Yet Roger, ever suspicious of neat explanations, sees inconsistencies everywhere he looks. Convinced that something is amiss, he recruits Alec to help him search for clues. Anthony Berkeley originally published The Layton Court Mystery anonymously; its modest success launched Berkeley’s career. More importantly, it introduced Roger Sheringham, the amateur sleuth who would become Berkeley’s signature creation. Readers new to Berkeley may find The Layton Court Mystery refreshingly brisk compared to many of its contemporaries. The setting functions primarily as a backdrop, established efficiently so the plot can take center stage; the dialogue moves quickly. Berkeley’s most delightful innovation, however, is his use of humor. Rather than presenting Sheringham as an infallible genius, he allows his protagonist to stumble—often spectacularly. Roger’s ego and overconfidence frequently lead him astray, and Alec’s occasioned exasperation towards Roger’s idiosyncrasies provides a perfect counterbalance. Their playful habit of calling each other “Roger Holmes” and “Alec Watson” underscores a self-aware charm hardly seen in other mysteries of the time.

Subjects: comedy, mystery

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Title: Romance

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: John Kemp is a young English lad who dreams of adventure (the titular “romance”)—and, through his dealings with local smugglers, soon gets his wish as he’s swept away to the Caribbean. There he meets admirals and pirates, nobles and rebels, merchants and seamen. Above all, he finds love—but first has to escape with his life. Romance, published in 1903, is the second of three collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. As an adventure novel it enjoyed some commercial success and was adapted into a silent movie in 1927. Today, it’s a mostly forgotten footnote among the authors’ more critically acclaimed works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lost Man’s Lane

Author: Anna Katharine Green

Description: New York detective Ebenezer Gryce enlists Amelia Butterworth to help investigate a series of mysterious disappearances in a village in the Berkshire Hills. When Miss Butterworth goes to stay with the family of an old friend in their decaying village estate, she discovers a web of deception. She must work with Mr. Gryce to untangle the threads and discover the fate of the “lost men”—and the secrets of her friend’s family.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Poetry

Author: George MacDonald

Description: George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister whose visionary works laid foundations for modern fantasy literature. They continue to resonate today with their spirituality, emphasis on personal transformation, and harmonious view of nature as a reflection of divine presence, influencing contemporary discussions on faith, ecology, and moral imagination. Composed amid his novels and sermons, many of his poems first appeared in 19th-century periodicals. This edition collects all of his poetry (excluding only his poetry written in Scots), encompassing narrative epics that trace inner journeys, intimate sonnets on divine love and human vulnerability, devotional reflections on the soul’s quest for enlightenment, and whimsical verses for children that blend wonder with ethical insight. Marked by a profound personal spirituality, MacDonald’s poems delve into the tensions of faith and doubt, the divine presence in everyday life, and the interplay between the ordinary and the transcendent—as seen, for example, in “A Hidden Life,” a long narrative tracing a young man’s spiritual growth through humble rural toil and inner trials, and “The Diary of an Old Soul,” a year-long sequence of introspective stanzas chronicling daily spiritual struggles and aspirations.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Jibby Jones

Author: Ellis Parker Butler

Description: The narrator and his friends, Tad, Skippy, and Wampus, enjoy a calm but playful life in the small community of Birch Island along the Mississippi River. One day, a strange boy who has come to live on their island tries to make their acquaintance. Introducing himself as Oliver Parmenter Jones, or “Jibby Jones” due to his prominent nose, he quickly joins the group after fixing a motorboat and sharing incredible stories of the places he’s been. Despite the group’s initial apprehension, Jibby proves to be a valuable friend: someone to enjoy hijinks and adventures with, while also enduring the occasional innocent prank and exaggerated tale. Jibby Jones is a rewrite of twenty-four stories first published between 1921 and 1923 for American Boy magazine recounting the Riverbank Boys’ quest to discover the treasure of infamous pirate John A. Murrell. With a crudely drawn map serving as their only guide to the treasure, the boys must solve the mystery using their knowledge of the region, all while building up their strength, sense of responsibility, and trust in one another as they face the challenges inherent an exciting quest.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: The Ladies Lindores

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: Robert Lindores accedes to his family’s title unexpectedly when the older sons from his father’s multiple marriages die in quick succession, making him an earl. Until then, he had led a frugal life, living cheaply with his family—his commoner wife, their son, and two daughters—on the Continent. With their ennoblement, they return to their Scottish estate to enjoy their new status; but the unexpected elevation does no favors to the new Earl of Lindores, bringing to the surface a deeply ambitious nature that had been obscured by his relative poverty. He forces an incompatible marriage on his elder daughter, seeking an alliance with the boorish but fabulously wealthy local magnate, and he attempts to coerce his younger daughter similarly. Thus it is that the lives of the Lindores become entangled not only with their wealthy neighbor, but also with that of the recently arrived local squire, John Erskine of Dalruzian, whom they had met during their Continental sojourn. Erskine, though born and raised in Scotland, has lived most of his life in England as a result of his widowed mother’s remarriage. Consequently, he too is feeling his way in the landscape, much as his old friends (as he thinks of them) the Lindores are too. The Ladies Lindores appeared in what was, even for the prodigiously energetic Margaret Oliphant, a time of extreme productivity. Even so, some contemporary reviewers welcomed it warmly: “one of the very best that has been written for many years,” enthused the notice in Peterson’s Magazine. Oliphant’s handling of Scottish speech and manners, and the dark depiction of a failed marriage, drew especial praise. Although it has passed into relative obscurity like much of Oliphant’s work, her latest biographer and editor, Elisabeth Jay, includes it as one of her finest novels.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: At the Villa Rose

Author: A. E. W. Mason

Description: When the wealthy widow Madame Dauvray is found murdered at the Villa Rose in Aix-les-Bains, suspicion falls on her young companion Celia Harland, who has gone missing—along with Dauvray’s valuable jewels. The famous French detective Inspector Hanaud is called in to solve the mystery, which involves a séance, a missing chauffeur, and a web of deceit. A. E. W. Mason was inspired to write this story after his own stay at an inn near London, where he saw the names of two victims of a famous murder scratched into a windowpane. Inspired by that case, he incorporated other small details from other murder cases into this narrative.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Breaking of the Storm

Author: Friedrich Spielhagen

Description: The stranding of their ship on a sandbank introduces Elsa von Werben, daughter of the celebrated General von Werben, to Reinhold Schmidt, merchant captain. Their blossoming friendship gets a further boost when Reinhold discovers that the von Werbens are neighbors to the uncle in Berlin he’s staying with. But his uncle and the General have an unhappy history and their own familial problems to deal with. For the time being life continues in a whirl of society and art, but people are playing dangerous games and the storm clouds are mounting. The Breaking of the Storm is Friedrich Spielhagen’s most famous work, and weaves fictional characters and relationships into real life events, including the German revolution of 1848, the 1872 Baltic Sea flood, and financial panic of 1873.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Trail of the Serpent

Author: M. E. Braddon

Description: On a cold and stormy night in Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy, Richard Marwood returns after a mysterious and long disappearance. While his rich uncle aids him in starting a new life, his reappearance is quickly upended after he is apparently framed for murder. Meanwhile, Jabez North—prodigal son of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy—schemes to make his fortunes by any means possible. The Trail of the Serpent is M. E. Braddon’s first book. Although it initially met with poor sales under its original title of Three Times Dead, it was later revised and re-issued under its current title to much wider recognition, and is now considered to be one of the first British detective novels.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: On the Eve

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Description: Elena Nikolaevna Stahov is a young, passionate woman from a wealthy background. Two men pursue her—Andrei Petrovitch Bersenyev, a serious-minded student of philosophy, and Pavel Yakovlitch Shubin, a free-spirited sculptor. Soon, however, another young man enters her life: Dmitri Nikanorovitch Insarov, a Bulgarian patriot who yearns to free his people from the Ottoman Turks. As the storm clouds of the Crimean War gather, Elena Nikolaevna falls in love with Insarov, setting in motion a series of events that will change their lives forever. Though On the Eve is Ivan Turgenev’s third novel, he actually began working on it before he published his first novel, Rudin. The love story, which is the central focus of the plot, is based on the accounts of a Russian man who left to fight in the Crimean War, who had given Turgenev a notebook before he departed. While the title is correctly translated as “On the Eve,” the strength of the character Elena has inspired such interest that the first French translation was titled Éléna, and the German translation was titled Helena.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Clark Ashton Smith

Description: Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet and author of fiction. By the late 1920s he started writing fantasy and science fiction stories for pulp magazines; after his death, many of his better-known weird tales were published as collections, making them available to a larger audience and ultimately cementing them as his claim to fame. hile Smith wrote a few more realistic stories without any supernatural elements earlier in his career, the stories in this collection mostly involve weird fiction. “The End of the Story” involves pagan entities and the fictional location of Averoigne; “Marooned in Andromeda” has the protagonists exploring an uncharted planet. Smith also wrote fiction featuring demons and other uncanny beings, like “The Abominations of Yondo.” His frequent correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft led to a literary friendship that lasted until the latter’s death, with the cross-pollination of influences clear in each of their respective bodies of work. The stories collected here are the ones known to have entered the U.S. public domain, ordered by their date of original publication.

Subjects: fantasy, science fiction, shorts

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Title: “We”

Author: Charles A. Lindbergh

Description: Charles Lindbergh, the aviator legendary for his nonstop, one-man flight from New York to Paris in 1927, recounts his life in this autobiography. He tells of his early life, his education, and his interest in science and mechanics. He became fascinated with flying after seeing his first airplane, but wouldn’t get near one for several years. He went to college to study engineering, then left school for Nebraska to enroll in flight lessons. He moved on to doing stunts at barnstormers, until he was finally able to buy his own plane from wartime surplus. He goes on to tell of his aviation career up to the point where he got financial backing to build his famous airplane, Spirit of St. Louis, to try for the Orteig prize for the first person to make a nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Reluctant to write about the incredible worldwide reception he received after the flight, Lindbergh chose the writer Fitzhugh Green to add several chapters to his autobiography on the phenomenal reaction to his achievement: not only were the crowds in Europe and the States overjoyed at his accomplishment, but his modesty, grace, youth, and lack of self-seeking motives made him all the more endearing. He continued to promote commercial aviation and foresaw a time when cities would be connected by regular air service. In reference to his famous flight, he always used “we” to refer to all who were involved in building the Spirit of St. Louis and enabling his endeavor, and refused to take sole credit.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Beric the Briton

Author: G. A. Henty

Description: Beric is a young Briton who is taken hostage by the Romans to ensure his tribe’s compliance with their rule. While hostage he studies the Latin language and Roman culture, history, and military tactics. After his release he becomes chief of his tribe, and goes on to engage in several battles against the Romans in Britannia and Italia, in which he utilizes the knowledge he gained in captivity to great effect. Set in the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, Beric’s adventures see him interacting with well-known historical figures like Boudica and Emperor Nero, as well as other features of the era including early Christianity and the gladiators’ arena.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tragedy at Ravensthorpe

Author: J. J. Connington

Description: During a masquerade ball at an English country estate with a valuable collection of artifacts on display there is a shot, the lights go out, and a robbery ensues. It’s soon followed by an entertaining, if unsuccessful, chase of the thief by the costumed revelers. Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield’s investigation discovers the robbery was planned as a practical joke that has gone awry. There are conflicting clues, unclear motives, and then even deaths which may or may not be related to the theft. The country estate is a charming character in its own right, with interesting features like “fairy houses” maintained through generations due to a clause in a will, a family curse, a museum for precious artifacts, secret passages, ruins, and an old quarry.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life

Author: Josiah Henson

Description: Born into slavery in Maryland in 1789, Josiah Henson was separated from his family and endured brutal treatment before eventually escaping to Canada with his wife and children in 1830. His remarkable story of survival, faith, and ultimate freedom became one of the most influential slave narratives of the 19th century. Henson’s narrative is a firsthand account of the horrors of slavery, including the violent punishment of his father, the heart-wrenching sale of fellow enslaved people, and his own struggles with loyalty to his master versus his desire for freedom. After gaining his freedom, Henson became a Methodist preacher and community leader in Canada, helping other escaped slaves build new lives and conducting dangerous missions back to the South to guide others to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Published in 1858 with a preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe, this autobiography is widely believed to have inspired her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Henson’s story stands as a powerful testament to human resilience and the pursuit of dignity in the face of oppression.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Conan Stories

Author: Robert E. Howard

Description: Conan, the Cimmerian barbarian, romps across Robert E. Howard’s world of Hyboria, slicing down enemy after enemy and trying not to fall too hard for a succession of ladies in need of rescue. Although very much a product of the pulp fantasy magazines of the 1930s, Conan has surpassed his contemporaries to become the quintessential barbarian of the fantasy genre: the muscle-bound and instinct-led hero, always willing to fight his way out of any fix. Collected here are Howard’s Conan short stories that are in the U.S. public domain, as well as a history of Hyboria that Howard wrote as a writing guide. Nearly all of Conan’s adventures were first published in Weird Tales magazine.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Story of Doctor Dolittle

Author: Hugh Lofting

Description: The Story of Doctor Dolittle, the first installment in Hugh Lofting’s beloved Doctor Dolittle series, centers on a kindhearted British physician, John Dolittle, who has an extraordinary gift: the ability to communicate with animals. Set in early 20th-century England, the novel begins with Dolittle’s life in the quiet town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, where his unconventional methods and growing fascination with the animal kingdom spark curiosity and skepticism among his peers. When he discovers he can understand and converse with creatures in their own language, he’s propelled toward an adventure to Africa, where he seeks to cure a monkey epidemic just as he faces bankruptcy. The book raises thematic questions about the moral responsibilities of humans toward the natural world, the value of empathy across species, and the challenges of bridging cultural and linguistic divides. Its whimsical tone and imaginative premise invite readers to consider the possibilities of communication, the interconnectedness of all living beings, and the transformative power of compassion. Lofting’s inspiration for the series was partly rooted in his own childhood fascination with animals and his experiences as a physician, though the character of Doctor Dolittle was also influenced by the growing scientific interest in animal behavior and communication at the time. The book’s success led to a series of sequels, many of which were written during Lofting’s later years, and it has since been adapted into films, stage plays, and radio dramas, cementing its place in popular culture.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: The World Below

Author: S. Fowler Wright

Description: Using a time machine, an unnamed narrator is sent half a million years into the future in order to investigate the whereabouts of two men previously sent to the same time period and failed to return. Upon arriving, he makes contact with the Amphibians, a telepathic humanoid race, who live in an uneasy peace with the Dwellers, the inhabitants of Earth’s subterranean territories. S. Fowler Wright originally intended to write a trilogy. The first part, The Amphibians was published in 1924, followed by the second part in 1929. The third part was never written. This edition includes both published parts, with the ending being a symptom of Wright’s having left the trilogy incomplete.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Haunted Hotel

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: One of Wilkie Collins’ shorter novels, The Haunted Hotel was published in 1878 as a monthly serial in six parts in Belgravia magazine. Most of the dramatic and sensational parts of the novel are set in Venice, and feature more of an emphasis on the supernatural than is usual in Collins’ work. The story deals with the death of the wealthy Baron Montbarry in a hotel in Venice. This follows his inexplicable breaking-off of a previous engagement to a pretty young woman and his subsequent marriage to a mysterious Countess, an unhealthy-looking widow. Montbarry’s younger brother, and the young woman he had spurned, set out to discover more about his death. The novel is considered by at least one biographer to be something of a potboiler, written because Collins was desperate for money. So desperate was he that he subsequently sold the translation and international rights to the novel, getting himself into legal trouble with the original publisher for doing so without their permission.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Brooklyn Murders

Author: G. D. H. Cole

Description: Sir Vernon Brooklyn is a successful theater impresario who, in his old age, has put together a will dividing his considerable fortune among his many descendants. But just as soon as he announces the beneficiaries, two of the men who stand to inherit the most are found murdered in separate locations—and all the clues suggest that the two murdered each other. Superintendent Wilson of Scotland Yard takes up the bizarre case, while at the same time Brooklyn’s niece Joan Cowper and her lover Robert Ellery investigate as amateurs. The two parties soon converge on a possible suspect—but can they find the killer before Brooklyn’s frail health fails?

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Apple Cart

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: It is some time in the future, and the King of England is beset by his ministers, who want him to stop expressing political opinions; around him circle his mistress, his Queen, his secretaries, and the American ambassador. What ensues is a battle of wits over who will run the country: will it be the King, the Prime Minister, or the powerful corporation Breakages, Limited? The Apple Cart presents a view of the future that is at times prescient, extrapolating from economic trends towards labor offshoring and the privatization of public services. In the preface, Shaw expands upon some of the play’s themes, discussing the nature of democracy and the difficulties in trying to get a population to govern itself responsibly. He compares the undemocratic nature of royalty to the undemocratic natures of corporate control, or government by unelected civil service. Shaw wrote The Apple Cart in under two months in 1928 for the Malvern Theater Festival, but it first premiered in Polish in Warsaw, where it was a critical and popular success. It moved to the West End and ran on Broadway, and has seen numerous revivals in the years since, as well as translations and adaptations for radio and television.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Planet of the Damned

Author: Harry Harrison

Description: The pinnacle of achievement on the planet Anvhar is winning the Twenties: their annual physical and mental games. Brion Brandd has pushed himself beyond all his limits to claim the trophy, but his post-success recuperation is interrupted by a previous Winner, named Ihelj, on a mission. Ihelj’s story about the upcoming mutual destruction of two planets in a far-flung system, combined with subtle emotional manipulation, is enough to convince Brion that in saving human life he has a hitherto unforeseen job to do. Harry Harrison was still early in his career when he wrote this story, which was originally serialized in Analog Science Fact 0026 Fiction in 1961. It was well received, being nominated for a Hugo award for Best Novel in 1962.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The City of God

Author: Augustine of Hippo

Description: In 410 CE, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, leaving the inhabitants of the Roman Empire in a state of deep shock. Some Romans began theorizing that the calamity occurred because many in the empire had chosen to become Christian rather than participate in traditional Roman religion. In response, over the course of thirteen years the Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God. In the first part, comprising the first ten books, Augustine critiques pagan religion and philosophy. Utilizing sources from well-respected Roman historians and philosophers, he works to show that the Roman gods didn’t save Rome from previous calamities or moral decay, and that worshiping the Roman gods can’t bring temporal or eternal happiness. He also responds to critiques of Christianity from pagan philosophers, working to dismantle their objections to Christian philosophy, while also affirming much that he finds true, especially in Platonism. In the second part, Augustine traces the origin and final destiny of the world, framing this history as the founding, progress, and end of two “cities”: the City of God (ruled by God), and the Earthly City (ruled by the devil). He explores the creation of the world, addresses the origin of evil, sin, and death, and then looks at the parallel histories of both cities, utilizing both Biblical and secular histories. Then he addresses the final judgment, making the case for why the inhabitants of the Earthly City are ultimately pursuing eternal misery, when pursuing God would bring eternal happiness. The City of God is a wide-ranging book of history, apologetics, and political and moral philosophy. It also covers many important topics in theology, such as the problem of evil, and issues regarding free will, and divine omniscience and omnipotence. It’s one of the most influential books in Western history, and continues to have an impact to the present day.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: As I Lay Dying

Author: William Faulkner

Description: As I Lay Dying is William Faulkner’s fifth novel, on which he began to work at the end of October 1929, just a few weeks after the publication of The Sound and the Fury. At that time Faulkner had taken a job at the University of Mississippi power plant and wrote the novel during his night shifts there, over a period of only forty-seven days. Though not initially a bestseller, the book was well received by critics. It has since come to be viewed as a cornerstone of both his oeuvre and American modernism, and is consistently listed as one of the best novels of the 20th century. According to the critic Julia K. W. Baker, As I Lay Dying is a companion piece but also “in construction and technique, an advance beyond” The Sound and the Fury. Both novels concern dysfunctional families in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. The title of the novel is again a literary allusion, this time to a speech of the ghost of Agamemnon in Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey. Through fifty-nine interior monologues delivered by fifteen narrators, As I Lay Dying recounts the death of a mother of five, Addie Bundren, and the journey of her husband and children as they convey her coffin to her hometown. Apart from death, the novel’s themes include religion, infidelity, and family secrets.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Faraway Bride

Author: Stella Benson

Description: For unconvincing reasons Old Sergei Malinin has gone blind; the family’s woes are compounded when their shop in Chi-tao-kou, Manchuria is raided by the Red Army. They’re left relying on what little money can be scraped together from their daughter Anna’s sewing and their son Seryozha’s timberwork. Luckily, Old Sergei, ever the businessman, has remembered that ten years ago he lent his old friend Gavril Ilitch Isaev two hundred yen, a sum that, with interest, would now be immensely valuable to the Malinins. The money is in Seoul, but a three week walk through the Korean mountains to a city sounds like the perfect adventure to Seryozha, and the unexpected appearance of an English-educated Chinese lawyer who happens to know the way is enough to tip Anna over the edge into agreeing with the plan. The Faraway Bride (alternately titled Tobit Transplanted for the British market) is Stella Benson’s best known work. The story, liberally cribbed from the tale of Tobit from the Apocrypha, is rehomed to late 1920s Manchuria, a setting characterized by political unrest and emigration. The resulting jumble of languages and cultures leads to a perhaps surprisingly comic take on the subject, but one that’s full of great empathy for the main characters.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Years of Grace

Author: Margaret Ayer Barnes

Description: Young Jane Ward is the young daughter of an upper middle class family living in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. She enjoys a comfortable Victorian upbringing, thoroughly inculcated with the morals and values of the age. Years of Grace follows Jane as she grows up, falls in love, attends university, and eventually settles down to raise a family of her own. At her heart, Jane is a solidly middle-of-the-road, conservative homebody: not as high-achieving or risk-taking as her friends, but rather preferring to hew closely to the traditional household values she grew up with. While she occasionally longs for a cosmopolitan, romantic life that could have been, she finds contentment in her family and joy it brings. As the years march on, Jane struggles to come to terms with the way the next generation conducts itself. World War I brings tragedy, and the dawn of the Jazz Age changes how young people live and love in ways Jane simply can’t understand. In this way, she becomes a symbol of a bygone way of life. Jane, and thus her antecedents going back generations, made compromises in life but learned to be content with what they achieved; but does the next generation’s selfish, high-life style really lead to happiness?

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Not Without Laughter

Author: Langston Hughes

Description: The first prose novel published by Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter is a coming-of-age novel that depicts the adolescent years of Sandy, an African-American boy growing up in a small town in Kansas. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes that depict Sandy’s interactions with his family and the surrounding society, including experiences of racial discrimination. It explores how social structures of race, class, and religion shape the lives of African-American families. Hughes aimed to depict “a typical Negro family in the Middle West,” drawing on his own experiences of growing up in Kansas alongside families similar to Sandy’s family.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The End of the World

Author: Geoffrey Dennis

Description: In The End of the World, Geoffrey Dennis writes about the fleeting existence of the human race and how the creation and spread of prophecies and predictions can create confusion, inspire awe, and instill an odd sense of reassurance in their believers. The need to define the unknown and to control things that are uncontrollable, and the fear of uncertainty, have developed knowledge, science, and culture; but they can also serve as a means to guide the population towards the benefit of certain social and political interests. Dennis delivers a carefully created and imaginative take on the tragic end of man and the planet he calls home, using a structure that emphasizes the four main aspects of such an event: How would the world come to an end? When could such a situation arise? Will humanity meet its demise before the Earth reaches its own? Would be the aftermath of such an inconceivable tragedy? These questions don’t have concrete answers, but Dennis offers conclusions based on theories known at the time, religious interpretation, and historical references ranging from ancient Rome to the then-present day. Published in 1930, the book is a fascinating entry into the “existential risk” genre, as it’s a philosophical critique that plays with the thin line between fiction and factual analysis. It employs a compelling writing style, focuses on the examination and review of forecasts and ideas, and includes the occasional touch of humor. It remains a valuable glimpse into the potential fates of Earth and humanity independent of technological development.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Castle

Author: Franz Kafka

Description: The Land Surveyor K. has received an order to work at the Castle. After a long journey through the snow he finally arrives at its surrounding village, but his welcome is considerably less than warm: his attempts to find out how he should start his job and whom he should speak to are undermined by pompous officials and a general sense of disbelief that he should even be there at all. The Castle remains stubbornly out of reach, and its structures seem almost purposefully designed to trigger K.’s spiral into a bureaucratic nightmare. The Castle was the second of Franz Kafka’s three great novels to be published after The Trial, and it was the first to receive an English translation. All three were unfinished at the time of his early death. Despite later re-translation, and a restructuring by Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod to add additional fragments not present in this translation, this original version remains eminently readable and contains an appendix by Brod describing some of the proposed story changes, and a possible conclusion, that Kafka had discussed with him.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Vile Bodies

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Description: Vile Bodies is Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, for which he seems not to have held out high hopes. It was written during a period of personal trauma—the break-up of his short-lived first marriage—and many see in the novel’s fragmentary scenes and frail relationships the effects of Waugh’s deep emotional disappointments. It’s also one of the most explicitly modernist of Waugh’s books. In spite of this sobering context, the novel is full of humor and ironic detachment from the sometimes tragic moments which punctuate the story. The narrative thread mostly follows the fortunes of Adam Symes, his sometime fiancée, Nina Blount, and an assortment of their friends and acquaintances—a coterie of “Bright Young People,” as Waugh sometimes refers to them collectively. Troubles with money, vagaries in society, questionable morals, and a fondness for drink dog the characters as they stumble from scene to scene. Later readers have found more to admire in the novel than its author did, and it remains a firm favorite among Waugh’s many fans. It was adapted for film by Stephen Fry in 2003 under the title Bright Young Things.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Miss Mole

Author: E. H. Young

Description: Hannah Mole, the child of poor farmers, is now a forty-year-old woman who spent her life working as a governess in the households of the wealthy. Not having the freedom to live life as she desires, she contents herself by making ironic comments in order to cause shock, in an effort to mask her true personality. The plot focuses on the interactions between Miss Mole and her new employers, Reverend Corder and his family, in which she assumes a motherly role. Miss Mole’s sharp wit and generous spirit help guide the growing family, but raise one of the novel’s central questions: who is taking care of Miss Mole?

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Cimarron

Author: Edna Ferber

Description: Yancey Cravat is a flamboyant, larger-than-life frontiersman who can kill a man with a quick draw just as easily as he can quote Milton and Shakespeare or charm a courtroom jury. He’s married to Sabra, a Kansas woman from a grand, blue-blooded Southern family. Together they decide to leave their home to claim a homestead in Oklahoma during the 1889 land rush. As they navigate the adventures and challenges of life on the frontier, Yancey starts a newspaper and Sabra begins cultivating society. But as the town booms and their newspaper prospers, Yancey—and their son—crave adventure of the kind that small-town life can’t provide, while Sabra’s ambitions expand beyond her homestead, and eventually the town. The story chronicles their prototypical frontier struggles against the backdrop of a proud Native American nation, the Osage, who are facing both physical and cultural conquest. Cimarron was enormously successful, becoming the best-selling novel of 1930 when the Great Depression left people people desperate for stories of escape and adventure. It was later issued as an Armed Services Edition during World War II, cementing its legacy as part of American mythology for an entirely new generation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Strong Poison

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: Lord Peter Wimsey, gentleman detective, is in love. Unfortunately, it is with a woman who has very nearly been convicted of murder. Crime novelist Harriet Vane is being tried for the murder of her ex-lover, a writer with strong views on free love and atheism who seems to have not been true to his professed beliefs. He has died by arsenic poisoning. Harriet is known to have quarreled with him; she saw him the night he was poisoned; and she has just written a manuscript describing how easy it is to poison someone by arsenic. Lord Peter believes in her innocence, though, and has mere weeks to find the actual culprit before she’s convicted and hanged. In this, the sixth Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Dorothy L. Sayers offers a humorous look at the English aristocracy, proponents of free love, the writing and publishing of crime novels, and a fake seance. Sayers based the murder victim on her own ex-lover, lending an autobiographical note to the story. First published in 1930, the novel has been adapted for television and radio multiple times.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Maltese Falcon

Author: Dashiell Hammett

Description: Sam Spade and his partner Miles are private detectives in San Francisco. When the mysterious Miss Wonderly walks into their office begging them to trail a man who has run off with her sister, Sam finds himself embroiled in a complex web of violence, greed, and deceit, all revolving around a mysterious artifact—the titular Maltese Falcon. The Maltese Falcon is a jewel in the crown of the “hardboiled” crime genre, and one of its best-known works. Hammett writes a tight and lean story in which no character, not even the hero or the police, can be said to be “good.” It was first serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929, before undergoing edits for publication as a novel in 1930. The novel was adapted into several movies, including the 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart, in which his portrayal of Sam Spade went on to become the core archetype for all film noir detectives to come.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Daphne du Maurier

Description: Daphne du Maurier, one of the premier English novelists of the twentieth century, was also an accomplished short story writer. As with her novels, her short stories can be both humorous and dark, often with open endings. Many of them are framed around psychological themes, and feature characters who have difficulties precisely communicating. Some of her later shorts were made into films, most famously Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. More recently her short stories have been singled out for praise by the American horror author Stephen King. Collected here are all of du Maurier’s short stories that are known to be in the public domain, arranged by first publication date.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Mystery at Lilac Inn

Author: Carolyn Keene

Description: The young detective Nancy Drew’s sleuthing skills are once again put to the test when her friend’s inheritance of diamonds—forty thousand dollars worth—is stolen during a lunch. Nancy struggles to uncover enough clues to break open the case before the police arrest her friend’s guardian, the last person known to have the diamonds. Can Nancy solve the case and exonerate an innocent person before it’s too late? The Mystery at Lilac Inn was ghostwritten by Mildred Wirt Benson, one of the many ghostwriters who wrote Nancy Drew stories under the pen name Carolyn Keene. It was first published in 1930, and was almost entirely rewritten in 1961 by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition text.

Subjects: children’s, mystery

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Title: The Secret of the Old Clock

Author: Carolyn Keene

Description: hen taking shelter from a storm, sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew meets the family of a wealthy, recently deceased man. While the man had told his family that his will would take care of them, the will that finally emerged leaves everything to a well-off—and disliked—relative. Everyone expects there’s a second will hidden somewhere, but can Nancy find it? This book, published in 1930, is the first in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series of novels. The novel was later completely revised in 1959 by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams; this Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition text.

Subjects: children’s, mystery

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Title: The Hidden Staircase

Author: Carolyn Keene

Description: Nancy Drew’s reputation as an amateur detective precedes her when two elderly sisters ask her to look into a haunting at their mansion. Can Nancy help them find the source of the strange happenings before the sisters are forced to sell the house? The Hidden Staircase is the second of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym used by the series’ authors; this particular book was written by Mildred Wirt Benson, who claimed it was her favorite Nancy Drew story that she wrote. It was first published in 1930, and later revised in 1959. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the text of the first edition.

Subjects: children’s, mystery

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Title: The Bungalow Mystery

Author: Carolyn Keene

Description: Young amateur detective Nancy Drew and her friend Helen Corning make a new friend when Laura Pendleton saves them from drowning in a storm. But when Laura runs away from her abusive guardian, can Nancy get to the bottom of what’s happening in a mysterious bungalow Laura’s guardian owns in the woods? The Bungalow Mystery is the third book in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. It was first published in 1930. A revised edition was published in 1960, which changed the plot significantly; this Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition text.

Subjects: children’s, mystery

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Title: Swallows and Amazons

Author: Arthur Ransome

Description: The four Walker children—John, Susan, Titty, and Roger—are spending the summer with their mother in the Lake District while their father’s away on duty in the navy. After getting permission to use their accommodation’s dinghy, the Swallow, they also beg to be allowed to camp alone on a nearby island. ith permission granted by their understanding (and trusting) mother, their adventures begin. For one thing, they’re not the first to camp on the island. They soon encounter the prior inhabitants: Captain Nancy and her sister Peggy who sail the Amazon. While war between them is declared at first, they soon find themselves allies against a common enemy—the uncle of the Amazons, Captain Flint. Swallows and Amazons was the first of what became a series of a dozen novels, known collectively under its title. While the fashion for juvenile fiction of this kind faded, Ransome’s novel has achieved classic status. It has frequently been adapted for television, film, and radio, and ranked 57th in the BBC’s “Big Read,” a search in 2003 for “the nation’s best-loved novel.” As Kate Haas noted in her essay on it in the Washington Post, its “celebration of friendship, imagination, fair play, and exploration” helps to explain its enduring appeal.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Murder at the Vicarage

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: Not much happens in the sleepy rural town of St. Mary Mead—but that all changes when Colonel Protheroe, a “pompous old brute,” is murdered while awaiting the Vicar in the vicarage study. The main problem isn’t the paucity of suspects—in this case, there seem to be too many willing to confess to the crime. The Vicar, who narrates the story, does his best to unravel the mystery himself, as the police seem not to be making a very good job of it. His investigation soon begins to benefit from the observations of his neighbor, a gossipy old spinster by the name of Miss Marple. This wasn’t Miss Marple’s first fictional appearance: she had played a part in an Agatha Christie short story three years earlier. Miss Marple went on to become one of Christie’s most enduring and endearing characters, portrayed in many adaptations for television, stage, and film.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Giant’s Bread

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: Vernon Deyre lives with his parents, Nurse, and a selection of imaginary friends including the enigmatic Mr. Green, at the Deyre’s ancestral home of Abbots Puissants. As he grows, his nebulous fears crystallize into more specific forms, most notably in the Beast: a terrifying piano that symbolizes the way music makes him feel. His early inability to engage with music stems from the lack of his hearing the right kind of music, as a later experience at a concert makes very clear. This Titanic Concert triggers an epiphany and sets Vernon on a new life path that will sweep his friends along with him, regardless of their own needs. Agatha Christie, already famous for her Poirot crime stories among others, had determined that a pen name would give her the freedom to pursue other types of literature. Giant’s Bread, originally published in 1930 under the name of Mary Westmacott, was the first of six of these non-crime novels. The press, while stymied over which author had adopted the pen name, were enthusiastic, praising in particular the characterizations.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Our Baseball Club and How It Won the Championship

Author: Noah Brooks

Description: The time is the late 19th century. In the rural Illinois town of Catalpa, the burgeoning new national pastime of baseball has become the defining phenomenon of the local culture. Due to the sport’s growing popularity, the wealthy and influential among the residents of Catalpa sponsor their local team to compete against some of the most successful and famous teams of the state, even going so far as to pay out-of-town talent princely sums to play for Catalpa against the best teams in the state—a shocking and scandalous move that seems almost prophetic when viewed from the modern 21st-century professional sports landscape. Understood to be the first novel ever written primarily about the game of baseball and published within a decade of the founding of the National League, Our Baseball Club and How It Won the Championship offers a fascinating look at the earliest form of the sport that continues to be played around the world today. Noah Brooks, a journalist best known as one of the earliest biographers of Abraham Lincoln, tells what is ostensibly a fictional tale for children; but today the book functions as a firsthand account of the game’s foundational years, and provides a useful point of reference for tracking the evolution of the game, from its inception to the present day.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Outlaw of Torn

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: In 13th century England, Norman of Torn is trained by his father, a French swordmaster with a grudge, in the art of swordsmanship—and to hate the English. He also befriends the priest Father Claude, who teaches him to respect the poor and the weak. As he comes of age, he becomes known as the “Devil of Torn,” the powerful leader of a band of outlaws that terrorizes the aristocracy and protects the poor. But as his legend grows and he falls in love with the daughter of an Earl, he finds himself increasingly conflicted about his actions. The Outlaw of Torn is one of the only two historical novels Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote, and the only one published during his lifetime.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Lone Wolf

Author: Louis Joseph Vance

Description: On a wet winter night in Paris, a boy is abandoned at the restaurant Troyon’s. Without even having a name, the boy makes a new life for himself under the stern eye of the restaurant’s owners, when through one of its guests he’s introduced to the criminal underworld. Years later, the boy—now named Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf—is a seasoned jewel thief, learned in mathematics, mechanics, and the ways of elegant society. He finds himself on the run, and returns to Paris where he must choose between the lonely life of a criminal, and the possibility of newfound love. The Lone Wolf is the first of many novels and movies featuring Michael Lanyard the jewel thief.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Law and the Lady

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins was published in 1875. As in many of Collins’ novels, it deals with themes considered sensational or scandalous by Victorian society, and features a strong-willed, intelligent woman unwilling to be bound by society’s conventional attitudes. It also treats the subject of disability with some compassion, featuring a man born without legs as a major character. The novel, told in the first person by a young woman named Valeria Brinton, begins with her wedding to a somewhat older man, Eustace Woodville. After their honeymoon, she accidentally discovers that he has married her under a false name. When she pursues this issue, Eustace leaves her, pleading with her not to follow him or ask for more details. There’s obviously a dark secret in his past, and ignoring his pleas, Valeria pushes on to seek the truth.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Futility

Author: William Gerhardie

Description: Andrei Andreiech, a young Russian-English man, finds himself in the company of the three lovely daughters of the Bursanov family. Their father, Nikolai Vasilievich, is a man of potential means, but besides a large house most of his wealth is tied up in a series of non-productive Siberian goldmines. Still, the possibility of future income is enough to keep him afloat, along with his daughters, his lover, his ex-wife, and a whole series of extended family members and hangers-on. Both Nikolai and his retinue seem locked into a holding pattern, their lives unable to progress without some inflection point that never seems to arrive. Futility is William Gerhardie’s first novel, published while he was attending Oxford after a stint in the British army. Like his protagonist, he was born and raised in Russia, then joined the English army as an officer, but he was careful to note that “the ‘I’ of this book is not me.” The book was critically acclaimed: both Evelyn Waugh and H. G. Wells championed him, and Edith Wharton wrote a preface for this edition. It has been cited as one of the earliest appearances of a theme that would become recurrent in twentieth century literature: that of “waiting” (a theme made most famous in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot).

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Powerhouse

Author: John Buchan

Description: Edward Leithen is a young M.P., barrister, and rising man in London society. When one of his old friends goes missing, Leithen decides to investigate. He discovers that some element of danger was involved in his friend’s flight, and from that point events spiral beyond his control. Along with a couple friends whose help he has sought, Leithen finds himself facing the wrath of a powerful and sinister secret organization. hile this yarn carries the reader along with its fast-paced events, drama, and danger, it still allows for some measured reflections on the political nature of a technocratic society. One of John Buchan’s most celebrated quotes is uttered in a dialogue between Leithen and the leader of the Powerhouse: “You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.”

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Payment Deferred

Author: C. S. Forester

Description: William Marble is a spendthrift banker living in suburban London with his wife and children. He’s hard up for money, as his wife spends indiscriminately, he has a growing interest in whiskey, and rent will soon be due. But one night, a visitor calls: James Medland, William’s nephew from Australia, is visiting to inform them of a death in the family. Medland is very wealthy, and very alone here at the other end of the world—and Marble, desperate for cash, quickly decides that he must do the unthinkable to get his hands on Medland’s bulging wallet. Payment Deferred is an unusual crime novel in the sense that the murder happens at the outset, and there’s no mystery as to who did it or why. Rather, taking cues from “The Telltale Heart”, the novel focuses on the state of mind of a guilty criminal. Marble’s increasingly elaborate attempts to keep his crime secret from both his family and the authorities become a study of the damage that guilt can do to a person’s psyche. Marble soon finds himself wealthy beyond necessity, but his fixation on his money problems is quickly replaced by an all-consuming obsession over this much, much darker problem.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Plum Bun

Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset

Description: Angela and Virginia Murray are sisters, brought up in an African-American family in Philadelphia. Unlike Virginia, Angela has inherited the light skin of her mother Mattie, giving her the opportunity to “pass” as white in public settings. Shortly after the Murray sisters reach adulthood, both of their parents die, leaving their house to their children. Hoping to further her artistic career, Angela decides to sell her stake in the house to Virginia and move to New York City, where she can pass as a white woman in her day-to-day life. Changing her name to “Angèle Mory,” Angela becomes entangled in a series of romances while creating a rift with her sister through her self-centered behavior. Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s second novel, explores the tensions between racial identity and individual ambition, especially as they relate to gender and social class. Published a year before Nella Larsen’s novella “Passing,” Plum Bun was one of the first works of literature to explore “passing” from a female perspective.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Patient in Room 18

Author: Mignon G. Eberhart

Description: St. Ann’s Hospital, located in an unnamed city in the U.S. Midwest, is the setting for this murder mystery. A patient mysteriously dies during a fierce thunderstorm, and it soon becomes clear that the death was a murder committed by one of a small circle of senior staff. As nurse Sarah Keate and detective Lance O’Leary work together to solve the mystery, the suspense builds and suspicion deepens until no one can be trusted. Published in 1929, The Patient in Room 18 is Mignon G. Eberhart’s first novel, and the first of a series of seven featuring Sarah Keate, a no-nonsense nurse who happens to keep being drawn into murder mysteries, and alternately helps and hinders their investigations. It also introduces Captain Lance O’Leary, the detective who appears in several of the Sarah Keate novels. This novel was adapted into a film released in 1938.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Author: W. N. P. Barbellion

Description: The budding naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion begins keeping a journal at the age of thirteen. Curious, enthusiastic, and clever, he lives a happy life punctuated by periods of health problems. As he grows up, he earns recognition as a promising naturalist, but his health scares become more frequent and more severe. He’s eventually diagnosed with a fatal, unnamed illness, which today we know to be multiple sclerosis. These journals of a dying man capture his frustration at a life of promise being cut short—but they also contain many odes to a life well-lived. His philosophical musings on death, love, beauty, and nature paint a picture of a sensitive young man who managed to fit a full life into his short years. Barbellion is in reality a pen name for Bruce Frederick Cummings, who died two years after the publication of these journals. When this book was published, his real identity was unknown, and early reviewers thought it to be a work of fiction penned by H. G. Wells, who wrote the introduction to the first edition. Though not widely read today, it earned immediate praise and generated strong sales. In the years since it has garnered much additional critical praise, with one more recent reviewer comparing it to the diaries of Franz Kafka, and another calling it simply “the greatest diary a man has written.”

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Roots of the Mountains

Author: William Morris

Description: Immediately after the publication of The House of the Wolfings in 1889, William Morris set to work on its successor. This story would move on in time from its predecessor, and adopt a slightly different style: less poetic and less overtly Germanic, but retaining the vaguely medieval setting, and the heroic, saga-like tone. The result was The Roots of the Mountains. The Roots of the Mountains tells the story of the men of Burgdale, now separated from other tribes of men dwelling in the woods and dispersed throughout the dales at the foot of great mountains. One of the leading sons of Burgdale wanders into the mountains to discover that the “Dusky Men”—forerunners of Tolkien’s Orcs—threaten the freedom of the Dalesmen. At the same time, he is awestruck as well as lovestruck by one of the daughters of the House of the Wolf. Together, these encounters lead to the heroic romance of the uniting of the Dalesmen and the defeat of their foes. Morris’s biographer, J. W. Mackail, recorded that The Roots of the Mountains was, of all Morris’s books, the one “which had given him the greatest pleasure in writing.” Mackail’s own judgment was that although it lacks “strength of its predecessor, The House of the Wolfings, [and] the fairy charm of its successor, The Wood Beyond the World, [still] in its union of the gravity of the Saga with the delicate and profuse ornament of the romance it may perhaps take the first place among the three as a work of art.”

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Mary Shelley

Description: Mary Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein, but she also wrote several other works of fiction and nonfiction. This edition contains most of Shelley’s works of short fiction, published primarily in periodical and annuals. The stories in this collection deal with themes of love, family, and grief. Shelley’s modern reputation rests largely on Frankenstein, but most of these stories don’t involve the supernatural at all, instead focusing on more human endeavors and the suffering caused by love and desire. Included in this edition is “Mathilda,” a likely autobiographical novella written by Shelley after the death of two of her children, and considered too controversial for publication during her lifetime.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Ashton-Kirk, Investigator

Author: John T. McIntyre

Description: Miss Edyth Vale, heiress to a steel fortune, has paid the youthful investigator Ashton-Kirk a visit. Her fiancé has become entangled in a secret and intensely stressful business matter, which is casting a shadow over their nascent relationship. Using her resources, she’s discovered that the cause of the problem is a numismatist called Hume, and Ashton-Kirk agrees to check up on him. Yet before he can even pay a visit, Hume is discovered in his office with a bayonet in his chest. Ashton-Kirk must uncover the real murderer, but with such a wide cast of suspects, he has his work cut out for him. Although the character of Ashton-Kirk had appeared in earlier serials, Ashton-Kirk, Investigator is the first in a series of novels by John T. McIntyre focusing on the youthful private investigator. Following in Sherlock Holmes’ footsteps as a scientific investigator-for-hire, Ashton-Kirk carefully considers all possible events, often operating several steps ahead of his colleagues—and the reader.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Little Caesar

Author: W. R. Burnett

Description: Caesar Rico is a small-time gangster in Prohibition-era Chicago, one of crime boss Sam Vettori’s lieutenants. He’s ordered to take a crew to rob a club during a New Year’s Eve party—but the holdup takes a turn for the worse when Rico shoots and kills a popular police captain. Using this distinctly unwanted outcome as leverage, Rico starts to climb to the top of Vettori’s criminal empire—but he quickly discovers that the summit can be very slippery. Little Caesar is often called the first gangster novel, and it certainly delivers in its realistic depiction of crime, the people in the social strata who are concerned with it, and their unique period patois. The novel was a hugely popular bestseller precisely because it was one of the first to record what life was like in the criminal gangs that had a stranglehold on American urban life. The novel was later adapted into the 1931 film of the same name, famous for, like its literary counterpart, being the first “gangster film” that established many of the gangster-movie tropes we take for granted today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: In the Days of the Comet

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: In the Days of the Comet, first published in 1906, is one of H. G. Wells’ “scientific romances.” Though it’s clearly a work of science fiction in that it features the collision of a huge comet with Earth, it has a greater than usual emphasis on Wells’ typical social commentary and criticism. The main story is cast as a memoir being written by an old man in a tower. It begins with the narrator as an unhappy young man who is thwarted in love. The grim working and social conditions of the late 19th century are described in some detail. After the comet strikes, the effects of the green vapors it spreads are the focal points of the plot of the second and third parts. They somehow alter human consciousness in a way which makes them immediately perceive both the flaws of their previous behaviors, and the inequities of society’s structures. With this new consciousness, humanity begins to remake the world. The publication of In the Days of the Comet caused a degree of shock and scandal in that it concludes with an endorsement of the idea of polyamorous love, with the narrator in a happy foursome relationship. Even the progressive Fabian Society, of which Wells was an early member, were scandalized by the book’s ending.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Henry van Dyke Jr.

Description: This anthology assembles the verse of Henry van Dyke Jr., drawn from a lifetime of output that stretched from the 1870s into the 1920s. His poems capture the breadth of his existence—both the outward man and the inner one—shifting seamlessly from odes to the raw beauty of the American wilderness to meditations steeped in unyielding Christian conviction. A substantial portion of the collection comprises the rousing patriotic pieces he penned while serving as a U.S. envoy in Europe, as the guns of the Great War began to thunder. Born in 1852 and gone by 1933, van Dyke cut a towering figure in American letters and public life: a bestselling novelist, a steadfast Presbyterian minister, a Princeton professor, and a diplomat who rubbed shoulders with kings and presidents. While readers still cherish his heartwarming Christmas tales, like “The Other Wise Man,” it was his poetry that left his enduring mark on the world. This collection includes his crowning achievement, “Hymn of Joy” (better known by its first line “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee”), as well as the poem “For Katrina’s Sun-Dial” (also known as “Time Is”), lines from which echoed through Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: My Four Weeks in France

Author: Ring Lardner

Description: In 1917, Ring Lardner was sent on assignment as a war correspondent on the French front for a series of reports for Collier’s magazine. Appearing in serialized format in the magazine before its eventual publication as a book, My Four Weeks in France recalls Lardner’s experiences in his new wartime role. Being a humorist and a satirist, it would have been inconsistent with his typical format to write harrowing stories about the horrors of combat. For this reason, this book instead consists primarily of harrowing stories of wartime government bureaucracy. Despite his efforts to get up to the front lines to write some legitimate war reportage, Lardner found himself constantly railroaded by one bureaucratic headache after another, and rarely made it to the trenches. What combat stories he did manage to write were mostly rejected by censors. However, his efforts in getting permits, licenses, press passes, and the like made for enough stories to fill a book anyway. My Four Weeks in France offers a unique perspective that sets it apart among the many travelogues and memoirs written about war. By finding moments of levity in what was then known as “the war to end all wars,” Lardner demonstrates that he can write nonfiction stories on grim topics while remaining consistent with his typical humorous, slightly satirical writing style.

Subjects: comedy, memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: A High Wind in Jamaica

Author: Richard Hughes

Description: After a devastating hurricane ravages their Jamaican plantation, the Bas-Thornton children are sent on a voyage to England by their parents. En route, their ship is overrun by pirates, and the children are brought into a world of violence and moral ambiguity, with their innocence at stake. A High Wind in Jamaica, originally named The Innocent Voyage, is Richard Hughes’ first and most celebrated novel. Credited for influencing Lord of the Flies, the book was inspired by an unpublished report written by someone who had been taken hostage by pirates as a child.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Mystery of 31, New Inn

Author: R. Austin Freeman

Description: Dr. Jervis is summoned to the aid of a dying man, but on arrival, he finds the man already dead of an opium overdose. Could the man’s death be related to will that was abruptly, and recently, changed for no obvious reason? Dr. Thorndyke is called to investigate and see if he can link the two cases. The Mystery of 31, New Inn was written as a novella in 1905 and expanded into a novel in 1912. Dr. Jervis, a Watson-esque sidekick introduced in The Red Thumbmark, takes a prominent role.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: Our Mutual Friend

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Our Mutual Friend is the last of Charles Dickens’ novels, published serially between 1864 and 1865. Like many of Dickens’ works, it addresses social concerns like how the poor and destitute are treated, but tempers these more serious themes with humor and satire. The novel opens with the retrieval of the body of a drowned man from the Thames river—a body which is identified as that of John Harmon, heir to his father’s huge fortune. What happens to this fortune and to the other people named in the will make up a large part of the complex plot. Though Our Mutual Friend wasn’t especially well regarded at the time of publication, its critical reputation has improved in later years. It has been adapted into several silent films, but its length and the complexity of its plot make it more suitable for long-form television, with several successful adaptations having been made.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Black Moth

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: The Black Moth focuses on Lord Jack Carstares, an 18th-century earl who has retreated from society and become a highwayman after taking the blame for cheating at cards years ago. He meets our heroine, Diana Beauleigh, when he rescues her from an attempted abduction by the Duke of Andover, and the three of them proceed to have grand adventures. Published in 1921, The Black Moth is Georgette Heyer’s first novel, and marks her debut as one of the originators of the modern historical romance. Set in the Georgian period, the novel features many of the elements that are characteristic of Heyer’s work: action, romance, and aristocratic characters in a historical setting, all focusing on themes of love and honor.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Jack Keefe Stories

Author: Ring Lardner

Description: The arrogant, proud, and mostly illiterate Jack Keefe of Bedford, Indiana had already established a career pitching for the minor league baseball club in Terre Haute. His strong pitching arm attracted the attention of Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and before he knew it, Keefe had been signed to play for the team. Through the ups and downs of his life, from his baseball career, to his marriage and family, to his service in World War I and his eventual return to baseball, Jack Keefe documents everything in a series of letters to his old pal back home, Al Blanchard. Behind Keefe’s rube-like dialect, these stories offer a glimpse at significant figures and moments in the era’s baseball culture. Jack faces off against legends like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Babe Ruth. He travels around the world as part of the 1913–1914 Baseball World Tour with the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants. He even fights in the trenches during World War I. The final stories take place during his 1919 season with the White Sox, a team who would become infamous for the game-fixing conspiracy in the 1919 World Series dubbed the “Black Sox Scandal.” Ring Lardner wrote the Jack Keefe stories from 1914–1919. The twenty-six stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, and while each can be enjoyed as a standalone story, they also form a larger continuous narrative arc. The first six stories were published in book form in 1916 as You Know Me Al, and they became landmarks of baseball culture. Two additional compilations were published containing the nine stories that span Jack’s time as a soldier in World War I under the titles Treat ’em Rough and The Real Dope. Ring Lardner’s unique ability to capture the dialect of middle America was cited as an influence by many authors who would eventually become household names, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. The Jack Keefe stories are Lardner’s earliest and most famous works that brought this dialogue style to the public eye.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, satire, shorts, travel

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Title: John Brown’s Body

Author: Stephen Vincent Benét

Description: Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem John Brown’s Body uses the figure of the radical abolitionist John Brown as a symbolic catalyst to explore the vast and complex tapestry of the American Civil War. Rather than focusing on a single narrative, the poem employs a wide range of fictional characters and a shifting perspective to present the conflict from multiple angles, encompassing the experiences of soldiers and civilians from both the Union and the Confederacy. It delves into the deep-seated causes of the war, the fervent ideologies on each side, and the immense human cost, all while grappling with the central, haunting issue of slavery that divided the nation. Benét wrote John Brown’s Body in the late 1920s, as the last Civil War veterans were passing away. He felt an urgent need to capture their fading stories before they were lost forever. He and his wife, Rosemary, buried themselves in research, turning their home into a map-strewn “war room.” The resulting poem, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was his attempt to build a national memorial out of words—not just for the generals, but for the forgotten soldiers, farmers, and enslaved people whose personal stories, he believed, were the true soul of American history.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: There Is Confusion

Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset

Description: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s debut novel There is Confusion follows an ensemble of middle-class African-Americans as they come of age in 1910s New York. The novel explores a series of on-again, off-again romantic entanglements between four characters: Joanna Marshall, an ambitious but snobby dancer; Phillip Marshall, Joanna’s brother who studies at Harvard; Maggie Ellersley, a hairdresser who aspires to climb the social ladder; and Peter Bye, a race-conscious medical student. Through the course of the novel, a series of misunderstandings and intentional slights set former friends and lovers at odds with one another, all the while the forces of racial prejudice prevent each of them from accomplishing the fullness of their vocational ambitions. The book is considered a canonical novel of the Harlem Renaissance for its depiction of the upwardly mobile African-American middle class.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Manalive

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: A man of unusually large stature and dexterity arrives at a boardinghouse on the wind—literally—while its unsuspecting lodgers look on in shock. The man, Innocent Smith, performs comic, eccentric, and dastardly acts which are examined and put to trial by the residents and renowned experts. Lawyers on both sides of the question of Innocent Smith’s guilt bring revelatory correspondence to the trial. In this fast-paced comedy of expansive proportions, Chesterton examines the meaning of life through the lens of the religious idea of the “holy fool.” Innocent Smith defies all logic—but perhaps that’s just what his new friends need.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Red Thumbmark

Author: R. Austin Freeman

Description: Jewels are discovered stolen from a company safe, and a letter with the thumbprint of the company owner’s nephew is found at the scene of the crime. The evidence seems indisputable, and he’s quickly arrested and charged with larceny. But was it an inside job? Dr. Thorndyke is called to investigate the case. With his medical, scientific, and legal background, he tries to uncover novel evidence that could shed light on the crime. This novel is the first in the long-running series of detective stories featuring Doctor Thorndyke.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: In Darkest London

Author: Ada Elizabeth Chesterton

Description: In 1925 the journalist Ada Elizabeth Chesterton decided on a dare to live on the streets of London. In Darkest London chronicles her two week experience. hat she found was a class of individuals, all without permanent homes, traveling between shelters in which overly bureaucratic organizations made life incredibly difficult. Chesterton concludes that the number of shelters, in particular those catering to women, were insufficient to handle the volume of people needing help, and those that did exist were too often unnecessarily restrictive. She claims that the government-run shelters in particular were designed not to help women, but to reform them, which are two very different propositions. Chesterton portrays the women she meets sympathetically. At the time, there were many unflattering portraits of the homeless, some of which linger to this day. Claims of drug or alcohol problems, mental health issues, criminality, and low morals or intelligence are shown to be exaggerations if not outright fabrications. The problem of homelessness should instead be considered as both a political and an economic issue, which leads to the conclusion that people have a right to be treated with a dignity that was too often lacking. The publication of In Darkest London led to increased interest in the lives of homeless people and improving public shelters. Chesterton herself went on to found the Cecil Houses, a system of shelters still in operation today, and named after her late husband Cecil Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton’s brother.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Peasants

Author: Władysław Reymont

Description: The Peasants describes one year in the lives of the inhabitants of Lipka, a turn-of-the-century village in Russian-occupied Poland. While the novel has a large cast of characters, its main focus is on the Boryna household. Matthias Boryna is among the richest and most prominent farmers in the village, and is still vigorous despite being twice a widower. He considers taking the young Yagna as his third wife. Meanwhile, his son Antek, married and father of two, is keen on obtaining his inheritance, and lusts for Yagna. Thus the Borynas struggle for land and love. Meanwhile, other villagers are less well off and strive to make a living. As farmers, they’re in constant battle against the forces of nature; as the rural working class, they collectively act against the whims of their local nobleman. Despite all their trials and tribulations, they find solace in helping their neighbors, upholding customs, and seeing the fruit of their hours of work in the fields. ładysław Reymont published The Peasants as a serial between 1902 and 1908, and later as four separate volumes between 1904 and 1909, with each volume describing a single season. This edition is of the first English translation, published in 1924, and contains all of the seasons in a single volume. The book is notable for being a naturalistic account of rural everyday life and for describing many Polish traditions, some of which are still upheld to this day. Critics praised its blend of realism with impressionism and symbolism. Consequently, Reymont was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924 specifically for this work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The English Constitution

Author: Walter Bagehot

Description: The challenge facing Walter Bagehot while writing the essays that became his study of The English Constitution is that, infamously, there is no “English constitution,” at least, not one that has ever been written down. The government of Great Britain and Ireland, in Bagehot’s day, is the result of centuries of evolution, and so is the product of custom, precedent, reform, and a great degree of chance. As a “constitutional monarchy,” the theory of government that Bagehot describes entails chiefly the role of the monarch, the main legislative assembly—the House of Commons—and its counterpart in the “upper house,” the House of Lords which, despite its apparently higher social register, is in reality a subordinate assembly. In these arrangements, the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 (the latter being debated while Bagehot was writing his essays) played a major role, and loom large in Bagehot’s discussion of the institutions of his day. The second edition of his work, published in 1872, takes a considered view of effects of the second phase of reform. At the time of writing, Bagehot was well settled into his role as Editor of The Economist, then a newspaper under the ownership of his father-in-law. Bagehot’s prose remains eminently readable, showing a light touch and sense of humor in explaining sometimes arcane arrangements of government, and often reflecting on its contrast with American practice. His sturdy prose bears comparison with that of his contemporary, the novelist Anthony Trollope. In some ways, The English Constitution could be seen as the theoretical basis for Trollope’s political novels, and those novels (especially Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister) as commentaries on Bagehot’s theory. hile now dated, Bagehot’s essays were widely influential and remain the standard work on British constitutional arrangements. Woodrow Wilson took inspiration from Bagehot in his own thesis, Congressional Government, in which he called Bagehot “the most sagacious of political critics,” without peer in “that field of critical exposition in which he was supreme, the philosophical analysis … of the English Constitution.”

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Wolf Solent

Author: John Cowper Powys

Description: Wolf Solent is the first of four Wessex novels by John Cowper Powys, based on a fictionalized southwest England in the pattern of Thomas Hardy. The titular character, after having a mental breakdown, loses his job and travels to the small town of Ramsgard to do literary work for a local squire. There he becomes involved with two women: Gerda who is simple and in tune with nature, and Christie, who is more complex and intellectual. The novel is very introspective. We watch Wolf’s inner thoughts as he tries to make sense of his secret “mythology” or “life-illusion,” based on his idea of an internal battle of good versus evil. As various buried secrets emerge, some involving his own family, Wolf tries to navigate his relationships and questions his own impulses, feeling that the survival of his “life-illusion” is at stake. The novel was very well received on publication, and is considered a literary masterpiece despite its curious lack of renown. Author Simon Heffer called Wolf Solent “the finest novel by an Englishman in the 20th century.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Blacker the Berry

Author: Wallace Thurman

Description: The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman’s debut novel, follows the life of Emma Lou, a dark-skinned young woman from Boise, as she graduates high school and enters adult life as a college student. After being the target of colorist prejudice from her fellow African-American students at the University of Southern California, Emma Lou decides to drop out and move to Harlem—where she’s swept into a torrid love affair that only deepens her sense of color-consciousness. ritten and set during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker the Berry was one of the first African-American novels to address the themes of colorism and homosexuality. It remains one of the canonical novels of the Harlem Renaissance.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Ring Lardner

Description: Ring Lardner was one of the most prolific humorists of the early 20th century. While he was most famous for the frequent appearances of his short fiction in numerous popular magazines of the era, he was also a prolific writer of poetry. His daily column for the Chicago Tribune entitled “In the Wake of the News” was generally a sports news column, but oftentimes served as a platform to publish his poetry. Many of his more sentimental poems from this column—the ones written about his children—would later be compiled in Bib Ballads. Lardner’s second poetry compilation, Regular Fellows I Have Met, is a series of nearly 200 poems about Lardner’s friends and colleagues—some of whom would go on to become incredibly famous, while others remained regular, everyday fellows. Lardner’s poetry, like his prose, has a recognizable voice. His sports journalism roots are made apparent by his frequent and satirical overuse of abbreviations. The verse is always cheerful, one might even say whimsical, in its rhythm and meter, despite the subjects often including gallows humor. Though his poems were all written for and published in different media like newspapers, magazines, and books, Lardner brings a consistent voice to his entire poetic corpus.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Veiled Women

Author: Marmaduke Pickthall

Description: Mary Smith is an English governess hired by an high-ranking Ottoman administrator in Egypt. Feeling mistreated and ignored by her native Christian society, she decides to convert to Islam and marry her employer’s son, becoming a part of the family’s harem. The lives of the women in the harem form the central theme of the book. Muslim women are shown not just as submissive to their male counterparts, but as beings with their own opinions and desires, in contrast to other depictions common at the time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Pit

Author: Frank Norris

Description: Laura Dearborn says she’ll never marry. Living with her sister and aunt in turn-of-the-century Chicago, she’s content with her comfortable, studious life. But with three suitors eager to win her love, Laura must decide between the disparate futures each could provide her—and as speculators struggle for control of the market in the wheat pits of the Chicago Board of Trade, each of those futures hangs in the balance. Frank Norris intended The Pit to be the second installment in his Epic of the Wheat, a trilogy of novels describing the journey of a shipment of wheat from its harvest in California, through the speculation pits of Chicago, and finally to its consumption in famine-stricken Western Europe. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to complete it; he died in 1902 and The Pit was published posthumously in 1903, leaving the trilogy unfinished.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Saki

Description: Saki’s name is regularly mentioned alongside O. Henry and others as being in the pantheon of short story writers. Like O. Henry, Saki’s stories were written in the first several years of the twentieth century, but Saki is known more for his sharp and sometimes scathing wit (“New Wine in Old Bottles”) rather than for surprise endings, although he was capable of that as well (“Open Window”). A journalist as well as a writer of fiction, Saki lampooned the high society of his day in his series of “Reginald” and “Clovis” stories. He could also be quite macabre, with many of his stories demonstrating the peril of wild animals (“The Interlopers”) and, surprisingly, children (“Gabriel-Ernest”). He managed to mock the retail industry in his story accompanying a Selfridges advertisement (“The Romance of Business”), although it doesn’t seem that Selfridges caught the humor. Although best known by his pseudonym, Saki also regularly used his real name of H. H. Munro in his contributions to the newspapers that first published almost all of his stories. This Standard Ebooks edition contains every short fiction story that Saki published.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Indiscreet Jewels

Author: Denis Diderot

Description: Mangogul, Sultan of the Congo (and an allegory for Louis XV), finds himself increasingly bored with court life, and his favorite consort, Mirzoza, has run short of gallant narratives of court and city life to amuse him. Her advice that he apply to the genie Cucufa for a way to hear new stories results in his possession of a magical ring that not only grants its wearer invisibility, but also compels any woman’s vagina to disclose its amorous history regardless of the woman’s wishes. Over the course of thirty “trials,” Mangogul succeeds for a time in amusing himself, while also creating havoc at court. His continued use of the ring reveals his courtiers’ scandalous and fascinating sexual exploits, and subjects them to a satirical scrutiny of their foibles and desires. Interleaved with the scandal, these disclosures also prompt philosophical discussions and speculation about humanity and religion, as well as theatrical and literary criticism. The Indiscreet Jewels is written in the style of Crébillon fils’ Le Sopha; its sympathetic treatment of Mirzoza was intended to engage the support of Madame de Pompadour, at that time Louis XV’s favorite consort, for Diderot’s Encyclopédie project.

Subjects: satire

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Title: The Clue

Author: Carolyn Wells

Description: Madeleine Van Norman, the last living descendant of a prominent family in a modest American town, is ready to start a new chapter in her life by becoming the wife of Schuyler Carleton, a decent but far from wealthy young man. The event has gathered the attention of the local community, who celebrate the union of two lovers—and who also take the opportunity to trade gossip regarding their private affairs and true intentions. Everyone has been looking forward to the wedding, with family and guests arriving in town to share this momentous occasion. Unfortunately, the wedding may be put on hold indefinitely after a corpse is found on the eve of the ceremony. The timing of this unexpected death, and who stands to benefit from it, places everyone in town under a shroud of fear and suspicion. It’s up to lawyer Robert Fessenden and Madeleine’s friend and bridesmaid Kitty French to investigate what really happened that night. Robert and Kitty conduct interviews with persons of interest and search for whatever clues they can find. Eventually Fleming Stone, the renowned private investigator, is called in to help. The detectives, both professional and amateur, must navigate a web of clues and red herrings in their attempt to uncover the truth and bring closure to this untimely death. The Clue is Carolyn Wells’ first mystery novel after a career of working exclusively on children’s literature. It features the first appearance of Fleming Stone, a popular character that went on to star in over sixty books.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Murders in Praed Street

Author: John Rhode

Description: The Murders in Praed Street features Dr. Lancelot Priestley, an eccentric scientist and mathematician. The novel’s first part introduces the neighborhood of Praed Street, its shopkeepers, and their families. Among these characters are the first victims of a series of shocking murders that terrorize London and baffle the police. In the second part, Scotland Yard seeks the help of Dr. Priestley, who is eager for “some enticing problem, mathematical or human.” To confirm his theory of the crimes, Dr. Priestley travels incognito to the Isle of Purbeck.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: John Silence Stories

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Description: John Silence is a doctor turned detective who uses his psychic training to solve strange cases sent to him by acquaintances. This collection features all six stories Algernon Blackwood wrote featuring the character. Silence is an early example of the occult detective trope, whose influence was later seen in media like The X-Files and the 1999 film Sleepy Hollow.

Subjects: horror, shorts

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Title: The House at Pooh Corner

Author: A. A. Milne

Description: This entry in the Winnie-the-Pooh series continues the adventures of Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. This volume introduces Tigger, an unintentional troublemaker who might bounce just a little too much. The stories center on themes of friendship, bravery, all-around silliness, and even sadness as Christopher Robin grows up.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The White Company

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: It is the Middle Ages, and the Hundred Years War rages on in England and France. Alleyne Edricson, the son of an English landowner, is training as a novice at an abbey. As his training draws to a close, he’s called upon to spend a year in the outside world to decide if he really wants to devote his life to prayer and contemplation. He quickly meets Hordle John, a fellow novice expelled for misbehavior, and Aylward, a French archer traveling to meet the famous knight Sir Nigel Loring and join his band of archers, the titular White Company. The three decide to travel together, and embark on a series of action-packed adventures across England, France, and Spain. Doyle was inspired to write about the time period after attending a lecture on the subject. He spent years researching the era, and his careful research is evident in the novel’s detail: period-correct words and names add a flavor of verisimilitude, and nearly all of the people and places in the tale really did exist—and are moreover depicted to a great degree of historical accuracy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Driven Back to Eden

Author: Edward Payson Roe

Description: First serialized in the popular children’s magazine St. Nicholas, Driven Back to Eden is a classic of the 19th-century “back-to-the-land” genre. In the preface, author Edward Payson Roe explains that he intended to write a realistic story that could serve as a practical and encouraging guide for families wishing to escape urban tenements for a healthier, more wholesome life in the country. For Robert Durham, a bookkeeper earning a modest salary, life in his crowded New York City flat has become an unsolvable problem. He sees his wife growing nervous and weary, his frail daughter Mousie fading in the city air, and his other children being drawn into the street’s unhealthy influences. After the events of a particular evening confirm his fears, he makes a momentous decision: the family must abandon the city and learn to make their living from the soil, despite their inexperience. The novel blends a heartwarming family adventure with detailed instructions on the challenges and rewards of small-scale farming, from planting the first crops to managing difficult neighbors.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Mr. Britling Sees It Through

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: Life at the writer Mr. Britling’s estate in the Essex countryside is idyllic. Guests arrive, games are played, and minor love affairs play out. During the early summer of 1914 Germany is discussed, but talk of war is dismissed as fanciful and less important than the situation happening at the same time in Ireland. The outbreak of the war changes everything. Some of the men are sent off to fight, while the formerly beautiful countryside becomes a playground for the British troops, and German zeppelins attack the Essex coast. The mood alternates between euphoric and despondent. Friendships unravel, loved ones die, and society begins to fall apart as the incompetence and cruelty of the leaders on all sides becomes clear. Throughout it all Mr. Britling tries his best to understand the war. Surely it must have a purpose? First published in 1916, when the cost of the war was becoming clear even if its outcome was still in doubt, Mr. Britling Sees it Through is H. G. Wells’s eulogy to a world destroyed. He uses the war as a way to explore ideas about religion, society, and humanity, as well as life and beauty.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Lazy Detective

Author: George Dilnot

Description: Harry Labar is lazy—at least he thinks so, and so do his peers in the Grape Street division. His boss has alluded to early retirement for Harry unless he can improve his clear-up rate. But Harry’s rate is impeded by Larry Hughes, an untouchable criminal kingpin suspected of being behind most of the local crime. hen a millionaire, Solly Gertstein, is robbed of precious jewels and objets d’art, the crime carries all the hallmarks of Larry Hughes. Hughes isn’t one to get his hands dirty; consequently Harry needs to be industrious to gather enough evidence to link the crime to Hughes, all the while trying to control his romantic feelings for one of the witnesses, Miss Penelope Noelson …

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Seagull

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: A fading actress, Madame Irina Nikolayevna Arkadin, visits her brother’s country estate, where her son, Konstantin Gavrilovitch Treplev, stages an avant-garde play in an attempt to realize his artistic ambitions. The play stars the woman he’s in love with, Nina Mihailovna Zaretchny, an aspiring actress with restrictive parents. Meanwhile, Masha, the daughter of the estate manager, pines for Treplev, while a local schoolteacher, Medvedenko, pines for Masha. Trigorin, a novelist, accompanies Madame Arkadin, but then attracts Nina’s attention. Some characters desire love, some desire artistic success, and some desire both—but over the course of the play, they’ll discover that happiness can be difficult to find. The Seagull, published in 1895, is considered to be the first of Chekhov’s four major plays. In contrast to most mainstream 19th-century plays, which were melodramatic, most of the characters speak in subtext. The play’s opening night in 1896 was famously a failure, and made Chekhov want to abandon writing plays. But when it was produced two years later by Konstantin Stanislavski, the seminal Russian theater practitioner, the play became a huge success. While some productions interpret the play as a tragedy, Chekhov always considered it to be a comedy.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Waverley

Author: Walter Scott

Description: Edward Waverley is a young English gentleman, the heir to his uncle, Sir Everard Waverley. After receiving a commission in the English army and being stationed in Scotland, he comes into contact with Jacobites, supporters of the pretender Charles Stuart, who seeks to reclaim the throne of England. After becoming enamored with the Jacobite cause and subsequently being suspected of treason, Waverley decides to openly join the uprising on the side of the rebels, during which his honorable conduct wins him favor on both sides of the conflict. Originally published anonymously by Walter Scott, Waverley was well-received by critics and audiences, and is an early example of historical fiction, a genre Scott helped popularize. The novel’s title became the name for the overarching Waverley stories, a series of unrelated historical novels set mainly in the British Isles.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Now It Can Be Told

Author: Philip Gibbs

Description: At the outbreak of war in 1914, newspaper reporter Philip Gibbs left for Belgium to report on the German invasion and the resulting mass Allied retreat. In the midst of these catastrophes in the early days of fighting, British high command was loath to allow any reporting outside army communiqués, and only after a public outcry for information was Gibbs made into one of only five official British war correspondents. He would accompany the British army through all their fighting on the Western Front, including the Battles of Ypres, the Somme, and Flanders, up till their eventual victory in 1918. As a war correspondent, Gibbs had the fairly unique position of being able to interact with both the soldiers in the trenches and the generals in high command. In return for this privileged access, all of the correspondents’ original reports were subject to strict censorship, and Gibbs chafed constantly under the censor’s pen. Published in 1920 after the war, this book contains his unvarnished accounts of the brutality of modern trench warfare and the British General Headquarters who struggled to adapt to it.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Magnolia Leaves

Author: Mary Weston Fordham

Description: Writing in the second half of the 19th century, Mary Weston Fordham was an African-American poet and teacher for the American Missionary Association, a Christian organization that played a major role in building schools for African-Americans following Reconstruction. Much of her poetry relates to religious and familial themes, especially the process of grieving for dead family members. She published her poetry in the collection Magnolia Leaves, which also contains a foreword by Booker T. Washington.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Recollections of Full Years

Author: Helen Herron Taft

Description: Helen Herron Taft served as First Lady of the United States from 1909–1913 alongside her husband, William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh President of the United States. Her memoir, Recollections of Full Years, recalls her experiences alongside her husband across his lengthy political career, and is the first memoir to be published by a First Lady. Mrs. Taft’s recollections start from her beginnings as a Cincinnati socialite, and go on to narrate her experiences as her husband ascends in his political career from Solicitor General of the United States, to Governor-General of the Philippines, and eventually to the Presidency. Just over half of the book focuses on the Taft family’s time in the Philippines. A detailed account of Philippine life as a politician and a cultural outsider offers unique perspective on this volatile era in Philippine history. Much of the book takes the form of a travelogue, as Mrs. Taft recalls stories in extensive detail about the travels that her husband’s political career took their family on, including Japan, Cuba, Hawaii, and of course, the Philippines. Following Taft’s election as the twenty-seventh President, the memoir turns to accounts of life in the White House from the perspective of the First Lady. History would remember Mrs. Taft as a trendsetter who expanded the role of the First Lady in significant ways, many of which she recounts from her perspective. This memoir takes readers through the very end of the Taft administration, as the family prepares to leave the White House following Woodrow Wilson’s victory in the election of 1912.

Subjects: biography, memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: Short Science Fiction

Author: Isaac Asimov

Description: Isaac Asimov’s reputation precedes him; his prolific output of science fiction novels and short stories between the 1940s and the 1990s, along with his many Hugo and Nebula awards, cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction author of his time. His writing, at least in the first half of his career, focused on “hard” science fiction: stories that were broadly founded in realistic science. Indeed, as well as writing fiction, he was a professor of biochemistry, and wrote a wide variety of popular science essays and books. This collection brings together the few Asimov science fiction short stories that are currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication. It includes one focused on robots and the positronic brain, a subject that he would return to many times over his career.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Ponson Case

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: hen Sir William Ponson doesn’t call down to his butler for his customary evening drink, the unusual turn is initially brushed away, but the alarm is raised once his servants find that he has disappeared from the house. It’s only the following morning that, at the bottom of a set of rapids, a damaged boat—and his body—are discovered. Initially the death is assumed to be a horrible accident, but it’s not long before enough suspicious evidence is found to merit a visit from Inspector Tanner of Scotland Yard. The Ponson Case is Freeman Wills Crofts’s second novel (following the well received The Cask) and amply demonstrates his skill in tightly plotted crime stories, in particular with his encyclopedic knowledge of train stations and timetables gained during his day job as a railway engineer.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Uncle Vanya

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: Alexandr Valdimirovitch Serebryakov, an elderly professor, and his beautiful and much younger wife, Yelena Andreyevna, return from the city to their country estate, which once belonged to Serebryakov’s late first wife. The estate is managed by Serebryakov’s daughter, Sonya, and his brother-in-law, Ivan Petrovitch Voynitsky (the titular “Uncle Vanya”). Voynitsky’s friend, the country doctor Mihail Lvovitch Astrov, goes to and from the estate, and is bored with his life. Sonya has feelings for Astrov, while both Astrov and Voynitsky compete for the affections of Yelena. Voynitsky, nearing middle age, feels life has passed him by, and deeply resents Serebryakov, believing that the management of the estate has thwarted his ambitions for his life. As the play progresses, these simmering resentments soon boil over. Chekhov first published Uncle Vanya in 1897, and it was first performed in 1899 in Moscow. It’s a heavily reworked version of The Wood Demon, a play Chekhov wrote a decade earlier. Uncle Vanya is one of Chekhov’s most highly regarded plays, and is still regularly performed in theaters throughout the world.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Great Roxhythe

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: The Great Roxhythe is set in the glittering but treacherous court of Charles II, in which the brilliant and wealthy Marquis of Roxhythe wears the mask of a cynical, self-serving courtier, allowing even his friends to believe he is cold and disloyal. Yet this public façade is his greatest sacrifice; in secret, he drains his own fortune and stains his own name to operate as the king’s most trusted spy and protector. The story is a tragedy of devotion, leaving Roxhythe completely alone, his immense loyalty and suffering a silent burden known only to the sovereign he serves so completely.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Octopus

Author: Frank Norris

Description: At the end of the nineteenth-century, a group of wheat growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley fights back when the railroad monopoly attempts to take possession of their farms. United in the local Farmer’s League, they try to retain the land that they’ve been improving for years, while the railroad company threatens them with increased shipping rates and eviction from their homes. When political opposition, court cases, and bribery all fail, the conflict comes to an explosive conclusion. Published in 1901, The Octopus is the first part of Frank Norris’s unfinished trilogy The Epic of the Wheat, on the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat. The Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, a bloody incident in the conflict between farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad involving disagreements on land ownership, inspired the novel, in which the portrayal of the railroad monopolies as powerful, evil, and greedy reflects the anti-railroad sentiments of the time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: When Charles the First Was King

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: The Dales of Dale’s Field have farmed their Yorkshire estate for generations. But conflict with a local enemy and the outbreak of the English Civil War make a deep impact on Will Dale, the young yeoman farmer currently the estate’s owner. His instinct to support the Royalist cause puts him inevitably in conflict with many in the North. This also leads to surprising chance encounters as the Parliamentarians move inexorably towards executing King Charles I. In more personal terms, the tumultuous times frustrate Will’s hopes of making a stable life with the woman he loves. Fletcher wrote a number of historical studies of Yorkshire—indeed, all his early novels were in this genre. When Charles the First Was King is described in Jonathan Nield’s authoritative guide to Victorian historical fiction as “an excellent Yorkshire tale.” It stands up well in the company of its more famous contemporaries.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Old English Baron

Author: Clara Reeve

Description: The Old English Baron opens with Sir Phillip Harclay returning to England after years of foreign service to find his friend Arthur Lord Lovel dead, and the family castle sold to Baron Fitz-Owen. Among the baron’s children, Harclay takes notice of the adopted son Edmund, a peasant from the nearby village. The knight feels an immediate connection with the child and offers to adopt him as his own. From there, the tale continues with a mix of adventure, mystery, romance, and the supernatural, telling of the tragic fate of the Lovel family. The Old English Baron is an influential early Gothic novel. It was first published anonymously in 1777 as The Champion of Virtue, and a year later was republished under its current title and Reeve’s name. Written as an offspring of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the novel follows a similar plot. It retains some of the ghostly tropes that define the genre, but avoids the more fantastical elements of its spiritual predecessor, to achieve Reeve’s stated goal of “uniting the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern novel.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Cherry Orchard

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s final play. The plot revolves around a heavily indebted landowner, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevsky, and her brother, Leonid Andreyevitch Gaev, as they attempt to save their estate, and its large cherry orchard, from being auctioned off to pay the mortgage. Lopahin, a wealthy merchant who’s uncomfortable with his lower-class background, accompanies them, suggesting grand business plans to revive the estate. Lyubov Andreyevna’s daughters, Anya and Varya, work to keep things stable, while Lyubov Andreyevna’s oddball employees and other locals are caught up in their own personal concerns. The Cherry Orchard was written in 1903 and performed in 1904. The play dramatizes the massive social changes that were happening in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, like the rise of the middle class and the decline of aristocratic power. Chekhov called the play “A Comedy in Four Acts,” and with farcical and tragic elements woven throughout, it would today be called a tragicomedy. It’s widely considered a classic of 20th century theater.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Charles Beaumont

Description: Charles Beaumont was an American author and screenwriter. Besides publishing a considerable number of short stories, Beaumont is best known for his work on movies and television shows, especially the The Twilight Zone, in which some of his short stories were adapted into episodes, often by himself. Most of his work is still under copyright; the few short stories believed to be in the U.S. public domain are collected in this Standard Ebooks edition.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Jealousies of a Country Town

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: “The Old Maid” tells the story of three men who are all after the hand of the same wealthy spinster, Mlle. Cormon, in the town of Alençon. The Chevalier de Valois is a member of the ancien régime with a penchant for snuff. Du Bosquier is a former financier who fell on hard times after he was discharged by Napoleon, and whom Mlle. Cormon has already rejected once. Both of these men are in their late fifties, and their interests in the forty-something Mlle. Cormon are financial rather than romantic. The third suitor is Athanese Granson, a young man of twenty-three who has fallen head over heels in love with Mlle. Cormon, a friend of his mother’s. While each of the three are devising ways they can win her hand, her focus is someone else entirely: M. de Troisville, a man looking to settle down in Alençon. “The Collection of Antiquities” is the name given to the salon of the Marquis d’Escrignon by those have been excluded from it. This includes the aforementioned du Bosquier, whom Balzac inexplicably renames “du Crosier” in this story. The marquis’s son, Victurnien, has been terrifically spoiled by his aunt, the marquis’s sister, who has raised him with her brother after the death of the mother. The profligate Victurnien is repeatedly rescued from ruin by the marquis’s faithful notary. Through his own recklessness and the cunning of a family enemy he eventually ends up in a situation that threatens not only his livelihood, but also that of his entire family.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Shadow Line

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: The unnamed narrator, a young seaman, is the first mate on a ship in Southeast Asia. Despite being satisfied with his position, he decides, on a whim, to end his career and head back to Europe. As he awaits for passage in the port of Singapore, he’s offered his first command: the captaincy of a ship left stranded in a nearby port without its commanding officer. His task is to bring the ship back to Singapore—an endeavor destined to become a rite of passage. Joseph Conrad wrote this novel in 1915, originally titled First Command; he serialized it starting September 1916, and finally published it as a book in 1917. The story is based on his own experiences, and it deals with themes of maturity, wisdom, and experience. It’s among Conrad’s most well-known novels and has served as the basis of two film adaptations.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A House of Gentlefolk

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Description: Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky, a Russian nobleman, abandons his wife in Paris after her infidelity. He returns to his family estate in Russia intending to “cultivate the soil” and falls in love with Lisa, the devout daughter of his cousin, who encourages Lavretsky to reconcile with his wife. Through Lavretsky, Turgenev reflects upon his own impending middle age, and the ephemeral natures of love and happiness. A House of Gentlefolk, Turgenev’s second novel, was originally published in Sovremennik in 1859, following the Crimean War but preceding the emancipation of the serfs. It has been translated into English under many different names, including Liza, or A Nest of Nobles, A Nest of Hereditary Legislators, and A Home of the Gentry.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Misalliance

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Hypatia, daughter of the newly wealthy underwear manufacturer John Tarleton, is at home with her parents and older brother, entertaining her fiancé Bentley and his father Lord Summerhill, a former governor of a British colonial territory. Their afternoon is interrupted twice: first when an airplane crashes into their roof, carrying Joey Percival and Lina Szczepanowska, a handsome friend of Bentley’s and a circus daredevil and acrobat; and then by a disaffected store clerk, who intends to assassinate John Tarleton. Over the course of the summer afternoon, eight proposals of marriage are offered and discussed. Which of them might make a good match, and which a misalliance? Misalliance continues the work of George Bernard Shaw in using satire to explore the nature of marriage, the liberation of women, and the philosophy of familial relationships. It was first performed in London in 1910, and has been run on Broadway and revived multiple times since.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: That Affair Next Door

Author: Anna Katharine Green

Description: When Miss Amelia Butterworth observes a couple entering the neighboring Van Burnam mansion, her instinct tells her that something isn’t right. Investigating, she discovers a woman’s body and realizes she has stumbled upon a murder, and that she’s a vitally important witness. But Miss Butterworth aspires to be more than simply a witness, however important—she sets out to solve the crime. Initially she works in competition with the famed New York detective, Ebenezer Gryce, but as the mystery deepens, nothing but their cooperation will lead to the truth. ith the creation of the character of Miss Butterworth, Anna Katharine Green anticipated by thirty years the advent of Agatha Christie’s more famous elder spinster and amateur sleuth, Miss Marple.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Travel Essays

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Best known for his fiction and poetry, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was also a prolific travel writer. This ebook is a collection of his travel works. In his earliest book, “An Inland Voyage,” Stevenson and a friend paddle their canoes from Antwerp to the north of France. Along the way, they meet with fellow travelers, innkeepers, sportsmen, and the police. “Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes” is his illustrated guidebook to the Scottish capital, covering both the history and the nineteenth-century present of the city and its people. In “Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes” Stevenson makes a walking trip in mountainous central France, accompanied, aided, and occasionally obstructed by the donkey Modestine. Both “An Inland Voyage” and “Travels with a Donkey” are considered two of the first popular books in outdoor literature, written at a time when hiking and camping were still uncommon recreational activities. In 1878 Stevenson traveled to California, were he married and lived for a few years. He documented his journey in several books and essays. “The Amateur Emigrant” describes the passage from Scotland to New York and “Across the Plains” describes the journey by train from New York to California. In “The Old and New Pacific Capitals” he describes the cities of Monterey and San Francisco. Finally, “The Silverado Squatters” is a memoir of Stevenson’s honeymoon to the Napa Valley with his wife Fanny. The remaining travel essays cover shorter trips in Europe and Stevenson’s general reflections on the nature of travel.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Master Mind of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Master Mind of Mars is the sixth installment in the Martian series. It was published as a novel by A. C. McClurg in March, 1928, after being serialized in the magazine Amazing Stories Annual in 1927. Ulysses Paxton, the first Earthman to follow the trail to Mars blazed by John Carter, becomes an apprentice of the brilliant, arrogant, and utterly amoral Ras Thavas, dealer of youth and beauty to the elites of Mars—until Paxton, driven by disgust with his master, rebels to seek the woman he loves. Besides the usual swashbuckling adventure typical of the Mars books, Burroughs continues exploring the themes of mind and body introduced in The Chessmen of Mars. He also satirizes religious fundamentalism, which reputedly made it more difficult to find a publisher for this book.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The House of the Dead

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: In 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years due to his involvement in an organization that had been banned by the Tsar. While there, he experienced a personal transformation, and after another six years of exile, he returned to St. Petersburg and wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The House of the Dead, which he finished in 1862. The book is structured around the reminiscences of the protagonist, Alexandr Petrovtich Goryanchikov, who is sent to a hard labor camp in Siberia for murdering his wife. Over the course of the novel, he gets to know the prison’s other inhabitants, seeing the harsh brutality and the deep human decency that exists within both the guards and the convicts. The book has no conventional plot, but is organized around Alexandr Petrovitch gaining gradual insight into the true nature of the prison and its residents. Many events and characters in the book are drawn from Dostoevsky’s own experiences, and the enigma of the good and evil that exist in all people was a theme he would return to for the rest of his writing career. This book launched the “prison memoir” genre, and has been admired by many, including Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev.

Subjects: fiction, memoir

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Title: Blind Mice

Author: C. Kay Scott

Description: An idealistic young architect, John Winter, and his wife, Lucy, find their lives uprooted when Lucy’s mother, Nannie, comes to town for an extended visit, having been thrown out of her cousin’s home because of their disapproval of her relationship with the principal of the local academy. Lucy must try to protect herself, her friendships, and her marriage from her manipulative mother. The contrast of Lucy’s and Nannie’s lives plays into themes of class and determination. Blind Mice is C. Kay Scott’s first novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Bridal Wreath

Author: Sigrid Undset

Description: Kristin is the daughter of a 14th-century Norwegian nobleman and farmer of great integrity. Her father, though successful, is somewhat out of place, being made for war and the command of men. Her mother has long been unhappy. Despite tragic circumstances, Kristin grows up to be a happy, if willful, young woman. Betrothed at fifteen to the well-born son of a wealthy neighbor, she wrestles with passion and duty as she finds her place in the world. The Bridal Wreath is the first book of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, Sigrid Undset’s best-known work. Undset’s realistic portrayal of the medieval world, along with her complex female protagonist, remains a landmark in literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Clifford D. Simak

Description: Clifford D. Simak, a prolific author of science fiction, wrote over 125 short stories. They often focus on the human scale more than the space opera scale, and are often tinged with horror. Included in this collection are stories of time travel, unreliable perceptions, and the difficulty in applying human understanding to different forms of life. The short stories in this collection are those currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, and are arranged in order of publication.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Magic Mountain

Author: Thomas Mann

Description: Hans Castorp is a young man ready to start a career in shipbuilding—but before he does, he decides to visit his cousin Joachim, a patient residing at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Switzerland. Castorp enjoys meeting and chatting with the wide array of colorful personalities living at the sanatorium, until its director delivers some bad news: Castorp, too, has symptoms of disease, and must remain at the sanatorium indefinitely. Thus begins a black comedy spanning years, in which he lives and learns in this self-contained world in the mountains. The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman and an allegory of the years surrounding World War I, in which Castorp, a naive blank slate symbolizing the Weimar Republic, spends time with the motley crew in the sanatorium, who each represent the nations and ideologies of Europe vying for his attention. World War I broke out and concluded as Mann was writing the novel; at first, he was opposed to the Weimar Republic, but he later changed his mind, and this development in his personal philosophy is reflected in how Castorp and the patients interact over the years, and in Castorp’s ultimate fate. Adding to the novel’s staying power are its many layers of allegory and allusion, including Greek mythology, European fable, music, opera, and theater, literature, mysticism, numerology, medicine, and philosophy. Above these layers is Mann’s overarching message of illness and death as necessary struggles to overcome before reaching a fulfilled life, a theme from his earlier novella, “Death in Venice,” that he explicitly wished to revisit and expand upon.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The End of the Tether

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Henry Whalley is an aging but once-famous merchant captain in Southeast Asia. He made a name for himself in the age of sail, when he commanded clipper ships and even made some minor geographical discoveries. When a banking crash wipes out his life savings, he retires with enough funds to sail on his own small ship. He is, however, forced to sell this ship when his daughter writes asking for financial aid. To provide for himself and his daughter, he enlists as captain of a dubious steamer under a three-year contract. Meanwhile, the owner of the steamer is a compulsive gambler looking for ways to take over the captain’s assets. Whalley is now near the end of his contract, with one final run to complete. Joseph Conrad included The End of the Tether as part of Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, a collection published in 1902. While less famous than Heart of Darkness (also part of that collection, though first published three years earlier as a serial), The End of the Tether is notable for its central themes of money, industrial development, and retirement.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Demian

Author: Hermann Hesse

Description: From a young age, Emil Sinclair finds himself living in two different worlds: one of cleanliness and order with a moral clarity, and the other of disorder and scandal, containing the ugly behaviors and circumstances of the world. As Emil progresses through his childhood, he begins to question his place in these two worlds, and goes on a rocky journey of philosophical growth and enlightenment aided by his enigmatic friend Demian. In the 1910s, Hesse began psychoanalytic treatment in the hopes of dealing with difficulties he experienced in his youth. This led him to become interested in the growing field of psychoanalysis, and in particular Jungian philosophy. Hesse include many symbols and archetypes related to the field in Demian, and based part of the novel on his own psychological qualms he had in his childhood.

Subjects: fiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Wild Animals I Have Known

Author: Ernest Thompson Seton

Description: ild Animals I Have Known, a collection of short stories published in 1898, was Ernest Thompson Seton’s most popular work and one of the most popular fiction books of its day. The stories are largely independent of each other, with each one following the life of a different animal. They explore themes of survival in a world populated by humans and other creatures, and the challenges that each animal faces in its efforts to thrive. Each story touches on the duality between the beauty and brutality of the natural world. The collection as a whole illustrates recurring themes of triumph and tragedy, while painting a picture of the great freedom and grave danger that animals face every day of their lives. In his 1903 essay “Real and Sham Natural History,” naturalist John Burroughs blamed this book in particular for founding the genre of stories he called “Nature Fakers,” sparking a controversy that raged for years and only ended when President Theodore Roosevelt publicly sided with Burroughs in September 1907. hile the book’s anthropomorphization of animals through Seton’s use of English words to represent the animals’ “language” was one of the characteristics at the center of its controversy, Wild Animals I Have Known was among the first literary works written with the intent to evoke a sense of empathy, rather than fear, for these wild animals, by showing that even for predators, survival in the wild is never easy.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Poetry

Author: Matthew Arnold

Description: Matthew Arnold was a cultural critic and inspector of schools in Victorian Britain. In his day he was famous for his critique of British society in Culture and Anarchy, but he was also well-known for his eclectic poetry. Some of his poems commemorate lost loved ones, like “Thyrsis” (for his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough) and “Kaiser Dead” (for a deceased dog). Others speak to ubiquitous human struggles, such as old age (in “Growing Old”) and the struggles against the natural world (“To an Independent Preacher”). Reflecting his concerns to “make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere,” he also wrote poems that retell stories from world mythology like the Norse (“Balder Dead”), Iranian (“Sohrab and Rostam”), and Greek (“The Strayed Reveller,” “Merope”). He also wrote poems that tell stories closer to home, like “The Scholar Gipsy,” which is based on a 17th century story about a poor Oxford student who leaves the university to join a band of gypsies. Ever the observer of culture, Arnold also wrote poetry speaking to issues of his own day, the most famous of which is “Dover Beach,” which compares the secularization of England with the nighttime ocean withdrawing from shore. This poem is sometimes held up as an early example of literary modernism, and also inspired the composer Samuel Barber to set the poem to music. Arnold is highly regarded among the pantheon of Victorian poets. As the English literary critic E. K. Chambers puts it: “It is no part of my object to attempt a comparison between the best work of Matthew Arnold and that of his six greatest contemporaries. Personal taste and emotional sympathy inevitably play too great a part in any such estimate. But one may fairly maintain that the proportion of work which endures is greater in the case of Matthew Arnold than in that of any one of them.”

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Road to Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Description: The Road to Oz tells the story of Dorothy Gale as she escorts a shaggy traveler who appears outside her farm. They soon find themselves transported to a fantasy land. Upon realizing this, Dorothy and the Shaggy Man travel down the road with the assumption that it will lead them to Oz, revealing a way for Dorothy to return home. The story, published in 1909, is a return to Oz at the request of Baum’s readers and features guest appearances from characters of his other fantasy books. The story is told in a style more like a travelogue compared to his other Oz books.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Women

Author: Zofia Nałkowska

Description: Janka has emerged from her “ice-plains,” her cerebral realms of pure thought, to bask in the strong sunshine of life. A summer with a friend has introduced her to a love-addled suitor, but her heart is fixed on another’s more intellectual charms. Meanwhile, the difference in how Polish society accepts men and women’s actions is becoming increasingly apparent to Janka and her wider group of associates. omen is Zofia Nałkowska’s first novel. The first part was published in The Truth in 1904; the remaining two parts were published in 1906, completing the book right in the middle of the modernist Young Poland movement. This translation was published in 1920.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The New Freedom

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Description: Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States. The New Freedom, a collection of speeches he made during his successful 1912 presidential campaign, takes its name from that campaign platform. In it Wilson describes the conditions necessary for freedom in a rapidly changing society, and highlights the dangers from monopolies and politicians that are either bought, or too cozy with business interests. To combat these regressive influences Wilson stresses the need for open and participatory democracy, as well as positive government intervention to promote individual, rather than business, freedom. Throughout these speeches Wilson shows an unwavering belief in democracy and the wisdom of the people. He admits that he doesn’t have all the answers, and begrudges those who make that claim for themselves. According to Wilson, politicians of all parties have been slow to recognize a change in power dynamics. Whereas once workers were familiar with their bosses, now workers toil for faceless corporations that have almost unlimited power over them and bear no practical social responsibilities. Wilson stresses that power over others isn’t a sign of wisdom or virtue, and that the government should be emboldened to break up such powers to allow for a fair playing field. He remarks that ignoring these new economic power relations risks disillusioning voters, leaving the door open for unscrupulous politicians to promise easy answers that lead to ruin.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Paradise Mystery

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: The cathedral of Wrychester has adjacent to it a beautiful and ancient garden known locally as “Paradise.” One morning, a man, not known locally, plunges to his death from the cathedral tower into that very garden. Pemberton Bryce, a young doctor freshly fired from the medical practice in the cathedral Close, is called to the scene. Glimpsing the senior doctor who fired him in an agitated state, he quickly calculates how he can turn to his advantage the facts that he alone possesses—and the prize he’s determined to win is the beautiful ward of his erstwhile employer. hile the plot of The Paradise Mystery may not conform wholly to the rules that the Detection Club later sought to impose on the crime fiction of the Golden Age, J. S. Fletcher still constructs a satisfying mystery that deepens with each twist of the tale.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Dark Princess

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Description: A brilliant young black American medical student runs into a color barrier that keeps him from graduating. He goes into self-exile to Europe where he discovers a world-wide group of colored peoples seeking to overthrow white-dominated governments. He falls in love with an Indian princess, who is one of the leaders of the organization. After returning to America and spending several troubled years dealing with Chicago politics and a failed marriage of convenience, he marries the princess and works with the organization to develop long range plans to overcome white dominance. This book was DuBois’ personal favorite of his works, combining themes of romance, international racial solidarity, and the corruptness of both the black and white political machines in Chicago.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Painted Veil

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: Beautiful but superficial Kitty Fane arrives in 1920s Hong Kong, accompanying her bacteriologist husband, the quiet and honorable Walter Fane. Kitty begins an affair, but Walter learns of her infidelity, and forces her to accompany him on a charitable mission into the heart of a cholera epidemic in mainland China—a mission of potentially deadly risk. The people and events they encounter there force them to confront their own deepest selves, changing them both forever. The novel was successful in its time, and has proven to be one of Maugham’s most enduring. Although deeply introspective, it enjoyed a stage adaptation and three commercial film adaptations, including one in the 21st century.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Return of the Native

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: The Return of the Native opens with Thomasin Yeobright returning from her wedding, which was aborted because of an error on the marriage license. She was supposed to wed Damon Wildeve, who seems ambivalent about the marriage, and still secretly longs for Eustacia Vye, a former lover. Eustacia imagines a better life than that of a lonely young woman living with her grandfather in the rural southwest of England. When Thomasin’s cousin Clym returns from business in Paris, Eustacia sees him as someone who can take her away to a city with charm and beauty, so unlike the heath that she loathes. But Yeobright has other plans. Hardy originally conceived The Return of the Native as a classical tragedy in five parts, but as it was being serialized, he added a sixth part in consideration of a public that demanded a more satisfying ending. The novel was controversial at the time, dealing with marital dissatisfaction and infidelity.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Conscience of a Conservative

Author: Barry Goldwater

Description: U.S. Senator and future Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative is a foundational work in the American conservative movement from the late 20th century and onward into the modern day. It lays out the conservative position on a number of topics including taxation, labor, welfare, education, and the general roles of state and federal government, and would prove highly influential to future conservative politicians in establishing their own platforms. Goldwater offers his case for a strict Constitutionalist government in which the role of the federal government is restricted to those things called out explicitly in the constitution, with all other matters being the responsibility of the states to manage independently. In the final chapter of the book, Goldwater describes his view of the stakes of the Cold War, and the importance of containing the spread of Communism broadly and the Soviet Union in particular.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Getting Married

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: On the morning they are meant to be wed, Edith Bridgenorth and Cecil Sykes are instead reading pamphlets about the dangers of marriage. Edith’s father, the Bishop of Chelsea, is writing a book on the history of marriage. In his kitchen, the rest of the family assembles and attempts to hash out a better alternative to marriage as it stands. Among them are Boxer, who is proposing to Lesbia for the tenth and final time, Reginald and Leo, who have faked an assault and affair so they may get divorced, Leo’s new love interest, who is having second thoughts about her, and Alderman Collins, who is catering the wedding as he has for all Edith’s sisters. One part family drama, one part satirical comedy about the institution of marriage, Getting Married presents George Bernard Shaw’s arguments for improved laws around marriage and divorce and includes an extensive preface containing his views on the future of marriage.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Vicar of Bullhampton

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Frank Fenwick is in many ways a model clergyman. He takes seriously the cure of souls in his Wiltshire parish, extending to the material as well as spiritual well-being of his flock, while upholding his convictions without doctrinaire excess. But in his ministry, as well as his friendships, his good intentions embroil him in unwonted controversy. The poor miller’s family is plunged into moral and legal difficulties, the romantic interest of his best friend—the local squire—is beset with obstacles, and conflict with the dissenting chapel deepens. And in each case “our vicar” has some degree of culpability. Anthony Trollope’s interest in matters ecclesiastical is famously bound up with his Chronicles of Barsetshire novels. While the church setting in those books is prominent, the issues arising are mostly of a social nature, whereas in The Vicar of Bullhampton the conflicts and controversies are more overtly moral and theological. How should the moral status of the miller’s wayward adult children be judged? Is it right that a young woman should be pressured to wed against her will and better judgment? Is it really the vicar’s “broad church” sensibilities that incline him to seek peace with the local dissenting clergyman, or rather his enmity with the local Marquis who has gifted their new chapel? Unusually, Trollope provides a preface to this novel, judging that his treatment of the “fallen woman” subplot—revolving around Carry Brattle, the daughter of the thoroughly “pagan” but virtuous miller—could be criticized for being overly sympathetic. For this reason, the novel has become identified with this trope, although Trollope acknowledges in his autobiography that Carry was actually a relatively minor character. As Frank Fenwick is fond of repeating, however, “It is not easy to set crooked things straight.” Yet he cannot seem to stop himself from repeatedly making the attempt. Through varied plot lines Trollope weaves his characteristic psychological insight, treating themes of loyalty and hypocrisy, constancy in love, and forgiveness and its lack. As Michael Sadlier commented, The Vicar of Bullhampton “has a sure title to enduring reputation,” and shows that Trollope, “who is in many ways aggressively a product of his age, may yet, in psychological judgments, forecast the standards of another, later period.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Box Office Murders

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: A young woman’s body is hauled out of the English Channel by a passing yacht, and it matches the description of a woman named Thurza Darke given in a circular from Inspector French of Scotland Yard. Just the day before he’d been sitting alongside Thurza, listening to her story about the “suicide” of her friend. Thurza had been ensnared in a scam perpetrated by a man with a purple sickle-shaped birthmark on his wrist, and had realized that this was the same man her friend had mentioned shortly before her death. With two potentially linked murders on his hands, Inspector French is determined to stop any further bloodshed. The fifth in Freeman Wills Crofts’ long-running Inspector French series, this novel sees French more stumped than usual with false leads taking him away from the scent, but it’s difficult to keep the dogged detective confused for long.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Roman Hat Mystery

Author: Ellery Queen

Description: hen the play they are attending is interrupted by a policeman yelling at everyone to stay where they are and not get out of their seat, most of the audience in the Roman Theater think nothing of it. After all, the play is about the underworld and the police, and has been full of the sounds of sensationalized criminal society. But this policeman isn’t part of the play; someone in the audience has been murdered. Inspector Richard Queen soon arrives on the scene, closely followed by his son Ellery, a mystery writer who often assists Richard on his cases. They quickly determine the victim was a well-known crooked lawyer, and discover an odd clue: the man’s top hat is missing. That clue will loom large as the Queen’s investigation leads them deeper into both New York high society and the criminal world in which the dead man moved. The Roman Hat Mystery is the first of the Ellery Queen detective novels. Ellery Queen is the pseudonym of a pair of cousins who wrote most of the novels, as well as the name of their fictional amateur detective.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Inheritors

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Arthur Granger, the narrator and a failing novelist, is commissioned to write celebrity profiles in a suspicious journal. On a stroll he meets an otherworldly woman, who tells him she comes from a parallel universe where she’s involved in a conspiracy to take over the world. Arthur is drawn in by her charm and falls into the world of political machinations, which include a plot for Britain to colonize Greenland. The Inheritors, published in 1901, is the first of three collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. The book’s concept and most of the writing is attributed to Ford. Conrad served mostly as editor; he himself was writing Lord Jim at the time.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Simon the Coldheart

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: In the early 1400s, the Hundred Years’ War rages on between England and France. Simon Beauvallet is a stern and formidable warrior whose icy demeanor and unyielding principles make him a man who is feared, admired, and respected. Born a bastard but raised by his noble uncle, Simon climbs the ranks from a lowly squire to a feared and respected knight through sheer skill, intelligence, and the honorable execution of duty. Simon’s relentless ambition leads him to seize a castle and earn the favor of King Henry V, but his greatest challenge comes when he encounters the fiery Lady Margaret, the defiant heiress of his conquered lands. Though their clash of wills begins in hostility, Simon’s unexpected patience and Margaret’s gradual admiration forge a passionate bond, proving that even the coldest heart can be melted by love.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Clerambault

Author: Romain Rolland

Description: Clerambault is a minor poet in pre-World War I France and a believer in European integration and the impossibility of war. But when war is declared, he is swept up in the surrounding nationalism and militarism—though he maintains a sense of discomfort and recognition that his opinions have changed. It’s only when tragedy befalls his family that he’s forced to belatedly recognize his complicity in the war and the ruin it has caused. He commits himself to speaking out against the war, but this doesn’t make him any friends. He’s condemned as a traitor—even by his former friends and colleagues. Despite the public and private rejections, Clerambault continues to dedicate his time and literary skills to exposing the crimes being committed. He eventually meets would-be revolutionaries, who agree with his thinking on the war and French society, but who desire a more radical course of action than Clerambault can endorse. Though ostensibly written about the war, Rolland makes clear that the novel is really about the importance of maintaining freedom of thought, even (or especially) in times of near-uniformity of opinion. Rolland, who had earlier won the Nobel Prize in literature, was called the conscience of Europe by Stephan Zweig. Clerambault provides ample evidence for that claim and stands as a strong defense of individuality against oppression by the masses, as well as a passionate plea for peace both between and within nations.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Purple Cloud

Author: M. P. Shiel

Description: Adam Jeffson, the narrator of The Purple Cloud, is recruited to join a polar expedition after the suspicious death of another crewmate. Jeffson and the rest of crew of the Boreal are hoping to claim a multimillion dollar prize for the first expedition to reach the North Pole. During the long voyage, Jeffson discovers an ominous purple cloud which transforms his Arctic adventure. Upon his return, he struggles to survive, especially psychologically, in an apocalyptically different world. This ebook edition is based on the 1901 novelization, which is an expanded version of the 1901 serialization and preferred by scholars over a later 1929 edition that made changes to the language. It’s Shiel’s best known work, and one of the earliest examples of the “last man” apocalyptic science fiction novel.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Charwoman’s Shadow

Author: Lord Dunsany

Description: The Lord of the Tower and Rocky Forest, Gonsalvo, only wants the best for his children, but the dire state of his coffers means that a dowry for his daughter Mirandola’s hoped-for wedding is but a dream. He does however have a plan: his father, whose great love was boar hunting, had been promised a favor from a magician to whom he’d taught his skill. If his son, Ramon Alonzo, could find him again after all these years, perhaps he could be tutored in the arts of alchemy and the transmutation of base metal to gold? It is with this hope that Ramon Alonzo heads off into the forest on a quest to learn the Black Arts. The Charwoman’s Shadow was one of Lord Dunsany’s many early fantasy stories that helped set the genre in motion. It blends historical romance with magic and magical creatures in a purported Spanish “golden age,” a setting also used in the earlier Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Saint Joan

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Saint Joan stands out among George Bernard Shaw’s plays. He’s best known for drawing-room plays exploring social issues; here he writes something closer to a Shakespearean history play, following the fifteenth-century French national hero Joan of Arc through her campaigns and beyond. Shaw’s preface to the play argues that other tellings of Joan’s story do her a disservice by idealizing her and demonizing her antagonists. By refusing to show the prosecutors at Joan’s trial as cartoonish villains, Shaw introduces real drama into what could easily be cheap melodrama. And Shaw’s fully human Joan is one of his finest creations, which has attracted great actresses to the part from the 1920s to the present day. It is mostly on account of this deep characterization that this is considered by some to be Shaw’s greatest play.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Simon

Author: J. Storer Clouston

Description: A Procurator Fiscal in Scotland, being responsible for public prosecutions, needs to be a fairly hard-minded lawyer. Simon Rattar is an older lawyer of just this type. Along with holding the office Procurator Fiscal in his small town, he also serves as factor for the estate of the local laird whose wider clan is well-represented in the vicinity. Naturally, when one of Rattar’s esteemed clients is murdered in strange circumstances, the local gossips struggle to make sense of the killing—and the police aren’t much the wiser, either. J. Storer Clouston’s sleuth, called in when the slow-witted rural detective fails to make progress, is the monocled and gentlemanly F. T. Carrington, anticipating by some years the first appearance of that more famous and aristocratic monocle-wearer, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Spy in Black

Author: J. Storer Clouston

Description: During the Great War, German U-boat officer Conrad von Belke possesses the bravery, intellect, and facility in English for him to undertake intelligence work in the far north of Scotland. His mission is to provide information on movements of the British fleet in support of an audacious German submarine attack on their enemy. He’s not acting alone, however; his actions are guided locally by the experienced professional spy Adolph Tiel, who is in turn abetted by a most alluring and winsome “sister.” German strategy made substantial use of U-boats in attacking merchant shipping, believing this would rapidly and decisively weaken the Allied forces. Publication of Clouston’s novel in 1917 coincided with Germany’s policy of extending unrestricted U-boat warfare. J. Storer Clouston was a native of Orkney, the real-life setting for this spy thriller. While not as famous as John Buchan, Clouston’s work shares with that of his contemporary Scot a flair for dashing action and evocative locations. Such was the continuing appeal of The Spy in Black that in 1939 it became the basis of a critically acclaimed film of the same name.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Nigger of the Narcissus

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: James Wait is an Afro-Caribbean sailor in Bombay who enlists on the Narcissus, a trading ship bound for London. His deteriorating health soon becomes a problem for the crew, whose attention is focused on the perils of their strenuous sea voyage. The forecastle, which contains the crew’s living quarters, becomes the narrative’s focal point. The Nigger of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad’s third novel, was serialized in 1897 and published as a book in the same year. Due to its controversial title, it was first published in the United States as The Children of the Sea, before being published there under its original title in 1914. Its introduction is considered to be one of Conrad’s most important pieces of nonfiction, as in it he explains his philosophy of writing with quotes like “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” The introduction has been employed by literary scholars as a crucial key to understanding Conrad’s artistic vision.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Lily of the Valley

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Natalie, Félix Vandenesse’s current love, wants to know about his past, and why he tends to brood even in the happiest of times. Lily of the Valley is his first-person response, a short account of his childhood followed by a much longer narration of his friendship, and near-obsession, with a married woman. Although born into a well-to-do family, Félix’s story of his school years is one of neglect, of parents who send him off to various schools and of family who provide the barest of means for him while he’s there. While attending his first fête in his early adulthood, he sees a woman who so dazzles him that he takes an enormous liberty, resulting in her exclaiming at him and walking away. After several days of his moping around the house, Félix’s mother decides he needs fresh air to overcome his apathy (for which she does not know the cause), and sends him off to friends in the country. After arriving, he soon discovers that his residence is adjacent to the estate of his obsession. Taken for introductions by his mother’s friend, he finds she is a married mother of two, named Madame de Mortsauf. Through several initial visits, Félix establishes a rapport with Comte de Mortsauf, and Madame de Mortsauf tells him they can be friends, but only friends. Disappointed, but deciding that something is better than nothing, Félix agrees, and soon becomes an intimate friend of the family. The rest of his tale is the story of that friendship and the strains it puts on him.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Adam’s Breed

Author: Radclyffe Hall

Description: Olga Boselli, a young Italian woman who immigrated to London with her parents at the turn of the century, dies during childbirth. Her son, Gian-Luca, is raised by his grandparents, but his grandmother, a hard woman with a nose for business, resents him—and God—for taking the life of her daughter. As Gian-Luca comes of age, he struggles to find an identity and meaning in his life. His grandmother, the mother figure in his life, is cold; he grows up in an Italian ghetto, and so feels simultaneously apart from his English peers, but neither entirely fitting in with the culture of the Italian immigrants around him. He turns to poetry to help fill that void, and then later, to work as a waiter at an elegant restaurant. But even after he marries a loving woman who treats him like a king, he still feels unmoored from the society around him—and then World War I begins, sending him spiraling into a repulsion for food and the life he’s found himself in. Adam’s Breed was a critically acclaimed bestseller in its day, earning both the James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize and the Prix Femina—Vie Heureuse. Its plot has been compared favorably to Siddhartha, another bildungsroman focusing on the search for religious meaning.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The House by the River

Author: A. P. Herbert

Description: In west London on the bank of the Thames is a well-heeled but down to earth street. The residents are all accomplished in their own ways, but the shining star that dominates their attention is Stephen Byrne, the war poet. But Stephen isn’t the perfect specimen that they imagine him to be: he spontaneously assaults his new maid, killing her, and setting his life—and that of his friend John Egerton—on a dangerously out-of-control path. The House by the River is A. P. Herbert’s second novel, following the success of The Secret Battle, and it was here that he began to develop—despite the subject matter—his trademark wit. These days the novel is perhaps best known as the source material for Fritz Lang’s 1950 film of the same name.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Aspects of the Novel

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: “I am annoyed when people laugh at me for loving The Swiss Family Robinson, and I hope that I have annoyed some of you over Scott!” Anyone attempting an analysis and evaluation of novels inevitably runs the risk of upsetting those with different literary tastes. E. M. Forster, in his 1927 Clark Lectures, embraced this challenge in this personal yet seminal account of the English novel. The previous decade had seen a number of significant contributions to literary criticism of the novel, and Forster engages with a number of them in his lectures. Yet most of these have been forgotten, while Forster’s Aspects of the Novel remains in print, with a new edition introduced by Frank Kermode appearing as recently as 2005. The continuing appeal is not simply Forster’s elegant prose, nor his engaging, conversational tone, nor yet the frisson of his many judgments on well-known books and contemporary authors. Rather, the work has proved seminal for Forster’s selection of “aspects,” and the clarity and cogency of his analysis. Contemporary reviews and reactions to his published lectures tended to decry his insights as limited to his own practice as a leading novelist. With the benefit of hindsight, more recent critics recognize the way in which Forster’s account of the novel has shaped the development of its study in the 20th century and beyond. As Aspects of the Novel approaches its centenary, it enjoys an established place as a classic of literary criticism.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: An Outcast of the Islands

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Peter Willems is a successful clerk in a Dutch East Indies trading company until he’s caught for embezzlement. He turns to Tom Lingard, his erstwhile benefactor, who sends him to work in a commercial outpost on a river settlement. There, Willems meets a young and beautiful native girl. Overwhelmed by this encounter, he’s tempted to turn on his employer. An Outcast of the Islands is Joseph Conrad’s second novel. It was published in 1896, just one year after his literary debut, Almayer’s Folly. Surprisingly, despite sharing the same setting and several characters, it’s not a sequel, but rather takes place about 15 years earlier. One of the main supporting characters, Tom Lingard, also appears in one of Conrad’s later novels, The Rescue. Collectively, these three works are sometimes referred to as the Lingard Trilogy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Like a number of his contemporaries, Thomas Hardy published many short stories apart from his much better-known body of novels. Although they weren’t as highly regarded by critics as his novels were, appreciation has grown for his small-scale fiction. Hardy himself thought they were worth preserving, supervising four collections during his lifetime which he revisited and tweaked over the years and editions. Their subject matter coheres well with his novels. Almost without exception they narrate tales of Wessex, Hardy’s beloved region in the southeast of England, which largely overlaps with today’s counties of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. Many are narrated by embedded characters, recalling romances, tragedies, and the occasional triumph from bygone years. Hardy’s familiar themes of misplaced ambition and thwarted love recur frequently. Hardy published forty-four short stories in his lifetime (including two collaborations), and two more were published posthumously. One of the posthumously published stories is not yet in the public domain, and print editions of two other stories (“Our Exploits at West Poley” and “The Thieves Who Couldn’t Help Sneezing”) couldn’t be located; the remaining forty-three stories are collected here, ordered mostly by date of first publication with the exception of the sequence found in Hardy’s 1891 collection A Group of Noble Dames.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Small Bachelor

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Taking place in Prohibition-era New York, The Small Bachelor tells the story of George Finch, a young man who has pursued his dream of becoming an artist in the big city, despite his lack of talent. Living a comfortable life after receiving a substantial inheritance two years ago, George spends his time sometimes painting pictures of dubious artistic quality, sometimes seeking the advice of his friend, the multitalented author J. Hamilton Beamish, and more recently finding the courage to propose to Molly Waddington, his dream girl. George’s noble quest for love proves to be a difficult challenge, as he soon discovers after meeting Molly’s father and finding himself suddenly invited to dinner at the Waddington household. George has to face an increasing number of obstacles in order to win Molly’s heart and prove his worth as a husband, starting with having to earn the approval of Mrs. Waddington—who has already contemplated marrying Molly to a lord, and has no intention of allowing Molly to marry a man who can barely earn a living pretending to be an artist. The reader is also given a glimpse into the lives of the unlikely group that surrounds George and Molly’s tale of romance, like a policeman with an affinity for poetry, a self-help scholar who becomes fascinated with a fortune teller, a reformed convict who has his eyes on a lady pickpocket, and more. Published in 1927, The Small Bachelor is a great example of P. G. Wodehouse’s ability to craft comic fiction, mixing together converging storylines that focus on romantic trouble with fun and wacky hijinks, a rich vocabulary, and controlled narrative mayhem. The novel’s story and characters were inspired by a book written for the 1918 musical Oh, Lady! Lady!! by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. The story would later be adapted into a 1927 silent movie of the same name and in the 2003 stage production Over the Moon.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Survivors

Author: Tom Godwin

Description: The spaceship Constellation, taking colonists to the world of Athena, is suddenly attacked and boarded by the Gerns—an alien race which has just declared war against humanity. The Gerns take the colonists to Ragnarok, a planet in a double-star system, which was previously surveyed as uninhabitable owing to its high gravity, extreme seasonal cycles, and threatening local fauna. The Gerns leave their hostages stranded, expecting them to succumb to the planet’s harsh conditions. The humans, meanwhile, seek to survive against all odds in the hopes of one day exacting revenge. In 1957 Tom Godwin wrote the novelette “Too Soon to Die,” which he later expanded into a novel published in 1958 by Gnome Press as The Survivors. In 1960 it was reprinted by Pyramid Books under the title Space Prison.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Man in Lower Ten

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Description: Lawrence Blakeley has traveled to Pittsburgh to collect the deposition of rich industrialist John Gilmore, chief witness for the prosecution in a forgery trial, while his legal partner Richey McKnight visits his fiancee at her home in Richmond. What should have been a standard legal procedure to help secure a conviction in their favor becomes instead the beginning of great misfortune for Blakeley. After being forced to sleep in a vacant bunk upon finding a drunk occupying his paid-for one, Blakeley wakes up to discover that all his belongings are missing. The search for the stolen evidence is further complicated when a lifeless body is discovered, and Blakeley—the murder weapon mysteriously appearing in his possession—becomes the main suspect. Blakeley has to work out how a tangled web of clues that surrounds the murder, a beautiful but mysterious woman with a familiar face, and a seemingly unrelated legal case are all interconnected to his predicament. Published in 1909, The Man in Lower Ten was an early pioneer in American crime novels and an instant bestseller, helping to establish passenger trains as suitable settings for murder mysteries.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Room in the Dragon Volant

Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Description: First published in his collection In a Glass Darkly, this gothic novella contains some of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s most atmospheric writing. In 1815 Europe is still reeling from the Napoleonic wars. A young, wealthy Englishman goes traveling to France and Belgium, and is quickly surrounded by characters who may not be exactly what they seem: a beautiful young countess with a cruel husband, an elegant gentleman involved in delicate political intrigue, a violent, ugly old soldier bent on revenge, and a fortuneteller who seems to know everything about his affairs. Le Fanu pulls these threads together into an intricately plotted mystery, with the sinister atmosphere of his better known ghost stories. It’s full of fascinating characters and evocative locations, from a rural village hostelry to a masked ball at the Palace of Versailles, to the mysterious haunted inn called the Dragon Volant.

Subjects: horror, mystery

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Description: Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is remembered today as a master of Gothic horror. This collection includes his classic atmospheric ghost stories like “Green Tea” and “The Familiar”—the latter of which M. R. James considered the best of Le Fanu’s ghost stories, and therefore the best ghost story ever written. But Le Fanu also wrote in genres other than horror. His talent for historical fiction shows in “An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald,” set in the aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne, and in “The Fatal Bride” he shows his mastery of Victorian sensation fiction. Both of these stories, and many others in this collection, were first published in the Dublin University Magazine, where Le Fanu was a regular contributor and later the owner and editor. Also included are two pioneering vampire stories: “Carmilla,” which profoundly influenced Bram Stoker in creating Dracula, and the lesser-known 1843 novella “Spalatro.”

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Author: Norbert Jacques

Description: Edgar Hull is a gambling at a Munich club when he suddenly and mysteriously starts losing, seemingly on purpose. He walks away from the table in a confused dazed and deep in debt—he can’t understand why he played that way. Little does Edgar know that his opponent in the game was the mysterious hypnotist, master of disguise, and archvillain who calls himself Dr. Mabuse, and that Edgar was merely his latest victim. When Inspector von Wenk, a state attorney, arrives to question Hull, the plot quickly turns to murder—and worse—as Mabuse continues his reign of mesmeric terror on Munich’s gambling class. But Dr. Mabuse isn’t just in it for the money—his aim is something far greater. Dr. Mabuse, along with Fu Manchu and Fantômas, is one of the earliest examples of the “supervillain” archetype popular in modern media like the Bond series or comic books. He’s a seemingly invincible chameleon with an eerie, inexplicable power over people; he seems to be controlling a shadowy organization with a greater, more sinister, goal; and he’s always one step ahead of the law. Jacques wrote Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler with the aim of criticizing the extravagance of German post-war society. This makes the novel a kind of time capsule of the era, playing on the gamut of contemporary interests and fears including hypnotism, psychoanalysis, decadence, and the question of whether a society that permitted World War I is a society that could be redeemed. The novel was successful in its day, but was made even more famous by the Fritz Lang silent movie of the same name, which was so popular with both audiences and critics that it almost completely overshadowed the novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Beauvallet

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: It’s the late 1500s and the English and the Spanish are struggling for dominance over the seas. Sir Nicholas Beauvallet is captaining an English ship when he’s fired upon by a Spanish galleon. He returns the attack and leads his men to a spectacular victory. But while plundering the ship, Sir Nicholas discovers aboard the beautiful and spirited Dominica, who is traveling with her dying father. Beauvallet treats them well and, at great risk to himself, returns them to Spain—but not before wooing Dominica and vowing to return for her within the year. In turn Dominica is attracted by his honor, courage, and recklessness.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Almayer’s Folly

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Kaspar Almayer is a Dutch trader whose career has stalled. He finds himself in a riverside village in the jungles of East Borneo with his estranged Malay wife, their beautiful daughter Nina, and a lavish but unfinished house the village has dubbed “Almayer’s Folly.” Kaspar dreams of becoming rich enough to free himself from the backwater village and take Nina to Europe. Rumors of gold deposits in the depths of the jungle delude him into thinking he’s close to achieving that dream, and with the arrival of a rajah’s son who’s willing to join Kaspar in his get-rich-quick scheme, the plot is kicked into motion. Almayer’s Folly is notable for being Joseph Conrad’s first novel, published in 1895 after six years of casual writing and just one year after he ended his maritime career. For this book, Józef Konrad Korzeniowski adopted the pen name by which he would later be known as a master of the English language. The book is based on Conrad’s experience as a seaman in the British merchant navy and his travels to Indonesia. Both the book’s titular character and the riverside village have their counterparts in real-life. While critics argue that Almayer’s Folly isn’t as good as Conrad’s more famous works, the book introduces themes which he often returns to in his writing career, including colonialism, the clash of East and West, and the dominant forces of Nature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Pluralistic Universe

Author: William James

Description: Originally delivered as the 1908 Hibbert Lectures, A Pluralistic Universe provides an explanation of the philosophy known as “radical empiricism.” This theory rejects the certainty of the “absolute,” an academic theory that holds that all existence is only the observable part of an all-encompassing entity that governs every detail in universe. By contrast, radical empiricism contends that while such an absolute may be possible, it’s unprovable within the experiences of our finite lives, and so has little practical value. Much like the theories James describes in his landmark work Pragmatism, radical empiricism evaluates the truth of a statement based on experiences and observations that we can actually have. This view doesn’t exclude religion, as religion can be directly experienced, even if people may differ on exactly what the experience is. Anything that can be experienced must, by definition, exist, and therefore can be analyzed using radical empiricism. hen these lectures were given, the academic consensus was in favor of some version of the absolute. James spends much of the lectures discussing and critiquing the ideas of other philosophers, in particular Hegel, Fechner, and Bergson. He finds much to like in each of the works he discusses, but finds them all incomplete.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Crimson Circle

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Strange envelopes marked with a crimson circle have started to appear across London: a series of blackmailing letters, each directed at prominent figures in society and communicating the threat of punishment if the demands within aren’t met—a promise that has yielded fatal results for those who have ignored those instructions. Despite their best efforts, the police haven’t been able to track down this shadowy cabal of criminals, leaving them without the means to put an end to the terror that has overtaken London and its citizens. The lead investigator in the Crimson Circle case, Chief Inspector Parr, finds an unlikely partner in Derrick Yale, an enigmatic detective with a peculiar gift for deduction, after the Circle claims its latest victim: Mr. James Beardmore, found dead in his estate after failing to pay £100,000. The search for the killer and any leads that could help bring the Crimson Circle to justice is further complicated by the appearance of Thalia Drummond, a charming young secretary who’s more than she seems … Published in 1922, The Crimson Circle became one of Edgar Wallace’s best-known works, and was adapted for film no less than four times.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Rasp

Author: Philip MacDonald

Description: Anthony Gethryn, a retired secret service colonel, is commissioned by the weekly newspaper to report on the murder of cabinet minister John Hoode. As he arrives in Abbotshall, the iron-clad alibis of everyone involved suggest that finding the murderer won’t be an easy task. Aided by his ingenuity, a couple of friends, and a bit of luck, Anthony will have to uncover the culprit—and perhaps something else that he’s missing. The Rasp is a classic detective novel with a closed circle of suspects. Skillfully misdirecting the reader on multiple occasions, Philip MacDonald keeps the reader guessing.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp

Author: John A. Lomax

Description: Although not always respected as serious poetry, folk songs and poems like the ones in Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp represent a long tradition of oral transmission of verse narrative, distinct from more formal and “scholarly” poetical compositions. The poems in this collection speak about love, honor, friendship, and the lives of cowboys. This collection was produced by musicologist and folklorist John A. Lomax, who did much to preserve traditional American songs. The poems in this production were mostly obtained from recitations by interviewees in the American west.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Bellamy Trial

Author: Frances Noyes Hart

Description: Mimi Bellamy is dead—stabbed multiple times and discovered in a deserted cottage. Now, two people close to her are on trial for her murder: her husband, Stephen Bellamy, and her friend, Sue Ives. The prosecution claims they killed her out of revenge, supposedly after learning about her affair with Sue’s husband, Patrick. But the defense has its own story to tell. Over the course of an eight-day trial family members, friends, servants, and eyewitnesses take the stand, and with each testimony the story shifts, with every revelation the trial changes course. We experience it all through the eyes of a red-haired writer making her debut as a court reporter, and the veteran reporter seated next to her. For the both of them, and for us, the suspense lasts until the very end: did Stephen and Sue kill Mimi? ith The Bellamy Trial, Frances Noyes Hart wrote one of the very first legal thrillers. In writing it she was undoubtedly inspired by her husband, an attorney to whom she dedicated this book, but the main inspiration for The Bellamy trial is the Hall–Mills murder case, a trial that was widely reported on at the time.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Kate Plus 10

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Scotland Yard Inspector Michael Pretherston has been called to attend a case of missing jewelry at Lord Flanborough’s home. While investigating, Inspector Pretherston comes across a familiar face—and an intriguing mystery to challenge his skills and intellect: a woman by the name of Katharine Westhanger. Kate has been a person of interest in various capers across Europe despite her innocent looks and charming personality. The use of a false identity is unlikely to be an attempt to distance herself from the tainted reputation of the Westhanger name, but what lies behind her latest appearance in London and recent association with the rich and powerful? Inspector Pretherston is certain that the Crime Street gang is scheming again, and intends to find out what their next target could be. Meanwhile, Kate discovers new thrills in her multiple encounters with Michael, playing a mischievous game of cat and mouse that mixes crime, romance, and a battle of wits and opposing personalities. Published in 1917, Kate Plus 10 was adapted into a motion picture of the same name in 1938, and later became the basis for the film The Trygon Factor.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Ajax

Author: Sophocles

Description: Ajax by Sophocles is a Greek tragedy that tells the story of Ajax, a warrior in the Trojan War. After the armor of the slain Achilles is awarded to Odysseus instead of him, Ajax is consumed by rage and humiliation. In his madness, he attempts to kill the Greek leaders, but is tricked by the goddess Athena into attacking livestock instead. When he regains his senses, Ajax chooses to take his own life rather than live in dishonor. His death ignites debates among the Greeks about whether he deserves a proper burial.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Parisians in the Country

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Parisians in the Country consists of, as the name implies, two stories of Parisians and their interactions and experiences in the French provinces. Gaudissart is a traveling salesman, well-known, well-respected, and universally considered to be one of the best—hence his nickname of “Gaudissart the Great.” As he enters a small town, he enlists the help of one of the town’s notables. The notable, who’s not as impressed by Gaudissart’s sales pitch as Gaudissart thinks he is, sends Gaudissart to another well-known man of the town, and the resulting encounter is one of Balzac’s more humorous episodes. In “The Muse of the Department,” a “superior woman” in Sancerre is married to a man interested only in money. She has been pursued for years by three local men, all of whom she puts off, not feeling any are up to her standards. When a journalist from Paris makes his appearance and shows an interest in her—which she avidly returns—the scene is set for someone’s comeuppance; but exactly whose remains unclear for most of the story.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of an Idea

Author: Louis H. Sullivan

Description: Louis Sullivan was one of the most important architects working at the turn of the 20th century. His most well-known work was done in Chicago as part of the firm of Adler and Sullivan, but he also designed well-regarded buildings in cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Buffalo. He has been called both the “father of the skyscraper” and the “father of modernism,” as well as being the progenitor of the famous maxim “form follows function.” Building in the seething crucible of progress that was post-fire Chicago, Sullivan put that famous maxim—the “idea” of his autobiography—to use by creating forms and grammars for the new kinds of high-rise buildings made possible by the newly invented technique of steel-frame construction. But contrary to the impression of sparse minimalism that the mid-century Bauhaus movement brought to “form follows function,” Sullivan’s building were often intricately decorated, with organic Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau ornaments gracing their richly designed façades. This book, his autobiography, was commissioned by the journal of the American Institute of Architects. Sullivan accepted the commission in part due to the financial difficulties he had encountered later in life; it was first published serially, then as a book, in 1922. Sullivan died just two years later. The narrative is in the third person, and for its first three-quarters covers Sullivan’s youth, education, and early apprenticeships in a prose style so elegant that it’s hard to believe Sullivan was an architect and not a writer by trade. Nothing of his adult personal life is mentioned, and, surprisingly, almost no space is given to any of the specific buildings he designed. After he briefly describes starting his legendary partnership with Dankmar Adler, he concludes the book with an abbreviated description of the planning of Chicago’s famous 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—in which a campus of nearly 700 acres of monumental white Beaux-Arts buildings was erected in just a few years, granting Chicago the moniker of the “White City”—before entering a philosophical exploration of his theory of “form follows function.”

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: The Columbiad

Author: Joel Barlow

Description: The Columbiad is an epic poem that celebrates America. It opens with Christopher Columbus in prison, despondent and feeling poorly rewarded for his great achievements. He is visited by Hesper, represented as the guardian genius of the lands to the west of Europe. He leads Columbus in a vision of the western hemisphere: its physical description, its native people, and the history of North and South America. They see the Aztec and Inca empires, the settling of America by Europeans, and the development of the British colonies up through the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States. The poem had its origin in an earlier work, The Vision of Columbus, which Barlow started during the Revolutionary War and expanded in the following years. First printed as The Columbiad in 1807, it’s filled with Barlow’s political views: he believed that the United States, as a haven of liberty, would demonstrate to other nations how to be free and prosperous. He also hoped that all peoples would learn to speak the same language and pursue knowledge, commerce, the arts, and peace.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Maiwa’s Revenge

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: After a day’s worth of shooting at his estate, legendary hunter Allan Quatermain settles down, lights a pipe, and tells his companions of a journey he undertook in the wilds of Africa. On expedition, Quatermain, while searching for ivory, meets Maiwa, a runaway African princess who is intent on avenging her child. She also carries a desperate note from an old friend, once thought dead. Braving buffalo, rhinos, elephants, and rivaling tribes, Quatermain finds himself in the middle of a plot to wage war on the notorious African chief Wambe.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Dangerous Ages

Author: Rose Macaulay

Description: Neville Bendish is left aimless after fulfilling her role as a loving wife and mother of two children. After celebrating her forty-third birthday, she decides to enroll at a university to realize her dream of earning a medical degree, both as a way to leave behind the confines of her home and to use her knowledge and talents before they start to deteriorate with each passing year. Neville’s story also allows the reader to take a glimpse into the lives of Mrs. Hilary, Neville’s widowed mother who is coasting through life doing housework and helping the local parish; Neville’s sister Nan, a writer who thinks of settling down with her friend Barry Briscoe, but hasn’t found the courage to accept his offer; and Neville’s daughter Gerda, a young rebel that has found refuge in idealism and opposing traditional societal values, but who also has fallen in love with a man who holds a worldview that runs contrary to her own. In Dangerous Ages, Rose Macaulay provides a satirical look at societal norms, psychoanalysis, love, and gender roles in the 1920s through the eyes of four generations of women in the Bendish family. Each one questions the mundane nature of their shared home life, and how their respective goals, frustrations, and means to achieve happiness gradually change depending on their priorities, the stages of life they’re in, and the expectations associated with the positions they hold in their family units, and in society in general.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Celibates

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: In The Celibates, Balzac forms a unit of three unrelated stories concerning bachelors and old maids. In the first, “Pierette,” a young woman is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, an unmarried brother and sister who view her as a leech on their business earnings and hound her beyond endurance. In the second, “The Vicar of Tours,” a socially unaware priest who has inherited the furniture, books, and rooms in a lodging house of a fellow priest, is put to grief by his landlord, an elderly unmarried woman who takes her new lodger’s social awkwardness for insults and decides to retaliate. In the third, “A Bachelor’s Establishment,” a widow has two adult sons, a painter and a soldier. The painter is poor but loves her dearly; the soldier is arrogant, completely indifferent to her, and has a gambling addiction that leads him to steal from everyone around him, including his family. Nevertheless, it’s the soldier who is her favorite, and it’s him to whom she turns when she finds her inheritance at risk from a ruffian and his girlfriend.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Gudrun

Author:

Description: The epic poem Gudrun (or Kudrun) is a Middle High German heroic epic from the 13th century, written by an unidentified poet who was likely Bavarian or Austrian. The work is preserved in a single manuscript and is often regarded as an antithesis to the Nibelungenlied; where the Nibelungenlied emphasizes tragic vengeance, Gudrun emphasizes female resilience and reconciliation. The story begins with the abduction of Gudrun’s mother, Hilda, by the warrior Hagen, who later becomes her husband. Their daughter, Gudrun, is betrothed to Herwic of Sealand, but she is kidnapped by Hartmut of Normandy and held captive for years, enduring hardship and refusing to marry him. After a long struggle, her betrothed Herwic and her family, led by her brother Ortwin, wage war to rescue her.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Bellarion the Fortunate

Author: Rafael Sabatini

Description: Bellarion, a young orphan, leaves the abbey he was raised in to attend university and learn Greek. He quickly learns the dangers of life in fifteenth-century Italy, as he is robbed, caught in a riot, and chased through town by the authorities. He tangles himself in a plot against the local regent, plays one side against the other, and declares his service to the beautiful but uninterested Valeria. Despite Bellarion’s repeated attempts to give up the pleasures of the world, he is adopted by a noble condottiere, learns the practical side of war, and dodges beautiful women helplessly attracted by his magnetism. And as if that weren’t enough, he goes on to become the leader of a mercenary company, using his cunning and knowledge of warfare to outsmart his enemies. Sabatini is famous for his historical novels, and his tight plotting, sharp dialogue, and unexpected twists make this a thrilling read. Many of the characters are based on historical figures, and Sabatini skillfully mixes fiction with historical fact.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Ralestone Luck

Author: Andre Norton

Description: A young brother and sister return to their family’s mansion with their older brother. They all know their family’s history: that their ancestors had resorted to piracy to survive—and family legend has it that there’s hidden pirate’s treasure, and lost “luck,” hidden somewhere in the mansion. With barely enough money to carry on, they seek the “luck” of the family, knowing neither what it is nor where it is. Their precarious situation is worsened by the appearance of a rival claimant who asserts legal rights to the property. And there’s the mysterious young boy living in the swamps who also seems to be looking for something on their land. But despite these challenges, they’re certain that the “luck” will restore their fortunes. Ralestone Luck, written circa 1930, is the first book Andre Norton wrote, but the second one she actually published. It was first published in 1938.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Mystery of Cabin Island

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: While trying to plan what to do for the winter holidays, the Hardy boys are heartily rewarded for their prowess in solving crimes by Mr. Jefferson, an eccentric antiques dealer and a victim of the carjackers from The Shore Road Mystery. Mr. Jefferson allows the boys and two of their friends to vacation on his island, but the fun outing soon takes a turn for the worse: among missing supplies, a snow storm, and a shady figure named Mr. Haneligh who keeps trying to assert his authority over the island, the boys realize that there may be more to the eccentric old man and his past than they first thought. This book was published in 1929 and then rewritten in 1966. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the original 1929 edition.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Yashka

Author: Maria Bochkareva

Description: Born a peasant in northern Russia, Maria Bochkareva lives in Siberian exile with her politically radical husband. With the outbreak of World War I she seizes the first opportunity and escapes Siberia to enlist in the Russian Army. Overcoming discrimination and maltreatment, she enters the ranks on the eastern front, where she fights the German invasion, wins the respect of her male comrades, and resists the rising Bolshevik tide. During her life in the trenches, Bochkareva became the first female officer in the Russian Army and organized the Woman’s Battalion of Death, an all-women military unit intended to inspire the demoralized troops during the last year of the war. Conflicts with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution forced her to escape to America, where she dictated her autobiography to Russian journalist Isaac Don Levine. After meeting with Woodrow Wilson and King George V to appeal for an Allied intervention in Russia’s civil war, she returned to Russia in 1918 and attempted to form another battalion. She was captured by the Bolsheviks and executed on May 16, 1920.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Splendid Fairing

Author: Constance Holme

Description: In the rural English community of Blindbeck, the elderly Simon and Sarah Thornthwaite picture what the future holds for them after facing their most recent bouts of misfortune: the need to abandon the farm that allowed them a somewhat comfortable lifestyle, Sarah’s gradual loss of her sight, and troubled finances that seem impossible to manage. In The Splendid Fairing, Constance Holme presents a character study of elderly life during the early 20th century, reflecting on the physical and emotional problems that arise with aging, the sense of loneliness and sadness caused by living away from your loved ones, the negative influence of family rivalries, and how youthful romance can lead either to life-long companions, or to grudges, resentment, and envy. The couple’s reluctant journey to the nearby town of Witham and the rumors that start upon their arrival give the reader a glimpse into the history the Thornthwaites share with Blindbeck’s inhabitants, as well as their poor relationship with Simon’s more affluent brother Will and his wife Eliza. Both Simon and Sarah each have moments of introspection that contrast their present existence with nostalgic memories of their younger selves. As the story develops, Simon, Sarah, and Eliza think about Geordie and Jim, their sons who left Blindbeck twenty years ago. Geordie’s upcoming return home only deepens the mystery regarding the fate of the Thornthwaite cousins and whether or not they accomplished their goals of finding fortune and a better future.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Steppenwolf

Author: Hermann Hesse

Description: Harry Haller, once a respected intellectual, now finds himself an outsider in society. During a depressed walk through town, he meets a mysterious stranger who gives him a pamphlet on the “Steppenwolf,” a man who believes himself split into two parts: one cultured and humane, and the other animalistic and violent. Like many people, the Steppenwolf is cursed to suffer because he considers these two spirits to be in conflict, instead of recognizing that they’re but two facets of the infinite multitude of personalities within everyone. Harry reads this pamphlet with great interest, believing it to describe his own life. Later, he’s introduced to the wild lifestyle of the bourgeois: dancing, drug use, and sex. This radically different lifestyle helps him reconcile his personalities and find purpose in life. In some places, Steppenwolf follows the despair and spiritual crises that Herman Hesse himself felt in the mid-1920s. Due to its depictions of drug use and sex, it quickly became highly controversial; perhaps for that reason it gained a significant following in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Today it’s regarded as a classic of existentialist literature, and is often compared to other works by Hesse, in particular Siddhartha. Hesse later claimed that Steppenwolf was his most misunderstood novel, as critics focused on the struggle and despair of Harry, and not on his possible redemption.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Philoctetes

Author: Sophocles

Description: Philoctetes is a master archer who, during the Trojan War, is bitten by a snake and cursed with a foul-smelling, incurable wound. Odysseus abandons him on the island of Lemnos with a bow given to him by Heracles as his only companion. Ten years later, a prophecy reveals to the Greeks that Philoctetes and his legendary bow will be necessary to win the Trojan War. This forces Odysseus and Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, to embark on a quest to retrieve him from his exile on Lemnos. Both Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote plays entitled Philoctetes, but only Sophocles’ version survives. It was first performed in 409 BC, and its performance won first prize.

Subjects: drama

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Title: No Treason

Author: Lysander Spooner

Description: Lysander Spooner was a failed lawyer and political philosopher who spent his career railing against the various systems society had set up around him, including education requirements, the Post Office, slavery, and capitalism. He attained his highest fame as an abolitionist after publishing The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, a book that influenced Frederick Douglass. Building on that train of thought is No Treason, a series of three essays he published in 1867 arguing that treason charges levied against Southern soldiers in the Civil War are spurious, because the Constitution itself is illegitimate. Spooner originally planned the essays to be a six-part series, but only ever published the first, second, and sixth part. Despite their fragmentary nature, they became influential in the budding Anarchist movement. hether or not Spooner’s views had much influence on mainstream thinking remains an open question. Perhaps tellingly, Spooner himself registered the copyright for these essays—a right enumerated in the very U.S. Constitution he argues is “unfit to exist.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Author: George Gissing

Description: Henry Ryecroft is an older English man of letters who, upon inheriting a small legacy, retires to a small cottage in the countryside. There he writes a diary, his “private papers,” which George Gissing purports to have edited and published in this volume. In reality Ryecroft is a fictional character, and his diary is a semi-autobiographical account of Gissing’s own career as an author and literary critic, and of his personal philosophical musings. His love of nature, the English landscape, and the English national character is evident throughout, though Gissing, in his affection for the rural England of the past, doesn’t shy away from criticizing contemporary society—like the precarious financial situations many intelligent literary men find themselves in. The Private Papers became his most popular work in his lifetime, though today it has been overshadowed by some of his other books, like New Grub Street. It also gained a surprisingly wide following in Japan at the turn of the 20th century, where its lyrical descriptions of the natural world combined with its simple style made it accessible to students and scholars.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: What’s Wrong with the World

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: In What’s Wrong with the World, G. K. Chesterton criticizes contemporary societal positions on property, imperialism, education, and home life. He believed that both unfettered capitalism and socialism erode society, breaking up the family and keeping the poor in poverty. He advocates for a broader distribution of both property and political power, a philosophy that became known as “Distributism,” and of which Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc became well-known advocates. hile this book was written in 1910, many of the issues Chesterton addresses, like home ownership, public education, and the erosion of democracy, remain important social issues in the modern day.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The First Men in the Moon

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: Mr. Bedford, an aspiring playwright, moves to the British countryside in hope of writing a successful play that will cure his financial troubles. There, he becomes acquainted with Mr. Cavor, an eccentric and reclusive scientist, who hopes to create an anti-gravitational material. After the two men accidentally create the material, they decide to use it to land on the Moon—Cavor motivated by expanding the realms of knowledge, and Bedford by the prospective mining of lunar minerals. There they meet an intelligent civilization of arthropoids whom they name the “Selenites.” First serialized between November 1900 and June 1901, the novel was published in a single volume the same year. By contrasting Selenite society with the society of Victorian England, Wells criticizes Victorian mores and professes eugenic and socialist ideas.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Fantômas

Author: Pierre Souvestre

Description: The savage murder of the Marquise de Langrune in her chateau leaves local authorities baffled, but the preeminent detective from Paris, Inspector Juve, recognizes in the case the hand of Fantômas—a criminal so prodigiously evil and elusive that many consider him to be a myth. Following the arch-criminal’s trail of murders, jewelry heists, and bombings, the indomitable Juve tracks suspects from the dive bars of the underworld to the ballrooms of high society, donning as many disguises as his shapeshifting nemesis in his relentless pursuit. Appearing in 1911, Fantômas was first conceived when publisher Arthème Fayard enlisted Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain to create a new series that would capitalize on the French public’s appetite for detective novels—Arsène Lupin, Zigomar, and Nick Carter were already popular characters whose exploits could be read in periodicals of the time. The two collaborators used an ingenious form of literary mass production, with each one writing alternate chapters, to write a sequel every month for several years. Elaborate crimes, technological gadgetry, and gruesome violence made the series a hit with the public—the 32 volumes written by Souvestre and Allain sold over five million copies—but Fantômas reached beyond the typical audience for pulp fiction, as well. Luminaries of the avant-garde—Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Max Jacob, and René Magritte, among others—praised and paid tribute to Fantômas in prose, poetry, and paintings, appreciating the surreal and imaginative nature of the novels’ impossible paradoxes and shifting identities.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Poisoned Chocolates Case

Author: Anthony Berkeley

Description: The noted amateur detective Roger Sheringham has formed his own private club of “criminologists.” As a challenge for this august group, he proposes that they individually attempt to solve a murder that has baffled Scotland Yard: the death of wealthy businessman Graham Bendix’s wife after he presented her a box of poisoned chocolates. The mystery lies in the fact that Bendix only got those chocolates by chance at his club from Sir Eustace Pennefather, a notorious man about town. Rather than the six members of the Crimes Circle converging on a single criminal, each one arrives at a completely different solution to the same murder. Anthony Berkeley’s artifice of forming a club for his amateur detectives in this mystery anticipated in real life the foundation the following year of the famous Detection Club, of which he was a founding member. The Poisoned Chocolates Case is considered one of the classics of the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Eye of Osiris

Author: R. Austin Freeman

Description: Newly qualified doctor Paul Berkeley takes over the care of Godfrey Bellingham, whose elder brother John, a renowned collector of Egyptian artifacts, has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. With John’s whereabouts unknown and his will an intractable muddle, the family fortune is locked in limbo, and Godfrey and his daughter Ruth find themselves on the verge of destitution. As Berkeley becomes ever more invested in the case and its outcome, he calls upon his former teacher, renowned forensic scientist Dr. John Thorndyke, to help solve the mystery.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Innocents Abroad

Author: Mark Twain

Description: The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, chronicles Twain’s journey through Europe, Northern Africa, and the Holy Land as part of a group of American tourists aboard the steamship Quaker City. Twain uses his signature wit and humor to describe the group’s experiences as they explore famous landmarks, mixing descriptions of ancient ruins and sacred sites with irreverent commentary on the expectations versus the reality of these revered destinations. He comments on the various culture clashes he encounters, and also pokes fun at the peculiar—and sometimes absurd—behavior of fellow travelers. Twain’s narrative captures the spirit of many Americans of his time, comparing his still-young nation to the Old World (with Twain humorously comparing every body of water he sees to Lake Tahoe). While a product of the 1860s, the story still feels fresh and vibrant, and many of Twain’s anecdotes may feel all too familiar to travelers today—from underwhelming hotels, to unscrupulous tour guides, to the difficulty of communicating abroad (including ill-fated attempts at speaking French in Paris). The Innocents Abroad conveys the style, spirit and humor for which Twain in famous, while providing an entertaining, rollicking narrative of a memorable Grand Tour.

Subjects: nonfiction, travel

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Title: Unspoken Sermons

Author: George MacDonald

Description: George MacDonald was a Scottish writer who was also a Christian minister. While his writing career focused mostly on fantasy works, he also wrote several theological works, including Unspoken Sermons, which was published in three volumes from 1867–1889. In it, MacDonald lays out his vision of God. In his view, God is fundamentally a loving father to all humanity, working to purify people from their sin so that they are as good as God himself. A consequence of this is that all people will eventually be saved—which was a controversial teaching in the churches where he preached, making him unpopular with church leaders. In other sermons, MacDonald deals with more practical topics like riches, prayer, and wrestling with spiritual doubt. Unspoken Sermons was a profound influence on C. S. Lewis, who said, “My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help—sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith.”

Subjects: nonfiction, spirituality

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Title: The Tour

Author: Louis Couperus

Description: In ancient Egypt, the immensely wealthy Roman Publuis Sabinus Lucius embarks on a journey through Egypt, traveling up the Nile from Alexandria to Memphis, past the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza, and eventually beyond the cataracts to Ethiopia. His large entourage includes, among others, his uncle Catullus, who lives off his nephew’s fortune; his slave and tutor Thrasyllus; the young African slave Tarra; and the Greek slave Cora. Cora is secretly in love with Lucius, but he does not return her affection. The group is led through Egypt by the guides Ghizla and Kaleb, who never miss an opportunity to fleece their foreign guests. The reason for Lucius’ journey is his attempt to cope with the loss of his beloved, the Greek slave Ilia. Ilia has suddenly disappeared and Lucius suspects she was kidnapped by pirates. In reality, she has fled with a sailor she loved, though no one dares to tell Lucius the truth. Through conversations with oracles, Egyptian priests, mystics, and hermits, he tries to uncover what happened to Ilia. The mysterious and supernatural elements in the story highlight how, even in the age in which the novel is set, Egypt was already an ancient civilization in decline. Couperus bases his lavish descriptions of decadent Egypt on the works of the classical historian Strabo. Although he had always wished to visit Egypt, he never actually did. The Tour fits neatly with his other historical novels in which he explores ancient civilizations and themes of fate and decline. The Tour was first published as a serial in the magazine Groot Nederland before it was published as a novel in 1911.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Nebuly Coat

Author: John Meade Falkner

Description: The tower of Cullerne Minster, a vast church dating from the twelfth century, serves as a landmark on the south English coast, even though the town of Cullerne is no longer a port. The oversized parish church has fallen into some disrepair, and its rector has managed to secure funds for renovations to begin. The young architect, Edward Westray, is dispatched by his firm to oversee the work. As Westray settles to the task, he becomes embroiled in the small but dense web of social affairs in the town, and develops a deeper relationship with his fellow lodger, an embittered church organist. The history of the church, it transpires, is bound up with the local aristocracy—the lords Blandamer—with the Blandamer coat of arms featuring in the stained glass of the church: “barry nebuly of six, argent and vert.” Yet in recent times the Blandamers have not been much present around Cullerne. More strange still is the conviction that was held by the late brother of Westray’s landlady—that he was the rightful heir to the title. The Nebuly Coat is the last novel John Meade Falkner published. It shares something of Moonfleet’s drama, but is altogether more ambitious. The settings evoked owe something to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex; Hardy and Falkner enjoyed a long friendship, and some have noted resonances between The Nebuly Coat and Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. Falkner is a patient narrator, and weaves together the story of the Cullerne Minster’s repair—a more fraught undertaking than it first appears—with the backstories of the main characters as they come to bear on the present circumstances. There is even a mystery about whether there is a mystery!

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Manhattan Transfer

Author: John Dos Passos

Description: The scene is the end of the Gilded Age in New York City. Ellen Thatcher is a young girl who aspires to be an actress. Young Jimmy Herf returns after years abroad, and rejects business school, becoming a reporter. George Baldwin is a lawyer who wins a big case, but continues to struggle to grow his business, eventually entering politics. The novel weaves the lives of these characters together throughout the narrative. Manhattan Transfer also has a good number minor characters, some of whom only appear briefly, while others connect to the several plot lines. They range from a lowly street beggar to an aspiring architect, chasing after love and excitement in the fast pace of New York City, often encountering both frustration and defeat. The story then jumps forward through World War I and into the Jazz Age, moving from one scene to the next in a fragmentary style. Many have compared this to a movie with many jumbled parts put together, portraying an overall impression of the metropolis through these glimpses. Contemporaries praised John Dos Passos for his ability to capture the soul of Manhattan, and Manhattan Transfer was quickly lauded as an important work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: William—An Englishman

Author: Cicely Hamilton

Description: 1am Tully is an unremarkable English clerk, passing his mundane and well-ordered life by doing what others tell him and trying to live up to their expectations. But when his mother passes away suddenly, William finally decides to take control of his own life and discover his purpose in the world. Inspired by a coworker’s advice, William becomes immersed in political activism and eventually meets Griselda Watkins, a young suffragette. The two fall in love and get married, and decide to spend their honeymoon in the Belgian Ardennes during the summer of 1914, away from everything and everyone they know in England. The looming shadow of World War I draws nearer with each day. William and Griselda may have suffered hostility and persecution while campaigning for their shared beliefs, but nothing could ever prepare them to face the horrors of war in a foreign country. Cicely Hamilton wrote William—An Englishman by drawing from her experiences while working in an army hospital during the Great War. The novel is a reflection on the naivete of youth, the senseless cruelty wrought by the conflict, and the irremediable disruption to the lives of the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. First published in 1919, William—An Englishman is notable for being a satirical critique influenced by the aftermath of World War I and the rise of new social and political movements like pacifism and socialism. The novel eventually became the first recipient of the Prix Femina—Vie Heureuse prize in 1920 for helping to illustrate the spirit and character of England to contemporary French readers.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Trachiniae

Author: Sophocles

Description: The Trachiniae is one of Sophocles’ lesser-known plays, yet it remains a powerful exploration of fate, suffering, and human fallibility. Though its exact date of composition is uncertain, scholars often place it later in the playwright’s career, possibly between 450 and 425 BCE. The play’s title refers to the women of Trachis, the chorus who witness and reflect on the unfolding catastrophe. The play begins with Deianeira, wife of the absent hero Heracles, expressing her fears about his long absence and possible infidelity. Her anxieties are confirmed when she learns that Heracles has sacked a city to claim the young princess Iole as his concubine. Desperate to regain his love, Deianeira sends Heracles a robe anointed with what she believes is a love charm—a potion given to her years earlier by the dying centaur Nessus, who deceitfully claimed it would ensure Heracles’ fidelity. But unbeknownst to her, the potion is actually a deadly poison that sears Heracles’ flesh, subjecting him to unbearable agony.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man

Author: Siegfried Sassoon

Description: By the 1920s, Siegfried Sassoon had built a reputation as a poet and man of letters, though he had not yet published prose. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that he finally made the attempt with Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, the first volume of his fictionalized autobiography—and he was so nervous about the prospect of publishing prose that he published it anonymously. George Sherston, the semi-autobiographical stand-in for Sassoon, is a young boy growing up in the English countryside under the gentle care of his aunt Evelyn. His youth is idyllic, and he spends many afternoons lazing in the verdant hedges and warm sunlight of Aunt Evelyn’s country home. But he soon becomes enamored with horses, racing, and hunting, and quickly finds himself a decidedly middle-class youth embedded in an aristocratic pastime. The first half of the novel is presented as a series of cozy and often comical vignettes. But as Europe teeters at the brink of the Great War, and then finally enters it, the novel’s tone shifts from nostalgic reminiscence to the stark brutality of one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. George’s—and thus Sassoon’s—very English way of life was now changed forever. Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man became an instant bestseller and sealed Sassoon’s growing reputation as one of England’s most important literary men of the war generation. It received several awards and was followed up by two sequels which completed Sassoon’s “autobiography.”

Subjects: autobiography, fiction

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Title: The Giant Raft

Author: Jules Verne

Description: An ex-slave trader named Torres comes across a secret encrypted note and schemes to figure out what it means. Meanwhile, Joam Garral, who runs a farm in Peru near the source of the Amazon river and is an outlaw from Brazil, accedes to his daughter’s wishes to get married to her love at the mouth of the Amazon. They decide to travel down the Amazon with the entire family and servants in a giant raft, encountering many adventures on the way. 21st in the Voyages Extraordinaires series, The Giant Raft combines thrilling adventure, humor, and an intriguing mystery with an almost encyclopedic depiction of the mid-19th century flora and fauna of the majestic river.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, travel

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Title: Allan Quatermain Stories

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: Published in different magazines across forty years, Allan Quatermain’s short stories take the reader into the heart of the unforgivable African jungles. These short vignettes tell of the titular hunter’s various adventures, told in his own voice over dinners or in old journals. From buffaloes, to lions, to inter-tribe battles, Quatermain’s scars and stories prove that he has the grit and steady shot to overcome what other men would never dare.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: A Woman of No Importance

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: During a Victorian high society party, Gerald Arbuthnot is offered a coveted position with Lord Illingworth, a charismatic nobleman. But when Gerald introduces his mother, Mrs. Arbuthnot, to Lord Illingworth, she refuses to give her permission for him to accept the position. Gerald is confused, but Mrs. Arbuthnot is determined to keep her reasons a secret. A Woman of No Importance explores themes of marriage and morality, and satirizes the hypocrisy of Victorian society. It premiered in London in 1893, and is Oscar Wilde’s second drawing-room play, following his successful Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Subjects: comedy, drama, satire

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Title: Understood Betsy

Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Description: Nine-year-old orphan Elizabeth Ann has led a sheltered life ever since she was adopted by her Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances. Their overprotective parenting never let Elizabeth Ann fully experience her childhood or get along with other kids her age. hen Great-Aunt Harriet takes ill, Aunt Frances is not able to care for both her mother and their young niece, so she’s forced to send Elizabeth Ann away to stay with her late mother’s cousins in a rural farm in Vermont. This drastic change in environment creates an opportunity for the young girl to discover who she really is and develop her own outlook on life, leaving behind the fragile and fearful nature of Elizabeth Ann to transform into the healthy, proud and confident Betsy of Vermont. Dorothy Canfield Fisher was inspired by her background in education and her belief in the Montessori Method to write this story in which a child is able to grow at her own pace, adapt to new circumstances, and reach her full potential by doing hands-on activities, all while developing self-confidence and a personal enthusiasm for learning more about the world around her.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Footsteps at the Lock

Author: Ronald A. Knox

Description: Derek Burtell is a boorish young man with a devotion to drink and drugs, and deeply in debt. His younger cousin, Nigel Burtell, is a pompous aesthete finishing his studies in Oxford. They share a childhood without parents, and a mutual antipathy. Derek is due to inherit a family fortune from his grandfather’s estate when he turns twenty-five, but if he should die before attaining that age, Nigel becomes the beneficiary. Complicating matters is the further possibility of a legacy from their great-aunt, if they can demonstrate that their hostilities have ceased. These are the factors leading to their decision to share a summer canoe holiday on the Thames, in spite of their animosity. As they are on the return leg of their excursion, Nigel needs to return to Oxford to complete his examinations, leaving Derek at Shipcote Lock. In Nigel’s absence, Derek disappears—as it happens, just before his twenty-fifth birthday. Given his self-destructive life-style, his creditors had insured his life. So Miles Bredon, private detective of the Indescribable Insurance Company, is called in to investigate. Bredon is once again accompanied by his clever wife, Angela, and joined as well by the official police investigator, his wartime friend Detective Leyland. The Footsteps at the Lock contains all the hallmarks of Ronald Knox’s detective fiction: polished prose, compelling characterization, and a pleasingly puzzling plot.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts

Author: Robert Williams Wood

Description: The Nature Fakers controversy, also called the “War of the Naturalists,” was an early 20th-century American debate over sentimentality versus accuracy in nature writing. The controversy was kicked off in 1903 when naturalist and writer John Burroughs published his article “Real and Sham Natural History” in The Atlantic Monthly, lambasting popular nature writers for their overly anthropomorphic depictions of wildlife and denouncing the genre of realistic animal fiction as the “yellow journalism of the woods.” Robert Williams Wood, inspired by the nature fakers controversy, published How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers: A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners in 1907, followed by Animal Analogues in 1908. The books collect illustrated poems comparing plants and animals with similar names, satirizing the uninformed, anthropomorphized style of nature writing. The Nature Fakers controversy is referenced most explicitly in his poem “The Yellow‑hammer; The Saw‑fish.” In 1917, the books were combined into How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts: A Revised Manual of Flornithology for Beginners. The revised edition included two new poems, removed four poems from Animal Analogues, and revised the text and illustrations of a number of others. This Standard Ebooks edition restores the missing poems from Animal Analogues.

Subjects: poetry, satire

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Title: The Homemaker

Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Description: Helping raise three children while her husband goes out to work for a local department store has taken its toll on Evangeline Knapp, as she can’t help feeling unhappy despite doing her best to fulfill her role as a mother and housekeeper. Meanwhile her husband Lester, working a monotonous accounting job that only serves to keep him away from his family, shares similar feelings. An unfortunate accident soon leads to a big change in their lifestyle, with Evangeline becoming the breadwinner while Lester takes care of their ill son Henry, their timid daughter Helen, and the young and impulsive Stephen. In The Homemaker Dorothy Canfield Fisher tells a story of personal discovery and the touching relationships that grow between family members in the face of unforeseen adversity. The novel is a tale informed by a critique of stereotypes, gender roles, and how keeping up appearances for the benefit of strangers can prove harmful. First published in 1924, it was well-received and became an instant bestseller.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Savrola

Author: Winston Churchill

Description: Set in the fictional European republic of Laurania, Savrola follows a popular opposition leader who clashes with an unpopular president who is tightening his grip on power. After a controversial government decision disenfranchises political rivals, riots erupt and spiral into violence, forcing the leader to navigate a dangerous balancing act: can he keep his supporters from running rampant, while removing the president from power? Complicating his efforts is his close friend, the president’s wife, who is torn between loyalty to her husband and sympathy for the opposition. Savrola was serialized in 1898 before being published in a single volume in 1900. Churchill began writing it at the age of twenty-two while stationed in India with the British Army; it stands as his sole work of fiction and one of his earliest published works, predating both his Nobel Prize in Literature and his legendary political career.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Secret of the Caves

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: Summer holidays are here for the Hardy boys and their friends. To celebrate, they decide to take a trip to Honeycomb Caves, which are fabled to have hidden treasure, to explore and see if they can uncover the riches rumored to lie within. A wanted criminal prowling around nearby, and reports of screams and gun shots near the caves, aren’t enough to deter the boys, who are out for adventure and mystery. But with stolen food, a harrowing storm, and steep cliffs where one misstep is the last step, have the boys put themselves in more danger than they bargained for? This book was published in 1929 and then rewritten in 1965. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the original 1929 edition.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Trafalgar

Author: Benito Pérez Galdós

Description: Gabrield de Araceli is a young orphan living in Cádiz, Spain. His caretakers, a retired naval officer and his wife, keep a close eye on him until one of their old navy friends comes to visit to tell of a grand upcoming battle between England on one side, and France and Spain allied on the other. Gabriel’s master is stirred by memories of daring and adventure, and, when his disapproving wife is otherwise occupied, steals away with Gabriel to board the Santísima Trinidad—then the largest battleship in the world—and sail off to cover themselves in glory. The action they encounter later becomes known worldwide as the Battle of Trafalgar, one of England’s greatest naval victories and one of Spain’s most tragic defeats, the final laurel on the crown of Horatio Nelson’s legend. Galdós composed this novel, the first in what would become his lengthy Episodios Nacionales, with realism and verisimilitude in mind. He interviewed a survivor of the battle and conducted significant research to ensure his story was as historically accurate as its fictional frame would allow. The novel was hugely popular and went on to become a cornerstone of the historical realism genre.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Representative Men

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Description: Representative Men is a collection of seven lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson that were published as a book of essays in 1850. In the first essay Emerson discusses the role of great men and the importance they have on society. He argues that great men with their actions and achievements inspire others to reach for their own greatness. Emerson then examines the lives and works of six men he considers examples of what is possible for the rest of humanity: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the skeptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world, and Goethe the writer.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Purple Land

Author: W. H. Hudson

Description: The Englishman Richard Lamb is forced to flee to Montevideo, Uruguay after marrying an Argentinian girl without her father’s permission. When he’s unable to find work in the city, he curses the country and its inhabitants, wishing that it was still ruled by England. Looking for work in the countryside, he finds adventure and romance while reexamining his beliefs about freedom and civilization. The Purple Land is W. H. Hudson’s first novel. Ill-received by both critics and the public when first published, it was reevaluated in later years, with Jorge Luis Borges saying that it was “perhaps unexcelled by any work of Gaucho literature.” Hudson was raised in the Argentine pampas, where he spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna. In 1874 he moved to England, and was shocked by the ecological changes that industrialization had brought; this contrast helped inform the background of The Purple Land.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Description: Dorothy Gale, accompanied by her cat, Eureka, is traveling to visit her Uncle Henry and her other relatives in California, when she encounters her second cousin, Zeb. While en route in a horse-drawn buggy, an earthquake strikes, creating a vast crevasse into which Dorothy, Zeb, Eureka, and a cab-horse named Jim fall. hile underground, they encounter the Wizard, who was last seen flying off in a balloon at the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He and his balloon were also swallowed up by an earthquake, trapping him just like Dorothy and friends. Dorothy, the Wizard, and the rest of their companions proceed to embark a perilous journey through the underground realms. They encounter a variety of strange creatures, like a race of vegetables who live in a glass city, wooden gargoyles, invisible bears, and young dragonettes. After the warm reception of the Oz books, L. Frank Baum had wanted to move on to write about other subjects, but he found the success of the Oz stories irresistible. He began to write more of them, with this book being published only a year after the previous entry in the series, Ozma of Oz. His fans wanted to hear “more about the Wizard,” as he says in the introduction, so he tried to be attentive to their request. This book, published in 1908, was written around the time Baum moved to California; the Great San Francisco Earthquake, which had happened just two years earlier, likely influenced the opening of the story.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Midwinter

Author: John Buchan

Description: Like Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan was fascinated by the mid-18th century Jacobite uprising which pitted those loyal to the Stuarts—a faction largely based in Scotland—against those content with the Hanoverians then on the throne. Buchan was hard at work during the 1920s on his biography of the Marquess of Montrose which further deepened his historical inclinations. It was during this period that Midwinter was written. It’s generally regarded as one of Buchan’s more “serious” works of fiction, but for all that it retains moments of excitement and whimsy. Midwinter tells the story of Alastair Maclean during the preparations for the 1745 uprising that attempted to restore the Stuart line to the throne, with “Bonnie Prince Charlie” as their figurehead. Maclean is a fit, fighting Scot—young, but with combat experience in France. As the story begins, he’s serving as a secret agent in England, helping to assemble forces in support of the House of Stuart. During his travels he becomes aware that at least one of his fellow agents is systematically betraying the cause, feeding intelligence to their enemies. But who? Maclean can’t tell, but has his suspicions. The “Midwinter” of the title doesn’t refer to the season, even though much of the book takes place in a snowy setting. Rather, it’s the surname of an odd, even mysterious character: Amos Midwinter. He’s a kind of philosopher king of “Old England,” whose loyalties transcend those of the tawdry political tussle between party factions, and who in turn commands the loyalty of a hidden people; and these, at moments of need, come to Alastair Maclean’s aid. Intertwined with Maclean’s adventure is the story of a historical personage: none other than Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, records the following: “It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne.” Buchan’s fiction attempts to fill this gap, giving full value to the suggestions that Johnson was a Jacobite sympathizer (now a controversial notion), and that during this fallow period some of his famous later work was in gestation. The fictional “editorial” prologue and epilogue give prominence to this creative artifice. It remains a small irony that a novel driven by Buchan’s love for his Scottish heritage, which has for its hero a redoubtable Scot, has also been called “perhaps his best book on England.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Fur Country

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Lieutenant Hobson is an officer employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, tasked with the mission of traveling to the Arctic Circle and building an outpost there in order to collect valuable furs. After a long voyage, the Lieutenant and his party settle on a small peninsula and build a modest fort. Though initially successful, the colony soon finds itself in grave danger when an earthquake severs their settlement from the mainland. ritten during a period in which the fur trade was an important economic enterprise and the northern regions of America were still unexplored, The Fur Country follows the attempts of colonial settlers to claim and subdue “savage” territories. Like many of Verne’s books, this novel blends a fictional narrative with a real scientific background.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Green Hat

Author: Michael Arlen

Description: The life of an unnamed narrator is forever changed after meeting Iris Storm, the enigmatic woman who knocked on his door searching for her estranged brother. The narrator quickly finds himself entangled in Iris’s rebellious life of glamour, excess, and carefree romance. As he reflects on her relationships with her family, friends, and lovers, he gradually becomes aware of the secrets and contradictions that hide behind the larger-than-life persona. Published in 1924, The Green Hat explores the pursuit of happiness, authenticity, and true love between young people in a post–World War I setting filled with temptation, personal loss, and societal expectations. The hedonism on display in the novel made it very controversial, but despite that the novel resonated with readers and eventually became a bestseller. In 1925 it was adapted into a stage play by Arlen himself, and later became the basis for films like A Woman of Affairs, and Outcast Lady.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The D’Arblay Mystery

Author: R. Austin Freeman

Description: While out collecting pond water samples early one morning, newly qualified doctor Stephen Gray chances upon a dead body in the Queen’s Wood. The body turns out to be that of an artist, Julius D’Arblay. Assisted by renowned medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke and D’Arblay’s daughter Marion, Gray finds himself embroiled in a plot that will test his wits, endanger his life, and perhaps even lead to love. Although narrated by earnest junior doctor Stephen Gray, the mystery of the D’Arblay case is unraveled by renowned forensic scientist Dr. John Thorndyke, protagonist of twenty-one novels and numerous short stories by R. Austin Freeman.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: Eugénie Grandet

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: M. Grandet, a vine-grower, lessor, and ruthless businessman, is the richest man in the town of Saumur. He’s also a miser: he lives in a decrepit house, parcels out sugar and eggs as if they’ll never be replenished, and lights only a single candle in the parlor at night. He’s worth many millions, but he and his family live as paupers. His daughter, Eugénie, has no idea they’re rich; austerity is all she has ever known. But the arrival of a handsome, impoverished cousin from Paris, and the love she develops for him, makes her begin to see things differently. When she decides to help her cousin, her father’s reaction throws the family into crisis, and it’s unclear how it can resolved—if it can be resolved at all.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: What Is to Be Done?

Author: Nikolay Chernyshevsky

Description: Viéra Pavlovna is coming of age, and her scheming mother tries to arrange for her to be married to a wealthy man. Viéra feels trapped and unhappy. She finds escape through her brother’s tutor Lopukhóf, who often visits the house, and they develop an understanding that they’ll get married and build a household together. Both of them consider it very important to be equal partners in the marriage, and so Viéra Pavlovna sets up a sewing collective to retain some of her independence. Chernyshevsky wrote What Is to Be Done? in 1863 while imprisoned in St. Petersburg. It was passed to the magazine Sovremennik and published in installments. Chernyshevsky explores themes of absolute equality of the sexes and equality of the classes in an effort to spur reformation of society at large. By forming small work collectives, he suggests, agrarian Russia could bypass capitalism and move into a utopian modern age. If this suggestion sounds familiar, it might be because What Is to Be Done? was a major influence on revolutionists like Kropotkin and Lenin, who went so far as to name one of his most influential political tracts after the novel. The novel went on to be become a Soviet-era classic thanks to its revolutionary ideas that foreshadowed Marxist socialism. This English translation was originally published with the title A Vital Question; this Standard Ebooks edition uses the more common modern title.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lost Illusions

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: hen David Séchard comes of age, his father wants to sell him his printing press business for three times what it’s worth; David, as generous as his father is miserly, agrees to the price because he loves his father. David soon runs across an old school chum, Lucien, and his sister Eve. Lucien is strikingly handsome, with ambitions to be a poet. Both David and Eve become devoted to doing whatever it takes to help Lucien succeed, and, while doing so, they fall in love. ith a ruthless competitor in town trashing his reputation and drastically reducing his income, an exorbitant rent and debt payment to his father, and a new wife, David struggles to make ends meet. He soon pins his hopes on inventing a new process to create paper more cheaply. In the meantime, Lucien takes up with a society woman who is twice his age, and they decide to run off together to Paris. Lost Illusions is about just that—David believes he can be a rich and famous inventor, Lucien believes he can be a rich and famous writer, and Eve believes she can help both the men in her life to succeed in their dreams. All three have to discover what is illusion and what is real, and the process will be painful for all of them.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Ursule Mirouët

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: hen Doctor Minoret moves to Nemours with a baby girl in tow, his relatives and heirs are alarmed. The seventy-one-year-old doctor is wealthy, and his heirs were already mentally dividing up the spoils amongst themselves. They didn’t want a new candidate for the doctor’s affection interfering with their inheritance. The doctor soon makes friends of the local curé, a retired military man, and the local justice of the peace. Together the men dote on Ursule, the illegitimate daughter of the doctor’s nephew, and bring her up in an unconventional yet loving environment. The heirs, to whom the doctor has made plain he does not care to socialize, continue to fume and fret and scheme. hen Ursule becomes a teenager and begins to notice young men, and one in particular, the doctor at last begins to decline. He makes arrangements to provide for Ursule after he’s gone, but the heirs are on heightened alert, and the drama of whether Ursule will be provided for or completely disinherited begins.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: James McIntyre

Description: James McIntyre, often referred to as the “Cheese Poet” due to his fondness for writing about cheese, published two collections of poems in his lifetime. McIntyre was born in Scotland but emigrated to Canada as a youth. The poems reflect his deep connection to rural Canadian life and landscapes of Ontario, particularly the Thames River region. His poetry focuses on subjects like agriculture, local history, community life, and caseiculture. His most popular work, “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese,” is a humorous, celebratory poem that pays tribute to a massive cheese produced in Ontario weighing over 7,000 pounds. While his style has been criticized for its “cheesiness” or lack of sophistication, his earnest and heartfelt verses offer a charming glimpse into 19th-century Canadian culture and the poet’s passion for his adopted homeland.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Disenchantment

Author: C. E. Montague

Description: C. E. Montague was 47 years old when the First World War began. Being well over the age limit for volunteers, he nonetheless dyed his white hair black and was accepted to the army in 1914. Written in 1922, Disenchantment is his attempt to analyze in detail the effect of the war on the British psyche. He traces the evolution of the soldier through the course of the war, beginning with arrogant and incompetent officers having free reign to lead recruits in pointless, outdated training routines that left them totally unprepared for modern warfare. From the officers he moves to the bloodthirsty press that had abandoned its commitment to truth and discovery, and religious officials for whom war was suddenly completely sanctioned by specific passages in the Old Testament. At the conclusion of the war the desire for revenge, especially among non-combatants, was a predictable effect of the years of hypocrisy and lying. He recognizes that even before the war certain vices were tolerated, if in moderation; but the war shattered all these boundaries, leaving a hollowed-out society struggling to find purpose. Montague was a writer by profession before the war. Due to his relatively advanced age he had insights into pre-war British society that were not available to younger recruits, and he was able to take a more detached view of the entire situation. The horrors of trench warfare are alluded to of course—it would be impossible to ignore them entirely—but the focus is squarely on the larger picture of how the war changed the attitudes of both soldiers and civilians. This, combined with his well-honed writing skills, creates a unique portrait of the war and an insightful analysis of the societal changes it wrought. Upon publication it received positive reviews and garnered praise from H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw among many others.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Red Dusk and the Morrow

Author: Paul Dukes

Description: Summoned to London by a mysterious telegram, Paul Dukes finds himself recruited into the ranks of the British Secret Intelligence Service. The murder of Captain Cromie in the Petrograd embassy has flung the British spy networks in Russia into disarray, and the onslaught of the Red Terror threatens to stamp them out for good. With no prior espionage experience, Dukes is tasked with rebuilding the broken networks under the nose of the Bolshevik regime, all while keeping two steps ahead of the agents of the secret police. Published in 1922, this memoir offers a view into the early days of the Secret Intelligence Service, now commonly known as MI6. Despite their reticence around their covert activities, MI6 allowed publication of early accounts of this book to drum up public support for the British intervention in northern Russia. Being a civilian, Dukes was ineligible for the Victoria Cross after his service, so instead he was knighted by King George V.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Nordenholt’s Million

Author: J. J. Connington

Description: As a new bacteria strain emerges and causes the collapse of the world’s food supply, wealthy and powerful Stanley Nordenholt steps forward with a plan to try to save a small, select portion of the British population. Sequestered in Scotland, he leads the group in a race between their dwindling food supply and their effort to reverse the damage caused by the bacteria as the outside world descends into chaos and starvation. Blending ecological disaster and science fiction with psychological and sociological exploration, Nordenholt’s Million asks the reader how far might they be willing to go—and at what cost—to save humanity from total disaster. First published in Britain in 1923, the novel is the first and best-known novel by J. J. Connington. His academic career in chemistry, physics, and radioactivity provides a strong foundation for a story that is both gripping and thought-provoking.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Edward Thomas

Description: Edward Thomas was a literary critic, biographer, and travel and nature writer for decades before he turned his hand to poetry at the age of thirty-six, at the suggestion of his close friend Robert Frost. orld War I broke out shortly after this decision, and in 1915 Thomas enlisted. His first book of poetry, Six Poems, was published in 1916. In 1917, as his next collection, Poems, was being prepared for print, he was killed in action in France. What remained of his poetry was published posthumously, his career as a poet cut short after just three years. Though his contemporaries knew him best for his literary criticism and prose, his modern reputation rests squarely on his poetry. Even though he wrote many of them during the war, only a few are overt war poems, with Thomas largely preferring to write about the English countryside. Despite his short few years of poetic output, Thomas was highly influential, with his personal voice and exploration of solitude and alienation foreshadowing the modernist movement that would emerge after the end of the war.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Lost Girl

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Description: Alvina Houghton is the only daughter of James Houghton, a merchant in the English Midlands whose business sense is insufficient to ensure his family’s prosperity. Alvina is independent-minded and struggles to fit in with the society around her—none of the available men spark her interest, and she begins training as a maternity nurse more out of a sense of obligation than of duty. As her father’s business continues to do poorly, he decides to open a theater, with Alvina helping by playing the piano. A traveling troupe of international entertainers arrive, and Alvina soon falls in love with one of them, an Italian named Ciccio. As the outbreak of the First World War looms, Alvina feels drawn to rural Italy to live with her love. But after having spent a lifetime as an aimless, freethinking, and unconstrained spirit, can she adapt to the expectations of society firmly entrenched in the past? Like many of D. H. Lawrence’s novels, The Lost Girl is built around a realistic depiction of English Midland life and society. Despite modern assessments placing it among the lesser of his novels, it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1920.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Swiss Family Robinson

Author: Johann David Wyss

Description: A Swiss family of immigrants—a pastor, his wife, and their four sons—are shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Australia and abandoned by the rest of the crew. Forced to survive with only the supplies and animals they can salvage from the wreck, they learn to make the best of all that providence provides. Johann David Wyss was inspired by Robinson Crusoe but wanted a story his own children could learn from. Thus the novel’s various adventures are really lessons on topics as varied as farming, cooperation, animal husbandry, and frugality. The novel became a favorite of the castaway genre, with Jules Verne writing a sequel, The Castaways of the Flag, in 1900, and various TV and film adaptations appearing in the 20th century.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Cruise of the Alerte

Author: E. F. Knight

Description: In the early 1800s Spanish colonists fled the Peruvian War of Independence, taking the wondrous treasures of Lima with them. Making their escape on unguarded and poorly equipped vessels, they were easy prey for the pirates swarming off the coast. A deathbed confession by the mysterious sole survivor of one such pirate crew—including a tattered map showing the location of their buried plunder—sets off a series of unsuccessful expeditions to recover the prize. After hearing further details from the captains of those failed voyages, E. F. Knight concludes that there’s sufficient truth in the story to justify an expedition of his own, and he goes to great effort and expense to outfit his yacht Alerte for a journey to the South Atlantic island of Trinidad to seek the fabled fortune. In lucid and detailed prose, Knight recounts the challenges of finding crew and arranging provisions, the fickleness of the weather and the sea, and the dangers of hunting for treasure on an island bedeviled with blistering heat, pounding surf, frequent landslides, and hordes of bloodthirsty land-crabs. The allure of adventure in The Cruise of the Alerte inspired authors like Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons children’s series, as well as Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands.

Subjects: adventure, nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Crime at Black Dudley

Author: Margery Allingham

Description: George Abbershaw has been invited to a party at the gloomy old English mansion of a friend, along with a few people he knows, a few he doesn’t, and one he is sweet on. A suspicious death means George has to determine who can be trusted and who can’t, including a bespectacled young man named Albert Campion who seems to have shown up at the party uninvited. When things take a decided turn for the worse, George and the rest of the guests have to band together in an effort to extricate themselves from an increasingly perilous situation. Although only a supporting player here, Albert Campion would be the protagonist of another sixteen novels and over twenty short stories, contributing to Margery Allingham being considered one of the four “Queens of Crime,” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Informer

Author: Liam O’Flaherty

Description: In 1920s Dublin the Irish Civil War has just come to a close. Gypo Nolan, a strong, brutish, and dull-witted ex-policeman, and his childhood friend Frankie McPhillip, are both members of a revolutionary organization—until Gypo betrays Frankie by informing on him to the police to collect a reward. Frankie is promptly killed in a shootout, and Gypo soon finds himself the subject of an investigation and manhunt as the revolutionary organization mobilizes its soldiers and the working class to uncover the traitor and bring him to justice. O’Flaherty was a Marxist and a member of both the Industrial Workers of the World and the U.S. Communist Party, and the novel’s foundation in the struggles of the working class and revolutionary politics reflect this background. It’s also rich in religious symbolism, with Gypo portrayed as a Judas to the revolution. The Informer was a critical and commercial success, launching O’Flaherty’s literary career. It went on to be adapted into a 1935 film of the same name that won four Academy awards.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Manly Wade Wellman

Description: Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, writing extensively for the pulp magazines of the day. He became known for his “Occult Detective” fiction, featuring recurring characters like Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone, and for the stories of John the Balladeer, set in Appalachia and based on its folklore. This collection is largely taken from stories written for Weird Tales, Comet, and Planet Stories between 1932 and 1958, and covers Wellman’s horror and science fiction work. In it we have stories in which a civil war patrol stumbles onto a rural family cult; the first explorers of Venus discover that descendants of humans have been living there for centuries; a strange, charismatic man produces the manuscript for a Byron play long thought lost; and an L.A. ventriloquist gives up his partner, only to find the decision brings unintended consequences.

Subjects: horror, science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Tunnel

Author: Dorothy M. Richardson

Description: The Tunnel is the fourth installment in in Dorothy M. Richardson’s pioneering sequence of semi-autobiographical novels, Pilgrimage. In this, the longest of the thirteen novels, Miriam Henderson moves to a furnished room in Bloomsbury, London, where she begins an independent life and takes on a job in a dental office. Echoing Miriam’s development, The Tunnel is more experimental and less tied to traditional chronological and narrative structure, providing instead a pure representation of Miriam’s stream of consciousness—a term coined by novelist May Sinclair to describe Richardson’s first three books. In her review of The Tunnel, Virginia Woolf called Richardson “one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tracks in the Snow

Author: Godfrey R. Benson

Description: On the day after visiting his friend Peters, Rector Driver learns that Peters has been murdered. The prime suspect seems clear: the alcoholic gardener Trethewy, who has a motive, an opportunity, and the murder weapon. But when a strange letter concerning the fate of the ship Eleanor arrives for his dead friend, the rector realizes the murder mystery is more complicated than it appears. Godfrey R. Benson’s works consist primarily of political essays and biographies of historical figures. Tracks in The Snow stands out as being his only work of fiction. Traces of his nonfiction writing style can be found in the novel, with its focus on illustrating a murderer’s cunning mind instead of depicting a logic puzzle as was common in contemporary detective fiction.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Tom Brown’s School Days

Author: Thomas Hughes

Description: Tom Brown’s School Days is a seminal novel of Victorian literature that immerses readers in the turbulent world of 19th-century English boarding schools. The novel follows Tom Brown, a spirited and good-hearted boy from the countryside, as he navigates life at Rugby School, an institution renowned for its strict traditions and emphasis on character-building. Through Tom’s eyes, the story explores the challenges of adolescence—bullying, loyalty, and moral growth—against the backdrop of a school culture defined by the reforming influence of its real-life headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold. Thomas Hughes, a lawyer and social reformer, drew deeply from his own experiences as a Rugby student under Dr. Arnold, whose progressive methods aimed to cultivate both intellectual rigor and moral fortitude in his pupils. The novel’s portrayal of school life—with its cricket matches, chapel services, and clashes between bullies and underdogs—captured the Victorian imagination. Hughes’ work became an instant classic, praised for its authenticity and moral earnestness. Beyond its literary legacy, the novel reflects the era’s ideals of masculinity, duty, and social reform, offering insight into how Victorian society sought to prepare young men for leadership in an expanding empire.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Andre Norton

Description: Andre Norton was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. She achieved significant commercial and critical success with her stories during her over seventy-year literary career, influencing many authors and winning various awards—as well as having an award named after her. Most of her short works are still under copyright; this collection contains the few of her short stories that are believed to be in the U.S. public domain.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: A Country Gentleman and His Family

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: hen Theo Warrender goes up to Oxford, great things are expected—but his prospects dim as he arrogantly believes his own idiosyncratic reading choices are better than his tutor’s guidance. In any case, his studies are cut short when he’s summoned home for his elderly father’s dying moments. Grief meets tragedy when the young Lord Markland is killed after attending the funeral, leaving behind a beautiful young widow and their precocious son, Geoff. These ingredients set in motion a remarkable novel which appears to have no central plot. Theo’s story is simply the starting point for exploring the character and choices of those in his family and social network who are there at this moment of change. Theo’s mother, now a middle-aged widow, has chafed under the boredom of her elderly husband’s placid existence, while Theo’s older sisters are both of an age when marriage and managing their own households is expected. There is a richness of domestic wisdom and experience notable in the work of Margaret Oliphant that goes beyond that of her better-known contemporaries. The prospects dashed by her own sons’ wasted gifts contribute to her sharp, unflinching account of Theo’s development, while her long experience of widowhood adds depth to the portrayal of the middle-aged Mrs. Warrender and the conundrums facing the young Lady Markland. Unusually, the boy Geoff plays a major role in the story: his foibles, hopes, and preternatural wisdom make for a compelling characterization of a child whose world is being transformed beyond his control or understanding. In A Country Gentleman and His Family, Oliphant’s imagination and vision impressively extend her own experience into her narrative art. It even has a prescient aspect, given the pre-Freudian psychological situations she portrays (along with what today would be called narcissism and gas-lighting) and the moral challenges her characters face.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Martin Chuzzlewit

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Old Martin Chuzzlewit is a wealthy old man beset with health problems, who sees everyone around him—family, friends, and strangers—as after his money. He has isolated himself from society, keeping with him only a young woman, Mary, whom he raised as an orphan. He has told her she will inherit nothing from him, to ensure that her service is purely for service’s sake. Young Martin Chuzzlewit, for whom the novel is named, is the elder’s grandson. He loves his grandfather and is beloved by him, until young Martin and Mary fall in love with one another. Old Martin promptly disowns young Martin, and throws him out. Young Martin then signs on as an apprentice to a local architect, and there meets Tom Pinch, a former student who is now the architect’s dogsbody. The rest of the novel follows young Martin and Tom and the usual Dickensian cast of supporting characters on their adventures together and apart, including a disastrous trip to the United States for young Martin. The trip provides Dickens the opportunity to skewer American sensibilities as he had so often British ones.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Looking Backward

Author: Edward Bellamy

Description: In Looking Backward, well-to-do Julian West of Boston falls asleep for 113 years and awakes to find the world of 2000 fundamentally changed. An old man and his daughter care for him and take him on a tour of the new world. In the new society, a single nationalized corporation-state under a single political party guarantees work, comfort, and luxury to everyone in the “industrial army.” Looking Backward is a watershed utopian novel following in the path laid by books like Thomas More’s Utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440. Looking Backward was received with great excitement and quickly became the second-bestselling novel in 19th-century America (after Uncle Tom’s Cabin), inspiring political reformers, “Bellamy clubs,” and a direct response by William Morris in his anti-industrial utopian novel News from Nowhere. Bellamy himself wrote a sequel in 1897, Equality, which sold well initially but met with less success overall.

Subjects: satire, science fiction

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Title: Geronimo’s Story of His Life

Author: Geronimo

Description: In the mid 1800s, few names could strike as much fear into the hearts of the settlers of the Western U.S. than Geronimo, the famous Apache leader. Born in what was then Mexico, but is now modern New Mexico, he was raised in the Apache tradition. When he was a young man, a group of Mexican soldiers raided his camp, killing his wife and children and instilling in him a lifelong hatred of Mexicans. Geronimo spent the next years of his life leading raids against his foes the Mexicans, and, once the U.S. annexed Mexican territory at the end of the Mexican-American War, against the new American settlers as well. Only after the U.S. government began forcing Native Americans onto reservations and deployed over 5,000 troops to combat Apache resistance did Geronimo finally surrender. He remained a U.S. prisoner of war for the rest of his life. This autobiography, narrated in the first person, was told by Geronimo to S. M. Barrett, the Superintendent of Education of Lawton, Oklahoma, after Barrett petitioned President Roosevelt to allow the story to be told. Geronimo, speaking through a translator, dictated his story precisely, refusing questions or to change what he had said. Since Geronimo was direct in expressing his low opinions of many of the U.S. officials he had dealt with (and who were still living at the time the book was published), Barrett often includes endnotes clarifying that these words are Geronimo’s and not his own opinions. The story is a fascinating window into the lifestyle, beliefs, and motivations of one of the most recognizable figures in the history of the western U.S.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Jonas Lie

Description: Jonas Lie was a Norwegian author of both long and short fiction. His works often seek to portray life and customs of Norwegian society, like the economic importance of fishing and supernatural beings from local folklore. His stories are set in the Norwegian countryside and feature primarily peasants. Both Christianity and Nordic folklore are present in the tales, with spirits and magic having a significant role in the plots. This edition of Short Fiction contains all of his short stories known to be translated into English, which were mostly published in a collection called Weird Tales from Northern Seas in 1893.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Electra

Author: Sophocles

Description: Sophocles’ Electra is a tragedy that follows Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, as she seeks revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of her mother and her mother’s lover Aegisthus. Mourning her father’s death, Electra yearns for justice and the return of her brother, Orestes, who has been exiled. When Orestes returns, the siblings plot and carry out the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, fulfilling their desire for vengeance. The play explores Electra’s conflicting feelings of triumph and horror at the matricide.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Three Taps

Author: Ronald A. Knox

Description: Jephthah Mottram is a wealthy businessman whose life is insured by a policy which pays a huge sum to his beneficiaries should he die before the age of 65, and after that provides an annuity. During his annual fishing retreat at a rural and decrepit Midlands inn, he dies one night of gas poisoning. There are complications. What is to be made of his attempt to negotiate a settlement with the insurance company because of a diagnosis he had received before his holiday? And what of the disposition of the three gas taps in his bedroom at the hostelry? Inevitably, Mottram’s death requires investigation, not only by the police but by the insurance company’s brilliant—albeit lazy—detective, Miles Bredon. Bredon is accompanied by his wife—a very sharp Watson to Bredon’s Holmes—as well as a police detective who had served with Bredon in the Great War. Ronald Knox populates this story of detection with a strong cast of supporting characters, adding a variety of viewpoints to the perception of Mottram’s untimely death. He also gave the book the subtitle “A Detective Story Without a Moral”—perhaps a subtle invitation from the author to his readers to draw a different conclusion?

Subjects: mystery

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Title: Philosophical Works

Author: René Descartes

Description: René Descartes is spoken of as the father of modern philosophy, and his seventeenth-century contributions to the discipline as the most significant since Aristotle. While in his lifetime he was primarily known as a mathematician and scientific theorist—in contemporaneous terms a “natural philosopher”—the works of his that we’d today consider to be philosophy are those that continue to command attention. Of these, collected here are the “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences,” the “Meditations on the First Philosophy,” and selections from the “Principles of Philosophy.” The “Discourse on the Method” was first published as a lengthy introduction to treatises on optics, meteorology, and geometry, in which the titular method of seeking truth in the sciences was applied. Unlike Descartes’ other major works, it was originally composed in French in the hope of reaching a wider audience than scholarly Latin would allow. It’s written in the first person, and Descartes introduces it as a sort of intellectual autobiography. In the second part he outlines the method for right ratiocinative conduct in the form of four precepts; later parts cover issues in morality, metaphysics, medicine, and scientific progress in general. In the “Meditations on the First Philosophy” Descartes takes up the metaphysical issues he says were only touched on “in passing” in the “Discourse,” namely “the existence of God and the nature of the human soul,” including what it can and cannot doubt. In the second Meditation he arrives at his most famous idea, which he’d later call the “first principle” of his thought, a proposition he argues is indubitable: “cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” From the cogito he goes on to deduce the existence of God and God’s non-deceiving nature—and then from these two conclusions, eventually the distinction between mind and body and the existence of material objects, foundations on which all other truths about the world may be based. Descartes’ arguments in the “Meditations” were controversial—the book was originally published with objections from seven of his contemporaries, and his replies to them—but its reputation remains that of one of the finest pieces of philosophical writing ever produced, and it’s still in wide use today as an introduction to philosophy. His discussion of the mind-body distinction in the “Meditations” is perhaps the most influential treatment of the subject since Plato, even if “Cartesian dualism” now functions as a pejorative. His solutions have since been rejected, but the problem he raised is still considered a problem. The “Principles of Philosophy,” written after both the “Discourse” and “Meditations,” was intended as a textbook to replace the textbooks of Aristotelian philosophy. Of the latter, Descartes wrote in the preface that “the more [people] have studied it, the less fit are they for rightly apprehending the truth.” In this work, short numbered paragraphs provide a systematic overview of his metaphysics and natural philosophy, which departed methodologically from that tradition, with—he claimed—salutary effects: “those imbued with my doctrines have much less difficulty in comprehending the writings of others, and estimating their true value, than those who have not been so imbued.” Descartes’ legacy is enormous; as translator John Veitch put it, his philosophy is “a sort of crossroad whence diverge the chief ways followed by modern thought.” Later major figures of Western philosophy from Hume and Kant to Wittgenstein and Williams have thought it necessary either to engage with his project or mark the contrast between theirs and his. While Descartes’ rationalist “project of pure enquiry” is not generally considered a live option in modern epistemology, his writing continues to serve as a model of lucidity in thought and argumentation. This edition includes as an appendix an excerpt from Descartes’ replies to the second set of objections, and some endnotes by translator John Veitch discussing key terms used by Descartes such as “idea” (in general and of the “innate” variety), “perception,” “pure intellection,” and “motion.” Descartes entreats his readers in the synopsis of the “Meditations” not to form any judgment about the questions the work raises without having read the Objections and his corresponding Replies; unfortunately, the Objections and Replies were not translated in full into English until the early twentieth century and will enter the U.S. public domain only in 2030.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Mystery at Lynden Sands

Author: J. J. Connington

Description: Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield’s holiday on the coast is interrupted when he’s asked to assist with the investigation of a murder on a nearby country estate. As Sir Clinton, his friend Wendover, and the local police work to uncover who’s behind the murder, they encounter an expanding web of clues, characters with possible motives, questions related to the large inheritance involving the estate, and additional misdeeds. Working against time and the tides, Sir Clinton and his team must piece together an increasingly complex puzzle of clues, potential suspects, and crimes. Mystery at Lynden Sands is the third in a series of detective novels by J. J. Connington that feature Sir Clinton Driffield. It was first published in Britain in 1928.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Demons

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: Young Pyotr Stepanovitch returns to the small town of his father and attempts to start a revolution that will ultimately remake the very fabric of society and bring forth a new social and political order. In order to realize his plan, Pyotr recruits a few men into his group, who are believed to be one cell among many spread throughout the country. Demons is told by a semi-omniscient narrator, and focuses mainly on the lives of middle- and upper-class Russians. The exact goals of the characters are not made very clear, and they serve primarily as commentary on contemporary Russian society and ideas. Some of the characters were likely based on real people. The episode of Jesus’ exorcism of Legion in the Synoptic Gospels is the source of the allegorical title of the book; the “demons” are in reference to the nihilistic and revolutionary ideas that “possess” the conspirators (and Russia herself). The novel’s title has alternately been translated as The Possessed and The Devils. Although described by some of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries as too unrealistic, the novel was generally well-received and is considered one of his most important works after his return from Siberian exile. Like other Dostoevsky novels, it was first serialized in The Russian Messenger; it was later published as a book in 1873.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Charterhouse of Parma

Author: Stendhal

Description: Fabrizio del Dongo is a young Italian nobleman, raised in comfort in Lombardy. But when Napoleon returns from exile in Elba to try to regain power in Europe, Fabrizio feels compelled to join the army and fight. The naive Fabrizio manages to stumble into the Battle of Waterloo, and thus begin his picaresque adventures as he fights in battles, deals with courtly intrigue, attends a seminary, romances countless women, engages in duels, and endures imprisonment in a fantastical tower. Stendhal worked as a diplomat in northern Italy for decades, and his experiences add a rich verisimilitude to the many passages discussing courtly life. This also lends to the novel’s reputation as one of the earliest examples of literary realism; when it was published, it was considered a revolutionary work that went against the current of romanticism that was popular at the time. He wrote the novel at a breakneck pace, completing it in just fifty-two days. He later admitted that parts of the plot were poorly structured and could have been improved with more careful writing and editing; despite this admission, The Charterhouse of Parma heavily influenced authors like Balzac, Tolstoy, and Henry James, who said it is “among the dozen finest novels we possess.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Shepherds of the Wild

Author: Edison Marshall

Description: When Hugh Gaylord reluctantly accepts the challenge to leave his soft, comfortable life to hunt the cougar Broken Fang in the Idaho Rockies, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Initially skeptical, he soon finds purpose and meaning in the trials and travails of life in the harsh wildnerness as his story intertwines with those of the animals around him—Broken Fang, Spread Horn the bull elk, Spot the bighorn goat, and Shep the dog—each of them contending with the challenges of their environment. Like many of Edison Marshall’s novels, this one draws on his own experience as a life-long outdoorsman and big game hunter.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Virginian

Author: Owen Wister

Description: The narrator, a man from “back East” on his way to a cattle ranch, stops in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and witnesses the enigmatic title character—the Virginian—rope a wild pony after many other cowboys failed. The Virginian is revealed to be the narrator’s escort to his destination, where the Virginian is employed. After getting a taste of the Western way of life in town, the two set off on the remaining 263-mile journey to the ranch, sparking a friendship. The narrator, now nicknamed Tenderfoot, goes on to recount the work, romances, and adventures of the Virginian against the backdrop of the Wyoming Territory and the greater American West. The Virginian is a foundational novel of the Western genre. Published in 1902, it spawned numerous adaptations in theater, film, and television, while setting the stage for later popular Western writers like Zane Grey.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Diverging Roads

Author: Rose Wilder Lane

Description: Helen is finishing high school and wants to leave the California farm of her parents, where they struggle to get by, to find a job and earn her own income. With her strong personality, she desires independence. She has an understanding with a young man, Paul, that they will marry someday, but he must also leave town to start work. Helen figures that if she can learn telegraphy and earn some money, she can bring the day closer when she and Paul can marry. She imagines working with Paul as a husband and wife team—but it’s apparent from the start that Paul doesn’t like the idea of a working wife. As Helen starts to make her way in the world, she finds that her desires are often in conflict with each other. Work is drudgery, but it gives her some freedom. She tries to find fulfillment in her crowd of friends, who are pushing off the conservative inhibitions of the day in the big cities like San Francisco. She’s swept off her feet by an exciting man, Bert, who has his own ideas of what he wants a woman to be. After marrying quickly, they run in to financial trouble, and Helen finds that she must strike out on her own to retain her independence. Helen longs for marriage, a home, and children, but settling down for these things would keep her from becoming the person she really wants to be. Rose Wilder Lane was the daughter of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Diverging Roads is her first novel. This fictional account is a reflection of her own experience as a telegraph operator, advertisement and feature writer for newspapers and magazines, and seller of land in northern California. We get a glimpse of the orchards, oil leases, and hardscrabble farm plots around the Pacific Coast of the very early twentieth century.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tarzan and the Ant Men

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Attempting his first solo airplane flight, Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, crashes in the unknown land of Minuni, surrounded by an impenetrable forest of thorns. After first encountering a group of slow, speechless giants, he escapes to discover a civilization of city-states inhabited by a people one quarter his size. As he is caught up in the wars they fight among themselves, he is captured, and must escape both the city and the land to return home. Tarzan and the Ant Men is the tenth book in the Tarzan series. It ran as a seven part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly beginning in February of 1924, and was published as a book by A. C. McClurg Co. in September of that year.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Point Counter Point

Author: Aldous Huxley

Description: Point Counter Point is Aldous Huxley’s fourth novel. More complex and serious than his previous work, it weaves together several stories to amusingly satirize English intellectual life and comment on fundamental human issues. Through these connected stories and characters Huxley strives to find meaning in the rapidly changing society of the late 1920s. Points are presented with their counterpoint: love and sex, life and death, religion and science, society and individualism. Many of the same themes are treated again in a very different way in Huxley’s next novel, Brave New World. Point Counter Point is a roman à clef, with many of the characters based on real life figures. In addition to Huxley himself, other characters are based on people Huxley knew personally, such as the author D. H. Lawrence, the political activist Nancy Cunard, and the painter Augustus John.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Antigone

Author: Sophocles

Description: The last of the Theban Plays tells the story of Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus. She defies the orders of her uncle, King Creon, who has declared her brother Polynices a traitor and forbids his burial after he dies in battle. Driven by her religious duty and love for her family, Antigone secretly buries him. Her actions lead to her arrest, and despite Creon’s attempts to persuade her with threats and promises, Antigone remains steadfast in her beliefs. The tension between the laws of the state and divine law escalates as the story progresses, culminating in tragic consequences; in the end, Creon comes to a painful realization about the devastating cost of his pride and stubbornness.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Jungle Tales of Tarzan

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of short stories about Tarzan’s experiences growing up in the jungle. Though each story stands on its own, together they form a loose narrative. The stories explore Tarzan’s development from a young boy into a young man and how those experiences are similar and different to the experiences of the apes he grows up with. These stories were originally published in Blue Book magazine before being collected into a book in 1919. Chronologically, these stories occur during Chapter 11 of Tarzan of the Apes, after the death of his ape foster mother and before he encounters anyone from England.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: Oedipus at Colonus

Author: Sophocles

Description: The once-powerful King Oedipus, now blind and broken, arrives at the sacred grove of Colonus near Athens, searching for a place to rest. Having suffered the tragic consequences of his unintentional crimes—killing his father and marrying his mother—Oedipus reflects on his anguish and the curse that has haunted his life. With the support of his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, he seeks solace and a final resting place. Although Oedipus at Colonus is the second of the Theban Plays, it was actually the last to be written, around 406 BCE, near the end of Sophocles’ life. The play was first performed in 401 BCE, when the playwright’s son, Iophon, presented it at a dramatic competition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Victory

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Joseph Conrad’s Victory tells the story of Axel Heyst, a reclusive Swedish man who lives a solitary life on the island of Samburan in Southeast Asia. During a stay at a hotel on the nearby island of Java, Heyst encounters Lena, a young musician traveling with an orchestra. Witnessing Lena’s mistreatment by the orchestra’s conductor and his wife, as well as the sexual threats by the hotel’s owner, Schomberg, Heyst decides to help Lena escape the orchestra and brings her to his island, where they fall in love. But Schomberg, filled with jealousy and rage, takes his revenge by sending three bandits to the island, promising them the fortune Heyst supposedly hid there. First published in 1915, Victory has a four-part structure, switching between different narrative perspectives to tell the stories of Heyst, Schomberg, and Lena.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Well at the World’s End

Author: William Morris

Description: The King of Upmeads has four sons who are tired of living in the peaceable kingdom, and yearn to adventure abroad. Three are sent out, but the fourth, Ralph, is chosen to stay home. He can’t stand being left behind, and so he runs away, wandering to the many lands beyond Upmeads. On his travels he encounters much evil, meeting both thieves and tyrants. At the start, Ralph is somewhat naive and is merely carried along by events. But when he hears of a legendary Well at the World’s End that grants health and long life, he devotes himself to finding it—though many before him have tried. Ralph must make allies, escape evil plots, and take charge of his journey to fulfill his quest. Along the way he’ll grow into a confident warrior, and the kind of ruler that can set things right in the world. The Well at the World’s End is an early example of the high fantasy genre, as it takes place in a fictional world filled with romance and features a heroic protagonist. The magic is subtle, and the story is largely an adventure of knights, damsels, villains, and heroes. The prose is written in an archaic style of English, which inspired many later fantasy writers including J. R. R. Tolkien (who may have been influenced by the book’s King Gandolf and horse Silverfax) and C. S. Lewis.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Hester

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: The bank owned by the Vernon family has a long and illustrious history in the town of Redborough—until its chief, John Vernon, brings it to its knees through mismanagement. He flees the country, and his cousin, Catherine Vernon, meets the crisis as the other shareholder, and at the expense of her own personal fortune. Under her competent leadership, the bank regains its past glories, and she becomes a wealthy philanthropist. As part of her largesse, Catherine provides for a number of her scattered relatives; after John Vernon’s death, she invites the impoverished widow to return to Redborough with her daughter, Hester. The first meeting of Catherine with Hester, still only fourteen, brings out an instinctive and mutual antipathy. Yet Hester longs to do something useful with her life, bold and even heroic, as Catherine had done. No such possibilities are open to her, however, and her life settles into a dull routine. This equilibrium is upset when one of Catherine’s “non-Vernon” relations arrives from London with his experience of life on the Stock Exchange. It is clear that this is as much Catherine’s story—framed by the hard-nosed realism of the banking world—as it is Hester’s, even though the younger woman gives her name as title to the novel. The depiction of Catherine Vernon’s hopes and fears, triumphs and tragedies, owes much to Margaret Oliphant’s own experiences. Oliphant was herself a competent manager with a huge capacity for work, but who had suffered much as a young woman. She understood, too, the challenges of providing for extended family, and the attractions and antipathies, as well as gratitude and resentment, that could grow between its members. In Hester, this social observation gains an additional edge by the dynamics of sexual politics which run through the novel. In spite of Oliphant’s intelligence and abilities—often thwarted, she thought, because she was a widowed woman—she was unpersuaded by those arguing for women’s suffrage: she wrote a critical review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. Yet Hester remains equivocal about what prospects should be open to this intelligent and capable, yet frustrated young woman. Hester has remained one of Oliphant’s most enduringly popular works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Two Treatises of Government

Author: John Locke

Description: John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is a foundational text in liberal political thought, which challenged the then-prevailing theories of divine right and absolute monarchy. The work is divided into two treatises, with the first primarily focused on refuting Sir Robert Filmer’s book Patriarcha, which advocates for absolute monarchical power based on the supposed divine right of kings. Locke dismantles Filmer’s claims, demonstrating the lack of scriptural support for inherited political authority, and distinguishing between political power and paternal power. In the second treatise, Locke articulates his own theory of government, grounded in natural law and individual rights. He posits that all individuals are born free and equal, possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke discusses the concept of the state of nature, where individuals are governed by natural law, and argues that legitimate government arises from the consent of the governed. He discusses how the social contract establishes the moral foundation for political authority. Locke proposes that should a government fail to protect the rights of the people or violates the social contract, citizens have the right and duty to revolt and establish a new government. His ideas about government by consent, the right to private property, and the right to revolution have profoundly influenced modern democratic thought and the development of liberal political theory, laying the groundwork for later political movements advocating for democracy and human rights.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Look Homeward, Angel

Author: Thomas Wolfe

Description: Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel, is a coming-of-age novel that follows the life of Oliver Gant and his family in the fictional town of Altamont, North Carolina. The story begins with Oliver’s early years, capturing the struggles of post-Civil War Southern life. Later, the focus shifts to Eugene, Oliver’s son, an aspiring writer torn between his artistic ambition and his small-town roots. The novel is a foundational work of Southern American literature, considered by many a viable contender for the “Great American Novel.” Wolfe drew extensively from his personal experiences growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, and many of the themes of Wolfe’s own life—like family, identity, and artistic exploration—are reflected in Eugene’s struggles. The novel was the result of close collaboration between Wolfe and his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins helped distill Wolfe’s original manuscript from an unwieldy 300,000 words to a publishable state, cutting 60,000 words and shifting the primary focus to Eugene. Ketti Frings created a critically acclaimed Broadway adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel, which premiered in 1957 and ran for 564 performances. Her theatrical adaptation won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received multiple Tony Award nominations across various categories.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Dodsworth

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Description: In the booming American Midwest of the 1920s, an innovative auto manufacturer decides to retire early at the age of fifty, having achieved the American Dream through his hard work and ingenuity. With his younger, socially ambitious wife, he embarks on a long-dreamed-of European tour—a seemingly perfect capstone to a successful life. But what begins as a leisurely vacation opens up profound questions about identity, marriage, and the nature of fulfillment. Can a self-made American businessman find meaning beyond his career? What happens when one spouse changes while the other remains static? The novel explores the clash between American practicality and European sophistication, between duty and self-discovery, and between the comfortable familiar and the alluring unknown. Published in 1929, Dodsworth emerged during a significant period in Sinclair Lewis’s career, arriving four years after he won (and declined) the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith and just before he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The novel’s resonance endured well beyond its publication, leading to successful adaptations in multiple media. Sidney Howard adapted it for the stage in 1934, and then wrote the screenplay for William Wyler’s acclaimed 1936 film adaptation. The film’s enduring significance was recognized in 1990 when it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Author: Mahatma Gandhi

Description: In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi relates his life story through a series of personal reflections, described by Gandhi as his “experiments with Truth.” The autobiography provides a look at his moral and spiritual development from his birth in Gujarat in 1869 through the beginnings of his practice of “satyagraha” (nonviolent resistance) in India in the early 1900s. It explores foundational periods in his life such as his childhood in Gujarat, his arranged marriage at a young age, his education in England, and the early stages of his professional and political life in South Africa. At a time when most notable literary works in India were composed in English, Gandhi chose to write his autobiography in Gujarati, his native language. And as noted in his introduction, the very act of writing an autobiography was considered unconventional in India during that era. The Story of My Experiments with Truth was originally serialized between 1925 and 1929 and published as two volumes in 1927 and 1929. Presented here in this Standard Ebooks edition is the 1940 revised edition.

Subjects: autobiography, memoir, nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Laughing Boy

Author: Oliver La Farge

Description: Laughing Boy is the name of a young Navajo man living in the American Southwest during the era when the Americans are pushing westward in earnest. He’s looking to find his way in the world and earn the respect of his tribe, when he meets a mysterious and fiery young woman, Slim Girl, at a tribal meet. Slim Girl was raised in an American Indian school, a type of boarding school designed by missionaries to “civilize” the native population. Her experiences there left her deeply resentful, and this bitterness carries on in her approach to the world: where Laughing Boy is optimistic, respectful of tradition, and comfortable with himself, Slim Girl is calculating, tough, and secretive. The two quickly fall in love, but Laughing Boy’s family warns against the union—it seems that Slim Girl has a reputation that precedes her. Despite the warning, the two begin a life together in a way that blends the traditional with the new American, before a dark secret in Slim Girl’s past threatens their happiness. The story is, on its face, a love story, but La Farge uses the framework of a romance to explore much deeper questions of tradition, native versus Western lifestyles, and how the inexorable expansion of Americans into the West changed things for the civilizations living there. La Farge was not just a novelist—he was also an anthropologist who spent much of his career studying Native Americans, the Navajo in particular. His deep knowledge of their culture, practices, and language allows him to create a convincing air of authenticity in the narrative, which went on to earn the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1930.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Magnificent Obsession

Author: Lloyd C. Douglas

Description: Robert “Bobby” Merrick, a college-aged only child from a wealthy Michigan family, is neither expected nor inclined to do anything with his life except “loaf.” But when he indirectly causes the death of an esteemed Detroit brain surgeon, Bobby decides to change his ways dramatically to compensate for his role in the tragedy. In the course of this he discovers the deceased surgeon’s secret journal, which reveals a spiritual obsession that will transform Bobby’s life even further. Lutheran Christian minister Lloyd C. Douglas began working on Magnificent Obsession, his first novel, at the age of fifty. It was initially marketed as a work of religious literature, but was a commercial failure until eighteen months later when it was instead marketed as a romance novel. In the years that followed, Douglas received many letters from readers about the novel’s spiritual ideas; this compelled him to write a prequel, entitled Dr. Hudson’s Secret Journal, which presents in full the fictional journal featured in this novel. Magnificent Obsession combines standard tropes of romance with an unusual reinterpretation of the message of the Christian gospels. In the preface to Dr. Hudson’s Secret Journal, Douglas wrote that its main theme “derived from a little handful of verses midway of the Sermon on the Mount” in the Gospel of Matthew. It explores the possibility of self-interested altruism and the compatibility of religious zeal with a scientific worldview. While the novel has never been admired by critics, the popularity it once achieved testifies to the enduring appeal of the notion of a hidden formula for success in life.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Man in the Queue

Author: Josephine Tey

Description: Standing in line in a long queue for a show at a theater, a young man collapses—and it quickly becomes apparent that he has been stabbed in the back. Inspector Alan Grant of the Metropolitan Police is soon on the case, though he finds it deeply puzzling—not least because the identity of the victim is itself a mystery. The Man in the Queue, published in 1929, was the first in a series of successful detective novels written by the Scottish author Elizabeth MacKintosh writing under the pen name Josephine Tey, though it was first published using the pseudonym “Gordon Daviot.”

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Cup of Gold

Author: John Steinbeck

Description: Henry Morgan is a young boy growing up in a small town in Wales. One day, a sailor returns to regale Henry with tales of the West Indies, and the glory that awaits those adventuresome enough to go. Henry, dazzled, quickly finds a place aboard a ship heading to the islands, thus setting himself on the path to becoming the brutal and fearsome pirate Captain Morgan. Cup of Gold, Steinbeck’s first novel, is the fictionalized story of the real Sir Henry Morgan. Morgan’s early life is mostly obscure, but his later life is well documented. Steinbeck takes a broad artistic license across all of Morgan’s life, so the novel is historical fiction that’s only loosely based on historical fact. The portrait Steinbeck paints of Morgan is of a complex, lustful, and largely unhappy man, set in evocative locations laced with traces of magical realism. Though Morgan’s life was filled with blood and violence, Steinbeck portrays him as a thoughtful and intelligent commander of men, whose tragic flaw is an unquenchable lust for great accomplishments combined with a misunderstanding of what great accomplishments actually are. Through his cunning he repeatedly attains the ever-grander victories he seeks—but he quickly discovers what so many before and after him have discovered: that achievement is not always as satisfying as the quest to achieve.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Courts of the Morning

Author: John Buchan

Description: After Richard Hannay is approached by American diplomats regarding the disappearance of a wealthy industrialist, he in turn seeks the help of his friend Sandy Arbuthnot. Soon, however, Arbuthnot himself goes missing. The story continues in the fictional country of Olifa, located somewhere along the west coast of South America, where a powerful head of a mining company is gradually enslaving the populace. It seems that only guerrilla warfare will save the country from rule under a ruthless tyrant. Some of John Buchan’s more famous works, like The Thirty-Nine Steps, are fast-paced thrillers. But while The Courts of the Morning contains plenty of excitement, it also has more measured passages in which Buchan works out a particular military philosophy and an approach to international relations. Its accounts of military engagement also owe something to his massive and carefully documented multi-volume history of the First World War.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Man Within

Author: Graham Greene

Description: In The Man Within, Graham Greene tells a tale of betrayal, fear, and the struggle for redemption. The story follows Francis Andrews, a young smuggler who betrays his comrades. Haunted by guilt and fear, he flees into the countryside, desperate to escape his new foes. He finds shelter in an isolated cottage inhabited by a solitary young woman. As his enemies close in, Andrews must confront his own cowardice and inner demons, as well as the consequences of his actions. The novel explores themes of guilt, redemption, the nature of courage and cowardice, and the complex relationship between one’s inner beliefs and outward actions. Set against the backdrop of the English countryside, The Man Within offers an exploration of human nature, choice and consequence, and the possibility of finding redemption, even in the darkest of circumstances.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: All Quiet on the Western Front

Author: Erich Maria Remarque

Description: All Quiet on the Western Front has often been called one of the most powerful war novels ever written. Set in the latter half of World War I, the novel follows Paul Bäumer, a young German recruit, as he fights for his life in the trenches of the Western Front. Paul is a schoolboy in a picturesque German village when World War I breaks out. Patriotic speeches at his school embolden him and his friends to volunteer for the German army. But their patriotism soon withers to a bleak, tortured, dehumanized agony as they struggle to survive the crushing horrors of endless artillery fire, trench warfare, tanks, gas, and hunger. The novel follows Paul as he and his company endure some of the most brutal physical and mental conditions ever unleashed on the face of the earth, as the new mechanized, technological style of war grinds and burns humans to physical pulp, seemingly at random, and for seemingly no benefit. Tiny slivers of land are gained at an enormous cost of human life, only to be lost again days later. Those who survive are left both mentally and physically shattered, unable to reintegrate into civilian life, almost like living ghosts returned from hell. Remarque himself was conscripted into the German army at the age of eighteen, and served in the trenches of the Western Front before being wounded and evacuated. After recovering he was sent back to the front, but the war ended just a month afterwards. He published the novel serially in 1928, a decade after the armistice. It saw immediate success, becoming the best-selling fiction novel in America in 1929 and moving 2.5 million copies in its first year and half. The grotesque horror of Remarque’s writing shocked contemporary readers, painting a raw picture of the reality of war for those who had consumed little but propaganda at home. But the novel’s success was despite of—or perhaps because of—its conspicuous avoidance of politics. Remarque quietly declines to mention any political or strategic perspectives, opting to focus entirely on the physical existence of soldiers so engaged in pure survival that not only are politics totally unimportant to them, but one could imagine them fighting for any side. So moving was the novel that it was quickly banned in many European countries as being anti-war propaganda; regardless, in 1931 it led to Remarque being nominated for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1933, after the Nazis rose to power in Germany, it was one of the first so-called “degenerate books” that the party banned and burned as they sought to reignite the nationalism and wartime spirit that the novel so thoroughly condemns.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Hudson River Bracketed

Author: Edith Wharton

Description: Nineteen-year-old Vance Weston has grown up in the fictional Midwestern town of Euphoria, Illinois. Though under pressure to join his father in real estate, Vance aspires to be a poet. After falling ill just as he is supposed to choose his profession, he convalesces for a while at home until a doctor suggests time away in a better climate would aid his recovery. Vance chooses to stay with relatives, the Tracys, in a small town not far from New York City; his hope is that he might be able to visit the latter during his stay and get his foot in the door of the literary world. The Tracys are caretakers for an old house owned by the much wealthier Spear family. Vance accompanies his cousins to the house, which is in the titular Hudson River Bracketed architectural style. In its library he meets a young woman from the Spear family, Heloise, known as “Halo.” This chance encounter is the first in a series of coincidences that will enable Vance’s writerly dreams to take shape. Hudson River Bracketed differs from most of Edith Wharton’s novels in that its protagonist is both male and materially disadvantaged. Having distanced the main character from her own life in these two respects, Wharton allowed herself, it’s widely thought, to be more freely autobiographical in portraying her experiences as a fledgling novelist. The novel is generally appreciated not so much for the depth of its characters, which one contemporary reviewer in the New Statesman said resembled “marionettes,” but for the light it sheds on Wharton’s own creative process of fiction writing, and her attitude towards the mercenary side of publishing—including the exploitation of new writers as a commercial strategy. Also notably explored are the many human factors that affect the awarding of literary prizes like the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which Wharton won in 1921 for The Age of Innocence and which explicitly appears in the novel as the “Pulsifer Prize.” Other themes of the book are the effects of social class and material resources on literary achievement; religious and publishing trends; marriage and divorce; and the majesty of the natural environment, in particular the Hudson River Valley. In connection with this last focus, scholar Judith Saunders has also argued that the book is an extended meditation on the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which is the subject of Vance and Halo’s first verbal exchange. Hudson River Bracketed was first serialized without Wharton’s permission in 1928, resulting in a frenzied rush to finish it, which biographers speculate may have contributed to the illnesses of her final years. The novel was published in its entirety in 1929, when Wharton was 67. It’s her longest novel, and among the five she consistently listed as her favorites within her oeuvre. Biographer R. W. B. Lewis reports her having said: “I am sure it is my best book.” Critics and readers didn’t agree; it has never been popular. However, even its detractors admire her rich descriptions of the Hudson River Valley setting. harton published a sequel to Hudson River Bracketed in 1932, five years before her death at 75.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Dain Curse

Author: Dashiell Hammett

Description: A diamond glinting in the grass outside the Leggetts’ front door gives the first clue to a burglary, and sets our narrator on the trail of a shadowy mastermind whose plans always seem one step ahead. But whether he’s having to deal with explosions, cults, car chases, or even the titular Dain family curse, our hard-boiled private detective remains calm and collected while inching closer to the truth. The unnamed narrator of The Dain Curse (known these days by the nickname of the Continental Op) is a detective who found his genesis among the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1923. This publication, from 1929, is a collection of four previously serialized interlinked short stories, and followed Red Harvest in a busy year for Dashiell Hammett.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Red Harvest

Author: Dashiell Hammett

Description: The Continental Op, the nameless hard-drinking and quick-shooting detective, arrives at Personville—called “Poisonville” by its inhabitants—in response to a call from the local newspaper publisher Donald Willsson. But just as the Op arrives, Willsson is murdered in cold blood. The Op begins investigating the murder, only to be ensnared in the deep web of power, corruption, and lies that undergirds the rough-and-tumble town. Red Harvest was first published as a series of short stories in Black Mask magazine before Hammett rewrote them and linked them together to form this novelization. It’s therefore the first novel to feature the Continental Op, the larger-than-life character who would go on to become the prototype for every hard-boiled, emotionally stunted, fedora-wearing detective cliché to grace media ever since. The novel’s influence has been widely recognized, with Time magazine placing it in its list of 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and authors for a century to come riffing on the stereotype created by the Continental Op.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Brown on Resolution

Author: C. S. Forester

Description: Albert Brown was fated to enlist in the British navy, his destiny set by his unusual birth and upbringing. While on operations in the Pacific during the first World War, his ship is sunk—but he survives, and is taken on board the German cruiser that sank them. It too has suffered damage, and heads to the Galapagos Islands to effect repairs. In this unlikely and hostile setting, Brown, alone, pits himself against the German ship and its crew, seeking to delay its progress while British naval reinforcements make their way to the region. C. S. Forester became famous for his Horatio Hornblower series, but Brown on Resolution is among the first of his works of nautical fiction. In it he weaves together the gritty social themes of his earlier work with meticulous accounts of naval adventure.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Author: Calvin Coolidge

Description: Calvin Coolidge served as the thirtieth president of the United States, from 1923–1929. Famously taciturn, his nickname was “Silent Cal”—and his autobiography does nothing to disabuse him of that legend. Where Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography is a weighty 214,000 words, and Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs clock in at a hefty 273,000 words, this volume is a terse 44,000 words. Coolidge wastes no time in describing his childhood in Vermont where his father, a respected pillar of the community, raised him in an environment that valued hard work, modesty, and education. Though idyllic in setting, this upbringing is tinged with loss in the early deaths of his grandfather, mother, and sister. He then recounts his career in the law, followed by his speedy ascent into politics and the vice presidency under Warren G. Harding. hen Harding dies suddenly in 1923 on a trip to San Francisco, Coolidge, who was visiting his family home, finds himself being sworn to the office of the President by his father, under the lamplight of a modest country house. His first abbreviated term ends with him a popular president, and, after winning the election in 1924, he ultimately declines to run for a second full term, stating that “If I take another term, I will be in the White House till 1933 … Ten years in Washington is longer than any other man has had it—too long!” Those starting this autobiography may expect it to focus on the time Coolidge spent as the most powerful man in the world, but Coolidge devotes few words to discussing the actual events that occurred during his presidency, preferring to talk about his upbringing and his broad views on government and character. He does, however, recount what a day in the life of the president looks like—and as one might expect, the average day is extremely busy and carefully scheduled. Despite its brevity, Coolidge’s autobiography reveals a portrait of a thoughtful, considerate man who cared much for his countrymen and held modesty and hard work as two of the most important traits a leader can have.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: The Maracot Deep

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: While investigating the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, a team led by Dr. Maracot is cut off from their ship and hurled to the bottom of the ocean. There, they find themselves in the remnants of the ancient civilization of Atlantis. Like some other later works by Arthur Conan Doyle, this novel shows elements of spiritualism and the supernatural, themes and ideas that interested him later in life. The Maracot Deep was first serialized in both The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine between 1927 and 1928, and later published in a book alongside other stories in 1929. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 1929 edition.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: A Farewell to Arms

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Description: Frederic Henry is an American lieutenant of an ambulance corps serving in the Italian front of World War I. During his service he meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse who goes on to work closely with him. As the relationship between Frederic and Catherine develops, the novel follows the effects the war has on them and those around them. But the war is not the centerpiece of the book; rather, it serves more as a background and plot device for the growth of the characters’ interpersonal relationships. Though the novel is not in any way an autobiography, Hemingway himself served as an ambulance driver in the Italian front, and his experiences directly inspired the character of Frederic Henry; a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky who cared for Hemingway when he was wounded served as the inspiration for Catherine Barkley. Several other real-life people Hemingway engaged with during his time in Italy also served as inspiration for other minor characters. A Farewell to Arms went on to become his first bestseller, with contemporary critics calling it “the premier American war novel from World War I.” It cemented his reputation as a powerful voice of the Lost Generation, and modern critics consider it among his best works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sound and the Fury

Author: William Faulkner

Description: The Sound and the Fury is one of William Faulkner’s most celebrated novels, and a landmark of American literature. Famous for its non-chronological structure and experimental style, the novel focuses on the once-prominent Compson family, descendants of planter aristocrats who have declined in both social standing and material wealth. As white landowners in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha in Mississippi, they continue to employ an African-American family to serve them. Each of the Compson parents has withdrawn from responsibility for their children, so the matriarch of the servant family, Dilsey, effectively raises their three sons and daughter. Each of the four parts of the novel is told from a different point of view, with each of the first three sections narrated by a different Compson son. In the first chapter, set on the day before Easter Sunday in 1928, the narrator is the mentally disabled thirty-three-year-old Benjy. The second chapter enters the mind of troubled Harvard student Quentin, who is finishing his year at the university. The third chapter, set on Good Friday, 1928, is narrated by the callous and mercenary brother Jason, who now works as a clerk at a farming supply store; and finally, on Easter Sunday 1928, the perspective is that of an omniscient narrator, though the main character of the section emerges as Dilsey. Central to each of the sons’ sections is their sister Caddy, whose rebellion as a young woman brings pain upon Benjy, profoundly disturbs Quentin, enrages Jason, and accelerates the family’s already precipitous decline. The book is noted for its nonlinearity, not only in the order of its four narratives but in the sequences of events recorded within the first two of them: Faulkner makes heavy use of a “stream-of-consciousness” style to relate Benjy’s and Quentin’s memories and thoughts, which jump around temporally. Non-standard italics and punctuation contribute to the effect. The influence of James Joyce upon the first two narratives was immediately identified by contemporary critics, though Edward Crickmay labeled the book “an even tougher proposition for the general novel reader than Ulysses.” Despite this compliment, its initial reception was mixed in general; it was described as inaccessible, even “unreadable.” At the same time, it was acknowledged for its innovative development of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and for its attentive depiction of the postbellum American South, in particular the decay of its formerly slavery-based aristocracy and the value system of that class. The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel, written after a lengthy struggle to have his third novel published. He later wrote that the novel arose from a single image, that of the character Caddy climbing a tree as a small child; and that the entirety of the story is present in the first narrative, with the following three having been written to clarify it. In 1945 Faulkner wrote an appendix that both explained and extended the novel, describing the fates of some of the characters; while quickly seen to introduce plot inconsistencies, it’s still often reprinted with the novel. The Compsons’ “tale full of sound and fury” both illustrates a particular historical context and explores more widely relevant themes. The novel’s title, taken from a famous speech in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, points to a central concern with time. The book depicts the march of change in the mores of the American South over the first three decades of the twentieth century, but also the possibility, not limited to that setting, of a family’s disintegration over generations, and the consequences of various distinct responses—notably despair, rage, flight, and resignation—to rotten domestic and social environments. A tragedy of idiocy, memory, and the “dusty death” of an era, The Sound and the Fury signified nothing less than a turning point in American literary history and modernism.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Seven Dials Mystery

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: The country mansion Chimneys, the setting of Christie’s earlier novel The Secret of Chimneys, has been rented out by Lord and Lady Coote, who are hosting a weekend party. One of the guests, Gerry Wade, has a habit of oversleeping, so his friends decide to play a prank on him by surrounding his bed with eight alarm clocks. Naturally, the next morning he is found murdered in his bed, with one of the alarm clocks missing—leaving only seven dials in his bedroom. Eileen “Bundle” Caterham, the daughter of the owner of Chimneys and one of the characters in The Secret of Chimneys, joins Superintendent Battle in investigating the crime. Her doggedness leads her to a scheme of grand industrial espionage—and a mysterious secret society. Unlike The Secret of Chimneys, The Seven Dials Mystery met with a middling reception, with contemporary reviewers complaining about a lack of the vivacity that made Secret so charming, an almost-unguessable solution to the mystery, and an unlikely ending to the novel. Christie wrote it in what she called her “plutocratic era,” when she favored easily and quickly written stories that could be sold for very large sums to American publishers.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Good Companions

Author: J. B. Priestley

Description: Jess Oakroyd is a middle-aged factory worker, Elizabeth Trant is the aimless daughter of a recently deceased colonel, and Inigo Jollifant is a bored schoolmaster. The three of them, unhappy with the directions of their lives, each strike out on journeys to clear their minds and do something new. After a picaresque opening in which each of these three characters engages in various adventures, they all happen to cross paths with the Dinky Doos, a “concert party”—a type of traveling musical vaudeville show—who feel like their act needs to be shaken up. They all join forces to form a new act called the Good Companions, and set out to make their fortune on the road in an era where radio and the motion picture were becoming larger and larger features of the cultural milieu. The Good Companions, J. B. Priestley’s third novel, was a hugely popular success that catapulted him to national fame. The plot is light and airy and the characters are upbeat and charming. Priestley, a Yorkshire native, writes in dialect for any character not speaking in Received Pronunciation, giving the principal characters, and the people they meet, an authentic feel as the troupe travels across the English countryside.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Fanny’s First Play

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: The Count O’Dowda, a hater of what he perceives as the modern vulgarity of England, hires a professional producer and actors to put on a play in his country estate, and then invites professional critics to attend. But unknown to him, his daughter Fanny, a student at Cambridge and a member of the Fabian Society, has written the play with the intent of morally shocking her father, and she hopes that the presence of professional critics will convince him of its artistic merit. ithin this framing, the play within the play concerns the Gilbey and Knox families. Both are highly respectable, and both of their children have secretly spent a fortnight in jail for assaulting a police officer. The families, along with a noble footman, a disreputable woman, and a French naval lieutenant, must navigate what it means to be respectable in the eyes of society, and what truly noble behavior entails. Fanny’s First Play is a satire not only of society and morals, but of the theater of the day and of specific criticisms George Bernard Shaw’s works had drawn. The characters of the theater critics are based on actual critics of the day, and Shaw’s other works are discussed dismissively by them. It was originally performed with its authorship kept secret, but attendees and critics soon recognized it as Shaw’s work. The mystery around its authorship was good publicity, and it became Shaw’s longest running and most popular work.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: A Marriage Settlement

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Paul de Manerville is the scion of a well-known and wealthy family in Bordeaux. After his father’s death, he leaves the family estate and spends several years in various positions in prominent cities in Europe. Although well-traveled, Paul is not wise to the ways of the world or of the people in it. So when he decides he wants to find someone to marry, his close friend argues strenuously against it. As with all men who think more of themselves than they should, Paul ignores his friend, and soon focuses his attentions on Natalie Evangelista, the daughter of a wealthy Spaniard and his Creole wife who settled at Bordeaux in the earlier years of the century. Her father passed away when she was a child, and she has been brought up by her mother. Everything goes well until it comes to the negotiating of the marriage contract. Natalie’s mother has spent most of the money that Natalie is due from her father’s estate, so her mother engages her lawyer to negotiate in a way that hides that fact. Paul’s lawyer is considerably older and considerably more experienced, and so the battle of wits begins. The bulk of this short novel consists of this negotiation, as well as the aftermath of it on the relationships of all three involved: Paul, Natalie, and her mother.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Middle of Things

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: Shortly after Richard Viner complains to his murder-mystery-loving aunt with whom he lives that such fiction couldn’t possibly “really represent life,” he himself finds a dead body in the lane behind his home. It turns out to be his neighbor, a man in his sixties, recently returned to England from Australia to care for the affairs of his ward, an accomplished young woman not long out of school. The police seem content to regard the crime as motivated by robbery, but Viner and his aunt, like the lawyers who get embroiled in the case, are convinced there is more to it than that. It seems clear that J. S. Fletcher took at least some inspiration for this work from the famous Tichborne case, one of the most celebrated legal mysteries of late nineteenth century England. It involved a contested identity which, if proved, would bring an enormous inheritance and position of privilege. Fletcher puts his own spin on things and constructs yet another intriguing plot line, solved only with the help of his intrepid amateur sleuths.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Uller Uprising

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: General Carlos von Schlichten is overseeing operations of the Chartered Uller Company on the colony world of Uller when a violent riot breaks out between native Ullerans and colonist Terrans. As the conflict expands to a full rebellion he must restore order to the planet while managing the complex political dynamics of the different alien factions. Published in 1952, Uller Uprising is the first novel by H. Beam Piper that establishes his Terro-Human Future History universe.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Brewster’s Millions

Author: George Barr McCutcheon

Description: Twenty-five-year old Montgomery Brewster, after being orphaned at a young age, was taken under the wing of his elderly and extremely rich grandfather. So it’s not a total surprise to Monty that after receiving the news of his grandfather’s death, he finds himself richer to the tune of a million dollars. What is surprising, however, is a letter from attorneys Grant Ripley with notification of a second and dramatically larger legacy, this time from an uncle he had completely forgotten about. Even more surprising is the condition attached: he’ll only receive this fortune if he can be absolutely penniless within the year. Brewster’s Millions was George Barr McCutcheon’s second novel, but today it’s perhaps better known as the story behind many film and stage adaptions. The story of a rich young man vying for even greater riches is perhaps more aligned with the Gilded Age than the eras that followed, but the situations Monty finds himself in retain their inherent comedy.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: A Personal Record

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: A Personal Record is the second of two memoirs by Joseph Conrad. In it he narrates a number of episodes in his life, including his first introduction to the English language, his childhood in Poland, his experiences as a sailor in Marseilles and England, and the work on his debut novel Almayer’s Folly. Originally serialized in the English Review from 1908 to 1909, the book was published under the title A Personal Record in 1912 with the addition of the “Familiar Preface.” The “Author’s Note” was added in 1919. The book was also published as Some Reminiscences.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: The National Being

Author: George William Russell

Description: George William Russell, also known by the pseudonym Æ, was a prominent Irish polymath who wrote on many topics related to Irish independence. In The National Being Russell outlines a vision of how an independent Ireland could create a unifying national spirit. This spirit would respect the rural roots of Ireland and draw heavily on ideas from the cooperative movement. Russell is very aware of the difficulties in solving the multifaceted problem of creating a nation, and he describes in detail many of the pitfalls that could occur: from a centralized representative democracy failing to respect individual rights, to a press that would rather stir resentments than properly inform the public. Russell reiterates that such a project cannot be achieved by hate, and that the only way forward towards nationhood is for the would-be nation’s citizens to be caring. To accomplish this, the economic system based on individualism and selfishness needs to be rethought. He emphasizes the need for Ireland to choose its own destiny and to not simply copy or reject outright the examples of other countries.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Georgia Douglas Johnson

Description: Georgia Douglas Johnson was one of the leading female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, who held the “S Street Salon” that brought her fellow African-American writers to her home in Washington, D.C. Her poetry collections The Heart of a Woman and An Autumn Love Cycle center nonracial, feminine themes, whereas her collection Bronze includes several poems explicitly addressing racial subjects. Along with the poems from these collections, this Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of her other published poems that are in the public domain.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Murder in the Maze

Author: J. J. Connington

Description: After twin brothers Neville and Roger Shandon are both found murdered on the same afternoon in the hedge maze on the grounds of their country estate outside London, the local county’s Chief Constable must solve the mystery of their deaths and bring the perpetrator to justice. Murder in the Maze is the first of seventeen detective novels by J. J. Connington. It was first published in Britain in 1927 and introduces his best-known detective character, Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield. The author’s academic and scientific background adds significant verisimilitude to the story.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Poetry

Author: Thomas Gray

Description: Thomas Gray was an English poet best known for his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Despite producing a relatively small body of work, Gray has had a lasting impact on English literature. This collection contains the eleven poems published by Gray in his lifetime, and over twenty more that have been published since his death. As a Cambridge professor, Gray drew from classical structures and themes for inspiration. His annotations to his published works show the depth of his knowledge of classical and contemporary literature. Building upon these foundations, Gray’s work is also strongly romantic in style. His “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” explores meditative melancholy, appreciation for the natural world, and respect for the common man. Other notable works include “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” (a playful poem inspired by a friend’s cat) and “The Progress of Poesy,” which celebrates the power of poetry. In “The Descent of Odin” and “The Fatal Sisters,” Gray captures the visceral drama of traditional Norse verse—the widely read Gray also drew from Norse and Welsh traditions, and folded them into his multi-faceted work. Gray’s reflections on life, death, and the human condition remain relevant today. His body of work is concise, approachable, and impactful, and his poetry continues to attract and inspire modern readers.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Oedipus Rex

Author: Sophocles

Description: Many years after Oedipus famously solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ascended to the throne, a curse descends upon Thebes in the form of a terrible plague. This persistent blight ravages the land: crops wither in the fields, livestock succumbs to sickness, and families lose women and children. In this dire time, Creon, Oedipus’s brother, returns from the Oracle of Delphi. He brings news of a cure: the plague will lift once the murderer of the late King Laius is identified and banished from the city. To save his people, Oedipus embarks on a quest to uncover the killer’s identity. However, as he delves deeper into his investigation, he begins to unearth shocking revelations about his own origins, and of the prophetic actions that brought the curse. Oedipus Rex was written for a festival competition, and is thought to have been first performed around 467 BC. While it didn’t win the competition, Aristotle considered it to be the play that best followed his outline for how drama should be composed. Today, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest plays—and perhaps stories—ever written.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Description: One of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley’s Lover follows the story of Lady Constance Chatterley, unhappily married to disabled World War I veteran and coal tycoon Sir Clifford Chatterley, as she takes as a lover the gamekeeper of her estate, Oliver Mellors, a working class man of the earth. Constance struggles with the guilt of her infidelity, but realizes that her marriage is over and wants to get more out of her life. Oliver, a veteran himself with some education, enjoys her company but worries about his own position in society. Like D. H. Lawrence’s earlier novels Women in Love and The Rainbow, this novel describes in detail the sexual encounters between the two lovers, doing so using language that was shocking at the time. It was subsequently banned in many countries and for years was only available through underground means. It was not until 1960 that the full, unexpurgated edition was finally able to be published in its native United Kingdom, after being the subject of a court case about freedom of speech and the idea of redeeming social or literary value trumping any notions of obscenity in works of art. The novel’s victory at trial is seen by many as the moment Britain began changing into a permissive society. As with other Lawrence novels, the novel features commentary on industrialization, the dying coal industry, and the societal class structure of England, but these themes are to this day still largely obscured by the book’s sexual content and the surrounding scandal.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Cornelli

Author: Johanna Spyri

Description: As the only child of a widowed and wealthy father, Cornelli is accustomed to having her own way. When business calls her father away one summer, he leaves her under the care of his cousin and her friend. Cornelli’s father’s assumption is that these refined ladies will instill some more elegant manners in his rambunctious daughter. But it soon all goes wrong, as Cornelli suffers stifling injustices under the new regime. Things begin to change, however, when a boy her age comes to stay in her alpine town for a period of recuperation. Johanna Spyri is best known for her children’s classic, Heidi. But she wrote many other works besides, mostly for children, and mostly set in idyllic Swiss landscapes. Cornelli shares these features, and brings also Spyri’s characteristic emotional depth as her young heroine discovers that suffering can be the path to deeper love and fulfillment.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Starvel Hollow Tragedy

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: Leaving her home, the isolated house on the Yorkshire moors called Starvel, Ruth Averill heads off to stay with a family friend. Little does she know that she will never see it again: the following evening a fire utterly destroys the building, killing her rich and reclusive uncle, along with the two servants. At first this is seen as nothing but a horrible tragedy—a tragedy that’s compounded when it’s discovered that the vast majority of Ruth’s legacy from her uncle was paper money stored in a safe that didn’t survive the fire. The safe, however, was reputed for being fireproof, and soon an errant £20 note brings Inspector French onto the scene. This, the third in the Inspector French series, was inspired by a real blaze that occurred near where Freeman Wills Crofts was living; but the layered drama that unfolds after, and Inspector French’s determination to find the next piece of evidence that will uncover the whole mystery, is invention in Crofts’ classic style—but with a little help from his wife.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: A Woman of Thirty

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: A Woman of Thirty is unusual in that the protagonist is thirty years of age in just one of the six vignettes that make up the novel. As the novel opens, Julie is a young girl in her late teenage years. She and her father are going to see Napoleon and his army as they embark on the campaign that ended with his defeat at Leipzig. Julie is in love with a colonel, which is an unpleasant surprise to her father. He warns her of the man’s many weaknesses and tells her she’s not ready for married life—and definitely not married life with him. Like most young women of that age, she doesn’t listen, and quickly finds herself in a marriage with a man who’s not what she imagined. The remaining five vignettes drop in on Julie at various points in her life, showing how she’s coping with the realities of her situation: with her husband, her children, and the various others who enter their lives. The story of Julie d’Aiglemont was a longer project for Balzac than most of the other stories of the Human Comedy: it was written across a span of sixteen years.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Quicksand

Author: Nella Larsen

Description: Quicksand, Larsen’s debut novel, opens with Helga Crane, a biracial woman, struggling to fit in at Naxos, a fictional Negro school where she works as a teacher. Dissatisfied, Helga embarks on a journey to find herself, moving through Harlem and Copenhagen in search of a place where she belongs. The novel explores themes of identity and race through the struggles of the mixed-race protagonist. The novel was published in 1928 during the heart of the Harlem renaissance. Larsen herself was of mixed Danish and African American heritage, and the character and struggles of Helga Crane were heavily influenced by Larsen’s own life. Today, the novel continues to be read as a prototypical reflection on what it means to be a part of a community, especially in relation to race, identity, and belonging.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mirror of the Sea

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: The Mirror of the Sea is the first of two autobiographical memoirs by Joseph Conrad. Prior to his career as a writer, Conrad spent two decades as a sailor, working in the French and British merchant marine from 1874 to 1894. Published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of essays on Conrad’s relationship with the sea, sailing, and ships. The book’s fifteen essays explore a wide range of maritime topics: from a seafarer’s perspective on departure and landfall, to the nature of the East and West Winds, and the symbolism of the anchor. These thematic reflections are mixed with personal anecdotes and autobiographical chapters in which Conrad reflects on his own nautical adventures.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Secret of Chimneys

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: Anthony Cade, a quick-witted rogue spending some time working as a tour guide in Zimbabwe, meets a friend who hands him a manuscript with instructions to deliver it to its publishers in London. Cade agrees, and quickly discovers that the manuscript is desperately sought after by high-level dignitaries—and revolutionaries—of the country of Herzoslovakia. As he does his best to complete his task in bustling London, he soon finds himself a guest of one Lord Caterham for a weekend party at his country estate, Chimneys. Chimneys, legendary for its long history of esteemed guests ranging from politicians to business magnates to royalty, is an ideal location for a murder mystery: it’s palatial, filled with secret rooms, and surrounded by rolling country. Sure enough, without delay one of the guests is murdered, kicking off a series of fast-paced intrigues as local and international police, led by Superintendent Battle, try to snag the killer—all while a famed French jewel thief seems to be lurking among them. The Secret of Chimneys was a well-received entry in Agatha Christie’s canon, and is often considered among her best early thrillers. Events unfold quickly, the plot is thick with misdirection and secret identities, and the ending is unexpected while simultaneously putting a neat bow on the futures of the witty and charming main characters. This is the novel in which Superintendent Battle, a character Christie returns to often, is introduced.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Viaduct Murder

Author: Ronald A. Knox

Description: As the fog and rain clear one Tuesday afternoon in October, four members of a village golf club decide to fit in a match before evening sets in. One of them slices his drive off the third tee. Following his ball to the foot of the neighboring railway viaduct, he stumbles upon a body. The police soon arrive, but they seem to ignore some odd circumstances noticed by the friends, and the four decide to investigate themselves. Ronald A. Knox was something of a polymath, who as a boy was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes. He was so interested in mysteries that he wrote and promulgated the “Ten Commandments” for detective fiction; in The Viaduct Murder, the first of his own whodunits, he puts these principles into practice. Knox was careful to lay the facts before his readers in good faith. But as one of the golfers comments early in this mystery, “Everything tells a story, if you are careful not to theorize beyond your data.” The difficulty in following this maxim leads to a challenging puzzle that holds the reader till the very end.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Man of Destiny

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: After the Battle of Lodi, General Napoleon is sitting in an inn and eating his dinner when a Lieutenant arrives to tell him that some of his dispatches have been stolen. Napoleon determines that a strange lady also staying in the inn has them in her possession, and thus begins a battle of wits for the papers—and over Napoleon’s philosophy. The Man of Destiny was written and first performed in 1897, and has been adapted for radio and television. It was first published in the collection Plays Pleasant.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Maid of Sker

Author: R. D. Blackmore

Description: Having been invalided out of the British navy, Davy Llewellyn plies his trade as a fisherman on the south coast of Wales. Investigating the wreck of a boat during a wild storm, he discovers an infant girl—the eponymous “maid of Sker”—whom he adopts. Her beauty and wit win a place in his heart that his own orphaned granddaughter can’t compete with. Llewellyn’s maritime activities also bring him to the Devonshire coast opposite his home, where he becomes embroiled with a corrupt parson. Years pass, during which Davy finds himself once again enlisted into the navy and involved in many adventures, some of which edge him closer to finding out the truth of the maid of Sker’s identity—but it’s almost twenty years before her full story is finally revealed. R. D. Blackmore had written The Maid of Sker years before his most successful novel, Lorna Doone, and it was his personal favorite. After the success of Lorna Doone left the public wanting more of his fiction, he was able to re-draft The Maid of Sker for serialization. It shares much with Lorna Doone: a historical setting, first-person narration from a key protagonist, and evocative local environments. Later readers have tended not to share Blackmore’s preference for The Maid of Sker; still, for all that Davy Llewellyn is something of a rogue and a less reliable, or even less likable, narrator than John Ridd, his storytelling has its own humor, charm, drama, and memorable moments.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Story of Utopias

Author: Lewis Mumford

Description: The concept of an ideal society has long existed in literature. In The Story of Utopias Lewis Mumford explains how imaginative utopias can be used either as an escape from daily life, or as the beginning of an actionable path to a better society. He begins by tracing the historical evolution of the concept of utopia, from Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, through to the nineteenth and early twentieth century utopias of William Morris and H. G. Wells. Along the way Mumford discusses how these ideal societies were influenced by the not-so-perfect societies the authors lived in, as well as the impact they had on public thought and sentiment. Mumford discusses how the society of his time, especially the consumer paradise of the country manors and their opposites, the industrial Coketowns, was made possible by a particular worldview that prioritizes consumers over producers. This worldview holds that a utopia can be achieved solely through technical, laborsaving improvements. Even revolutionary countermovements came to accept this premise, with the corollary that salvation lies in a better distribution of material goods. Furthermore, Mumford asserts that science has become a tool for mass production, and art a tool for expressing personal feelings without relation to society as whole. He concludes that in order to create a truly better society it’s essential to be able to dream and invent a more appealing version of utopia that can reconcile both people’s material and spiritual needs.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: You Never Can Tell

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: The Clandons—twins Dolly and Phil, older sister Gloria, and their mother—return from Madeira to England and make the acquaintance of Valentine, a penniless dentist who immediately falls in love with Gloria. When they invite him to lunch, they discover that his landlord is the rich husband who Mrs. Clandon fled from years ago. hat follows is a comedy of errors and a satire of both Victorian morality and modern values. Smoothing over these issues is an old waiter, who dispenses wisdom such as “you never can tell.” You Never Can Tell was written in 1897 and premiered in 1899 at the Royalty Theatre in London, after Shaw’s first commercial success but still early in his career. It was published in the collection Plays Pleasant.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Hjalmar Söderberg

Description: Hjalmar Söderberg was a Swedish author, working from the end of the nineteenth century up until the 1930s. While most famous now for his novel Doctor Glas—a favorite of Margaret Atwood’s—he also wrote other books, plays, and several collections of short stories. His stories have several common themes: human desire and self-deception, the inability for people to ever truly understand each other, and bittersweet reminiscences of the past. A Stockholm resident for most of his life, his work draws heavy inspiration from the locale and its social structures. This collection of short fiction was primarily translated by Charles Wharton Stork, who was a major promoter of Swedish literature in the interwar period.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: El Filibusterismo

Author: José Rizal

Description: El Filibusterismo is the sequel to Noli Me Tangere, and picks up thirteen years after Crisóstomo Ibarra disappeared, assumed dead after fleeing from the Civil Guard. Returning to the Philippines in disguise, he involves himself in the lives of those he once knew. Ibarra works with the ruling class to make life miserable for the native population, hoping to frustrate them enough to awaken them and cause them to rise up against their oppressors. This proves difficult, as even the slightest talk of liberalism or reform is considered “filibusterism,” and filibusters risk jail, deportation, or worse. The story follows the lives of several characters at all levels of society. Some of the most vulnerable are robbed by corrupt officials and cannot afford legal fees, or find a patron to help to get back what is theirs. Students push back against the stultifying school environment that bars them from any practical learning. When their plans for a new school are hampered, they publish protests, and this lands many of them in jail. Meanwhile, Ibarra hopes to unite with his lost love, and develops plans to foment a revolt against the government. This novel takes a dark turn from the hopeful Noli Me Tangere, where Rizal showed optimism that modest reform could bring about change. Now the character of Ibarra seems to personify Rizal himself as he comes to the conclusion that real change will only come by violent means. While Rizal himself didn’t lead any revolutionary activity, his writings had such an effect that he was exiled and finally executed by the government. Many consider his writings, including El Filibusterismo, to have indirectly inspired the Philippine Revolution.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Béatrix

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: The du Guénics are one of the oldest families in Brittany, and Calyste is the twenty-one year old only son of the patriarch. A long-time family friend is determined to marry off one of her nieces to Calyste, but he’s in love with a woman of forty. Although Camille is flattered by the attentions of a man half her age, she recognizes the futility of his feelings. She decides that she’ll introduce him to her friend Béatrix, a twenty-eight year old woman of the world, with far-reaching implications for everyone involved. Balzac’s vivid characterizations provide the compelling backdrop to the story of Calyste’s introduction to love. Béatrix, as originally written and published, contained only the first two parts of the present novel; Balzac didn’t add the third until several years later.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69

Author: Edward Whymper

Description: In Scrambles Amongst the Alps, English author, illustrator, and mountaineer Edward Whymper recounts his mountaineering adventures in the Alps, culminating in the historic first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. This expedition, and its tragic ending, marked the beginning of the silver age of alpinism, and Whymper’s book has since become a classic in early mountaineering literature. First published in 1871, the book presents an account of Whymper’s travels, combining the stories of his ascents with descriptions of French, Italian, and Swiss mountaineering culture. The book is illustrated with numerous engravings based on drawings made by the author during his expeditions. This ebook is based on the fifth edition, printed in 1900, which closely follows the first edition but includes several small corrections and updates from the author, adds additional engravings, and extends the Appendix with a history of later ascents of the Matterhorn.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: These Old Shades

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: Justin “Satanas” Alastair, the reclusive Duke of Avon, is known for his ruthless reputation and dark past. One night, while in Paris, the Duke encounters a mistreated street urchin named Léon Bonnard. Taking pity on the boy, the Duke purchases him and makes him a page, unaware that Léon is actually a young woman named Léonie, the daughter of the Comte de Saint-Vire who had once wronged him. Alastair plans to use his new personal servant to get his revenge on an old enemy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Masqueraders

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: In 18th-century London, two siblings, Prudence and Robin Merriot, are forced to go into hiding after narrowly escaping a dangerous political situation. Prudence takes on the persona of a charming young man named Peter, while her brother Robin poses as a fashionable woman named Kate. As they navigate London society, they become entangled in misunderstandings and romantic relationships. Eventually the Merriot siblings’ true identities become difficult to keep concealed—especially as they both fall in love with people unaware of their masquerade.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Leviathan

Author: Thomas Hobbes

Description: Leviathan is a foundational text in political philosophy that explores the structure of society and legitimate government. Hobbes uses the metaphor of the Leviathan, a sea creature from biblical lore, to represent the powerful state that arises from the collective agreement of individuals. He argues that in a state of nature, humans are driven by self-interest and are in constant conflict, leading to a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this chaos, individuals come together to form a social contract, agreeing to cede certain freedoms to a sovereign authority in exchange for security and order. Hobbes’s political theory is grounded in a materialist view of human nature, which posits that humans are motivated primarily by fear and self-preservation. He emphasizes the importance of a strong, centralized authority—whether a monarch or an assembly—to maintain peace and prevent the descent into anarchy. This sovereign power must be absolute to effectively control the inherently aggressive tendencies of human beings. The book challenges the divine right of kings and provides a secular justification for political authority, arguing that the legitimacy of the state derives from its ability to provide security rather than divine sanction. Throughout, Hobbes engages with various philosophical and theological ideas, addressing the nature of human beings, morality, and the role of religion in society. He argues that civil laws should be based on social contracts rather than religious dictates, advocating for a separation between church and state. Hobbes’s work laid the groundwork for later political theories, influencing thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau. Its enduring relevance in discussions about governance, individual rights, and the balance between liberty and security continues to resonate in contemporary political discourse.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: E. M. Forster was a British author primarily writing in the first half of the twentieth century. A perennial Nobel Prize in Literature nominee, he is best remembered for his novels, which include A Room With a View and A Passage to India. He turned his hand to most forms of writing, producing plays, film scripts, travelogues, criticism, essays, and, collected here, well-regarded short stories. Forster often used the mores of Edwardian society to lightly satirize the characters in his work, but he rarely missed an opportunity to take them into the realm of fantasy. In “Albergo Empedocle” an otherwise unremarkable fiancé starts believing in past lives after a visit to an ancient Greek temple; in “The Celestial Omnibus” a head of a Literary Society comes into unexpected contact with the Wagnerian characters he knows so well from the page. As well as writing satire and fantasy, Forster also contributed to early speculative fiction with his short story “The Machine Stops;” the setting of a room with video calling and buttons that produce literature and music seems worryingly prescient. This collection includes all of Forster’s short fiction that is in the U.S. public domain, ordered by date of its first publication.

Subjects: fantasy, science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism

Author: Bertrand Russell

Description: In 1920, British philosopher Bertrand Russell traveled to Russia with the British Labor Delegation to assess the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the growth of the inchoate socialist republic. Wracked by civil war and an oppressive trade blockade, Russia has descended into starvation, industrial failure, and civil unrest. In response, the Bolsheviks have resorted to austere methods to maintain social order and suppress perceived counterrevolutionary activity. Russell had previously described his thoughts on socialism in Roads to Freedom and expressed concern that Marxism would give too much power to the state. In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Russell details his trip through Petrograd, Moscow, and the Russian countryside, and his interactions with Lenin and other prominent Soviet leaders. The second half of the book describes Russell’s critiques of Bolshevik fanaticism and the conditions he believes are necessary for the success of communism. An alternative account of the British Labor Delegation from the Russian perspective can be found in Alexander Berkman’s The Bolshevik Myth.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Sticks and Stones

Author: Lewis Mumford

Description: In his book Sticks and Stones, the historian Lewis Mumford discusses how American society has evolved alongside its architecture. Beginning with the first settlements in New England through to the early twentieth century, Mumford traces the development of American life through its ever-changing buildings and cities. From the simplicity of the early villages, to the classical Palladian style of the antebellum southern plantations, to the imperial buildings of Washington D.C., through to the uniformity of the mechanical age, Mumford contends that each style of architecture guides the development of society and its economy in a certain direction. In particular, the architecture of a society embodies specific values and encourages certain kinds of relationships between people. Mumford claims that mass-produced, mechanical architecture has led to an increasingly uniform urban society that has lost touch with nature and tends to minimize genuine human contact. The most visible effect of this are the sprawling suburbs and commuter lifestyle that were becoming increasingly larger and more common in the early twentieth century. Mumford concludes by imploring the need for a new, human-centered kind of architectural framework, including urban design, that could encourage a better, healthier, society.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

Description: ritten in the midst of the French Revolution and the British pamphlet war surrounding it, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as an answer to a report by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to whom her essay is dedicated. Talleyrand had reported to the French National Assembly on the topic of public education, and noted that women needed only enough education to suit them for the “paternal home.” ollstonecraft objected to this recommendation and, in this book, argues for the equal treatment of women in society, while still highlighting the differences between the sexes. Her argument touches on many topics, focusing extensively on the needs of educating women the same as men. She argues against either sex viewing women as mere ornamentation, and advocates for the substantive contributions educated women could make to society. Though initially well-received, Wollstonecraft’s essay suffered in reputation after her husband, William Godwin, published a biography of her after her death. His details of her private life conflicted with the orthodoxy of the time, and cast a pall on her writing for nearly a century. Still, her work is viewed as having been influential on the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. that began in the mid-19th century, and as a precursor to modern feminist philosophy.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Là-Bas

Author: J.-K. Huysmans

Description: The Parisian author Durtal is hard at work on his biography of the French knight and notorious child-murderer Gilles de Rais, but the question of how a confidant of Joan of Arc became such a figure of depravity is difficult to answer. Turning to his friend and confidant Des Hermies, he gradually discovers that the Satanism of de Rais’ time is not only still active in the Paris of the 1890s, but that there are practitioners in his social circle. J.-K. Huysmans–already famous from the success of Against the Grain–wrote Là-Bas (alternatively translated as Down There) at a time when he was struggling with his journey back to Catholicism, and the character of Durtal is a fairly unsubtle autobiographical portrait. Each character represents an allegorical faction in the religious debates of the time, and their conversations and interactions with Durtal help him navigate his own spiritual truth. The novel’s descriptions of both Satanic ceremonies and de Rais’ sexual violence against children shocked fin de siècle France; if a modern reader with a taste for horror is inured to the first, the second retains its nauseating power. This Standard Ebooks edition is Keene Wallace’s 1924 translation from Huysmans’ original French, plus a restored scene of a sexual nature that had been excised from some other editions.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: History of the Peloponnesian War

Author: Thucydides

Description: History of the Peloponnesian War covers the events of the first twenty years of the late fifth-century BC war between two alliances led by Sparta and Athens. Thucydides, an Athenian general in the war and thus a first-hand witness to many of its events, begins with his views on what led to the war, with the remainder of the book devoted to the events of the war itself. His history covers the first twenty of the twenty-seven years of the conflict, cutting off almost immediately after the devastating Athenian defeat at Syracuse. Perhaps the most famous aspect of his history are the numerous speeches it contains. Thucydides acknowledges that they were often reconstructed from what he thought the occasion demanded, while trying to stick as closely as possible to what was actually said. Many of the speeches are the back and forth between two parties as they argue their respective cases before an administrative body, and they offer a fascinating view of different perspectives of the same set of events. Although Thucydides’ history came soon after Herodotus’, it differs in significant ways. Thucydides makes no mention of the role of gods in any of the events he reports, and his history is chronological, with a sentence concluding the end of each campaign year. He also states that he sifted through differing versions of events to discern what actually happened, in an attempt to be unbiased in what he presented. He also focused solely on the events of the war, rather than also delve into the surrounding culture. For these reasons, he has been called “the father of scientific history.”

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Evelina

Author: Fanny Burney

Description: Evelina is an epistolary novel that follows the titular Evelina Anville as she navigates the challenging (and sometimes absurd) nuances of 18th-century English society. The novel begins as Evelina is invited to London by the Mirvan family, marking her first true exposure to English high society. She soon encounters a series of misunderstandings, social embarrassments, and would-be suitors. Evelina is naive but kind-hearted, and she finds that both goodness and meanness can be found in all stations of society in equal measure. The novel captures the manners and customs of Georgian England, especially in regard to class distinctions and gender roles. Evelina’s position as a young woman born into nobility, but not acknowledged by her father, finds herself navigating challenging social dynamics throughout the novel, and meets with those who judge a person’s worth based on their birth. Further, Evelina faces the challenges inherent to a young unattached woman as she attempts to assert her agency while maintaining her dignity. Evelina is an early example of the English romantic novel, and a fine example of social satire. When it was published in 1778, females were not encouraged to be writers, and Burney was forced to publish anonymously. Nevertheless, her work influenced writers like Jane Austen, who referred to Burney’s works in her novels and private letters, and continues to provide an insightful and often humorous lens through which to view the late 18th-century English aristocracy.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Frank Belknap Long

Description: Frank Belknap Long started his literary career as a teenager in the 1920s by drawing on his deep appreciation for Edgar Allan Poe; his initial work brought him into the sphere of H. P. Lovecraft, who became a friend and strong influence—so strong, that Long’s short story “The Hounds of Tindalos” was the first story not by Lovecraft’s to be part of the Cthulhu Mythos. By the end of the 1930s Long had turned his hand to science fiction, and this became his primary genre for most of the rest of his long career as a regular in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Comet, Planet Stories, and Fantastic Universe. While many of his contemporaries moved towards “harder” science fiction, Long’s work focuses on human psychology, often with a streak of the horror of his earlier writing coming through in the loneliness and alien nature of the space travel and worlds featured in his stories. The short stories in this collection are those currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication.

Subjects: horror, science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Unicorn from the Stars

Author: Lady Gregory

Description: In a coachbuilder’s workshop in rural Ireland, a young man awakens from a trance. His uncle hopes he will finish the gilded coach he was building for the English authorities in Dublin Castle, but his visions lead him and the new followers he finds down a different path. Most of Yeats’ plays were written as collaborations with his friend and patron, Isabella Augusta. Just how many of the plays attributed to Yeats were actually written by Gregory is still debated. Yeats titled the collection in which The Unicorn from the Stars appears “Plays in Prose and Verse, written for an Irish theatre, and generally with the help of a friend.” In the preface, he credits Gregory’s help on nearly all his plays, and describes The Unicorn from the Stars as, “but for fable and chief character … wholly her work.” Still, though he admits only a few of his plays are “wholly mine,” only The Unicorn from the Stars, their last collaboration, was ever published with Gregory named as a co-author.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Nella Larsen

Description: During her brief career as a writer, Nella Larsen published two novels and three short stories. The most famous of her short works, the short story “Sanctuary” and the novella “Passing,” focus on the perspectives of African-American and mixed-race people in the United States, and handle themes of solidarity and prejudice based on both race and class. Though Larsen’s literary reputation rests mainly upon her treatment of these issues, her other stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom,” concern infidelity and marriage. Larsen was born in Chicago to a mother and father who had immigrated to the United States from Denmark and the Danish West Indies respectively. She published her first stories in the 1920s, when she was living with her husband in Harlem and working as a librarian. During these years she became active in the literary community of the Harlem Renaissance, but her career was cut short after some accused her of plagiarizing “Sanctuary.” This alienated publishers despite Larsen’s denying any wrongdoing in print. Her short fiction draws on her experiences of not belonging and of the African-American middle class into which she had married. It is noted for the acuity of its psychological insight, its use of suspense and plot twists, and the simplicity and elegance of its prose. Larsen’s novella “Passing” concerns the possibility of moving between the highly race-conscious social groups of 1920s New York, and explicitly mocks the idea that ancestry is straightforwardly deducible from behavior. The concept of “passing” had already been featured in American fiction for several decades before, but “Passing” presented the issue in a new way, alongside questions of social class and morality. The novella was positively received by critics, including W. E. B. Du Bois, and was instrumental in Larsen’s receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930. “Sanctuary” is set along a desolate strip of the Southern coast. A desperate man named Jim Hammer seeks refuge at Annie Poole’s isolated cottage. When Jim reveals he’s shot a man—possibly white—Annie reluctantly agrees to hide him, not from kindness but because of her son Obadiah’s inexplicable fondness for this man she considers “no ’count trash.”

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Moribund Society and Anarchy

Author: Jean Grave

Description: A systemic critique of bourgeois society, Moribund Society and Anarchy is a comprehensive introduction to anarchist theory written by the French anarchist Jean Grave. Laying out a case for anarchist communism against authoritarian forms of human organization, Grave investigates foundational institutions of capitalist society such as property, family, and authority, before going on to critique the concept of a “country” and associated practices of militarism, colonization, and racial hierarchy. It unapologetically advocates for a revolutionary form of anarchism and lays out a refutation of arguments in favor of evolutionary and reformist efforts to ameliorate social ills. The book was widely circulated at the time of its original publication, ultimately leading to Grave’s imprisonment under the lois scélérates (“villainous laws”) curtailing free speech in the French Third Republic. This edition of Moribund Society and Anarchy was translated in 1899 by Voltairine de Cleyre, a notable American anarchist author and theorist in her own right.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Noli Me Tangere

Author: José Rizal

Description: Noli Me Tangere takes place towards the end of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. It deals with the corruption that had worked its way into the church and governing authorities over the centuries. The title, Latin for “touch me not,” is a reference to the passage in the Gospel of John, where the resurrected Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him. It also refers to types of cancer sores that are very painful and irritated by touch, serving as a metaphor for the state of Philippine society that Rizal perceived. Crisóstomo Ibarra returns from Europe after years of study, shortly after the death of his father. He plans to marry his childhood sweetheart, María Clara, and to open a school in his hometown. Crisóstomo is a hopeful idealist, believing that the Filipinos can improve their situation if given a proper education. But a friend warns him that he will make enemies by undertaking such a project—and in fact, he already has enemies. Soon past secrets emerge, and Crisóstomo must deal with unnamed forces working against him. Together with its sequel, El Filibusterismo, Noli Me Tangere indirectly influenced Philippine revolutionary sentiment to such an extent that Rizal was exiled and subsequently executed by the Spanish government. Both novels were long banned in the Philippines, but today are required reading for students, with Rizal considered a national hero.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Lord Tarzan makes it his job to know who comes and goes in his jungle; James Blake and Wilbur Stimbol’s safari and Ibn Jad’s troupe are no exception. Blake and Stimbol, on safari for photographs, are on the verge of parting ways after vehement disagreement, while Ibn Jad’s people are searching for the fabled city of Nimmir, yearning for its riches. Allowing passage to some and not to others, Tarzan gains new enemies and new friends as the different parties seek their treasures among the wilds of his jungle—a beautiful jungle, but one fraught with danger from men, beasts, and the elements. Tensions, greed, and passions run high as those welcome and unwelcome trod upon Tarzan’s land, desperate to survive and find the treasures they seek. Is there such a city filled with gold, jewels, and the most beautiful woman on earth, or have these explorers just walked into a death trap with the lord of the jungle as the mastermind? This book marks a significant transition from previous novels in the series. Whereas earlier books interwove personal affairs and continuity, from this book on, Tarzan is presented as an adventurer with no significant ties. Although previous characters still put in minor appearances, the books shift from Tarzan’s active role in his family to him supporting a secondary cast of characters, and from his own personal affairs to contending with new tribes and civilizations.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Mother

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Description: In The Mother, the story begins in a rural Chinese farming community, where a mother juggles her labor on the land with caring for her children. The setting is simple yet demanding, reflecting themes of survival, motherhood, and family duty. Her deep connection to the land is both nurturing and burdensome, hinting at underlying tensions. The quiet struggles within this family’s daily life raise questions about what challenges might unfold as the story progresses. The Mother, published just two years after Pearl S. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth, is similarly set in rural China, but focuses instead on the life of a mother and her family. While The Mother was not as popular as The Good Earth, it was recognized for its simple and straightforward story.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mauprat

Author: George Sand

Description: Bernard Mauprat is the young scion of the infamous Mauprat family, famous for its violence and cruelty. After the death of his mother, he goes to live in his grandfather’s estate of Roche-Mauprat, and is initiated into the brutal family life by his close relations. After losing his uncles in a confrontation, the young Mauprat is taken under the wings of his great-uncle and female cousin, who dedicate themselves to rescuing him from the abyss of vice and sin that he was raised in. Set just before the French Revolution, the novel focuses on themes of inequality, female agency, and the redeeming power of education.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Agamemnon

Author: Aeschylus

Description: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon opens with a watchman anxiously awaiting King Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan War. As Agamemnon arrives home in triumph, he is greeted by his wife, Clytemnestra, who feigns loyalty but harbors a deadly secret: she has plotted his murder in revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, which Agamemnon made to secure favorable winds for the Greek fleet. Clytemnestra’s manipulation and cunning are revealed as the plot unfolds, and the play ends with the ominous foreshadowing of further retribution, setting the stage for the tragedies to come in the rest of the Oresteia.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Stainless Steel Rat

Author: Harry Harrison

Description: James “Slippery Jim” diGriz is a criminal in a galaxy where crime has almost been eradicated. In his own words, he’s a rat in the wainscoting of society, and now that society is all ferroconcrete and stainless steel only a stainless steel rat can find the gaps. Despite a nose for the hustle and a healthily paranoid survival instinct, Jim’s luck has to run out at some point—and when it does, it isn’t a prison cell he’s offered, but a job with the Special Corps. The Stainless Steel Rat—a fix-up novel based on two earlier short stories for Astounding magazine—was the first in a long series of books by Harry Harrison to star the anti-hero. It is never less than a breathless ride, with twists and turns at every corner. As well as the twelve novels and additional short stories, the Stainless Steel Rat has appeared in numerous comics and games over the years, and has become Harrison’s most enduring character.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Scarlet Sister Mary

Author: Julia Peterkin

Description: Set in the post-Civil War South on Blue Brook Plantation, Scarlet Sister Mary tells the story of Mary, a fifteen-year-old orphan girl in a close-knit Gullah community. As she prepares to marry the charismatic but unreliable July, Mary finds herself torn between tradition and her own desires. Love, community, and superstition intertwine as Mary learns who and what truly matter to her. Scarlet Sister Mary, written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, is notable for its depiction of African-American life, particularly the Gullah people; and especially so because it was written by a white author, something very unusual for the era. It won Julia Peterkin the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1929. The Pulitzer was not without controversy. The jury chair had spoken publicly of another candidate, Victim and Victor by John Rathbone Oliver, as his favorite for the prize, which was reported in Publishers’ Weekly as being the actual announcement of the winner. Shortly afterward, The New York Times published an article by the head of the Advisory Board refuting Publishers’ Weekly. Ultimately, the Advisory Board chose Scarlet Sister Mary as the winner and, subsequently, the jury chair resigned. Despite this, the novel remains a noteworthy part of the early 20th-century conversation on race and Southern literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Monster

Author: Edgar Saltus

Description: On the very day Leilah Ogsten marries Gulian Verplank, her world is shattered by a letter from her father. Mere hours after their wedding, she vanishes without a trace. Desperate to find her, Gulian embarks on a frantic journey across the globe—in the wrong direction. When he finally discovers her whereabouts, he’s shocked to learn she’s engaged to a Polish count. Determined to uncover the truth, Gulian rushes to Paris, only to find the marriage has already taken place. The Monster offers all the signature elements of an Edgar Saltus novel: high society, decadence, and a deeply pessimistic view of humanity, but this time with a touch of eastern mysticism.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Buddenbrooks

Author: Thomas Mann

Description: The Buddenbrooks have worked hard to make their name, and the eponymous firm of Johann Buddenbrook is widely known for its trading prowess. But despite trappings like an imposing town house on Meng Street, under the surface the cracks are showing: Johann’s first son isn’t living up to the status the family desires, and there are more problems to come. Buddenbrooks is a biographical novel spanning over forty years and four generations, and charts the dwindling fortunes of the Buddenbrooks through their lives in an unnamed north German town, albeit one heavily modeled on Thomas Mann’s hometown of Lübeck. It was Mann’s first novel and was published when he was just twenty-six, following a period of heavy research into the intricacies of the Lübecker bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth-century. The critical reception was exceptionally positive, eventually leading to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann which, unusually, specifically referenced Buddenbrooks as the principal reason for the award.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Democracy and Social Ethics

Author: Jane Addams

Description: In Democracy and Social Ethics, Jane Addams examines the rapid social and economic transformations and the need to reevaluate traditional ethical frameworks. She proposes that individualistic notions of morality—while important on a personal level—prove insufficient in addressing complex social problems created by industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration. She suggests that these large-scale shifts give rise to a new set of ethical challenges, demanding a transition from a focus on individual virtue to a broader understanding of social responsibility. Addams contends that achieving meaningful progress in areas like poverty, inequality, and social justice requires recognizing the profound influence of social structures and economic systems on individual lives. Rather than attributing hardship solely to personal failings, she calls for a more empathetic approach, which acknowledges the factors that limit opportunity and perpetuate disadvantage. Addams envisions social ethics grounded in democratic ideals, which views individual well-being as inseparable from the well-being of the community as a whole.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Magic City

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Young Philip Haldane has been living a happy life with his beloved older sister Helen, their parents having died some years previously. But when his sister meets a childhood sweetheart—now a widower—and marries him, Philip is plunged into anger and bitter resentment. He extends this resentment to Lucy, the daughter of Helen’s new husband. Left alone while his sister goes on her honeymoon, he builds a fantastical city out of wooden blocks and household items. Shortly afterwards, he finds himself inside his imaginary city, and is tasked with carrying out a series of heroic deeds. The Magic City was published in 1910. Like Nesbit’s other children’s books, it was first serialized in The Strand magazine.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: The Social Contract

Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Description: In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents a political philosophy based on the principle that legitimate authority originates from the consent of the people. Individuals willingly surrender their rights in order to create a collective sovereign, which embodies the general will of the people. Rousseau examines different forms of government, addresses the challenges of ensuring that a government executes the general will of the people, and addresses the need for safeguards against the abuse of power. He demonstrates that active citizenship and a strong social compact are crucial for maintaining a just and free society.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Beyond Thirty

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Lieutenant Jefferson Turck is a naval officer from Pan-America, the unified supercontinent and dominant world power of the 22nd Century. Though he is only twenty-one, he is greatly respected by the crew of the aero-submarine Coldwater. Coming from a long line of soldiers and sailors, Turck longs for adventure. But in the year 2137, such exploration outside of the Pan-American regions is forbidden. Merely crossing beyond a line on a map is considered treason punishable by death. The globe between 30° W. and 175° W. is a mystery except for tall tales and ancient histories. hen equipment failures befall the Coldwater the ship veers dangerously close to the “dead line.” Violent storms worsen the situation, and tensions rise as some sailors fear danger on the other side or punishment from their own government. In the midst of it all, Turck feels only a sense of excitement—what lies beyond thirty? The ship’s captain and a small complement of sailors set out to find help anywhere they can, and end up in a land that is far from what they expected.

Subjects: adventure, fantasy, science fiction

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Title: The House of the Seven Gables

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Description: Hepzibah Pyncheon is a dignified but destitute woman residing in the House of the Seven Gables—a manor with a dark history, and her ancestral home. She lives with her brother Clifford, who has completed a thirty-year sentence for murder, and a lodger named Holgrave, who is writing a book about the history of her family. Long ago, Matthew Maule owned the land that the titular house was later built on; but the scheming Colonel Pyncheon, founder of the Pyncheon family, wrongfully seized the land from him, and Maule was accused of witchcraft and condemned to death. Before his sentence was executed, Maule put a curse on the family—and the curse has followed them all the way to Hepzibah, now an older spinster inhabiting the gloomy, moldering house and desperate to make ends meet. But Hepzibah’s prospects brighten considerably when a distant relative, a bright young girl named Phoebe, arrives to stay for a while, helping her set up and run a small shop in a side room of the manor. As the two work to launch their business in the ill-omened house while caring for the withdrawn Clifford, a strange mystery unravels. Hawthorne based his depiction of the House of the Seven Gables on a real house, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, which was owned by one of his cousins. The Pyncheon family, too, is a real family, ancestors of the novelist Thomas Pynchon—though Hawthorne was unaware of this when he wrote the novel, and was unpleasantly surprised when, on the novel’s success, some of them came out of the woodwork to claim a connection. The novel was well-received on publication, earning praise from contemporaries like Longfellow and Melville. It has since become a classic of American literature, often taught in schools alongside The Scarlet Letter.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Pickwick Papers

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: In The Pickwick Papers, the wealthy and amiable Mr. Pickwick and his friends—calling themselves the “Pickwick Club”—wander around England out of curiosity and an interest in human nature. On the way, they have many loosely related comic adventures. Mr. Pickwick eventually employs a cockney man-servant, Sam Weller, whose fractured language and forthright attitude adds a great deal of amusement. Late in the book, a continuing story relates to a prosecution of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise by his erstwhile landlady. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, to give it its original title, was Dickens’ first novel. He had previously achieved a degree of popularity with his short pieces of journalism published in newspapers and magazines. Published as a serial by Chapman and Hall in 1836, the early chapters of The Pickwick Papers weren’t initially a success; but when the character of Sam Weller was introduced, the series rapidly took off and became a publishing sensation. Its success launched Dickens’ phenomenally successful writing career. The critic John Sutherland called it “the most important single novel of the Victorian era.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Zuni Folktales

Author: Frank Hamilton Cushing

Description: Zuni Folktales is a collection of traditional stories from the Zuni, a Native American people who live in the American southwest, mainly in the modern states of New Mexico and Arizona. These stories are a part of larger group of oral tradition. As such, there are no “definitive” versions of these tales, and the ones in this book are simply one possible version of the stories. Like traditional stories from other cultures, the tales from this collection often seek to teach something to the listener: how to behave, a moral lesson, or an explanation of natural phenomena. Frank Hamilton Cushing was an anthropologist who went on an expedition to collection data and artifacts from Native American cultures, which led him to do significant work on the Zuni people. The tales that he collected in this volume were told to him by Zuni natives.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: Rachel Ray

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Both Rachel Ray’s mother and elder sister are widows. They live a quiet life in their rural village, under the shadow of the nearby town of Baslehurst. When Rachel’s attractions catch the eye of Luke Rowan—a young man recently arrived in town to develop a brewery in which he has a commercial interest—reactions are varied. Her friends are jealous, her pious sister affronted; and Luke’s status in the town suffers a blow. While the nature of Rachel’s attachment to Mr. Rowan provokes speculation, the affairs of others in the town run their own course. Rachel Ray is a tale of obstacles to the course of true love, told in Anthony Trollope’s gentle and well-observed style. Yet Trollope laces this otherwise unexacting narrative with probing explorations of personal morals, religious integrity, and even political prejudice. It might now seem remarkable that this innocuous novel should have been the focus of controversy when it was serialized, but Trollope’s capacity to display the potentially hypocritical elements in Christian morality drew the ire of certain prominent ministers. If anything, the controversy only fueled its commercial success after it was published in a single volume. Since then, its charms have won for it a continuing readership, appreciative of the deft and delicate strokes with which Trollope depicts a few moments in the life of a Devonshire town.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Eumenides

Author: Aeschylus

Description: In Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, the final play of the Oresteia trilogy, Orestes is tormented by the Furies after avenging his father, Agamemnon, by killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Seeking refuge at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, he is guided to Athens, where he faces trial for his actions. The goddess Athena intervenes, establishing a court to judge Orestes, symbolizing the shift in Greece from personal vendetta to a structured legal system.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Splendid Spur

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

Description: Jack Marvel is a student in Oxford late in 1642 as tensions are growing between Royalists and Parliamentarians. He happens to observe a clandestine encounter, and what he overhears, he soon shares with Anthony Killigrew, as it concerns a plot on Killigrew’s life. Killigrew, it turns out, is carrying a letter for the king. But Killigrew is killed, and Jack takes up the letter in his friend’s place. His road to Cornwall is beset with danger, and in spite of falling in with Killigrew’s sister—the beautiful Delia—Jack’s commission is ever in peril. There is a hint of the picaresque in this dramatic first-person narrative, as Marvel is never far from danger, and emerges only narrowly from many scrapes. This was a prominenet element of the popular historical fiction of the late 19th century. Arthur Quiller-Couch self-consciously stood in the tradition which ran from Sir Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. In the case of The Splendid Spur, this brings with it not only historical accuracy, but scenes of dramatic and romantic tension, all acted out on an evocatively drawn landscape.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Libation Bearers

Author: Aeschylus

Description: In Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, the second play of his Oresteia trilogy, the story continues the cycle of vengeance that began with the murder of Agamemnon. The play opens with Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returning to Argos to avenge his father’s death. Commanded by Apollo, Orestes and his sister Electra plot to kill Agamemnon’s murderers—their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Women in Love

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Description: omen in Love is a profound exploration of relationships, sexuality, and societal conventions in early 20th-century England. Set against the backdrop of World War I, the novel follows the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, as they navigate love, desire, and independence. Ursula, a schoolteacher, seeks a deeper connection beyond societal expectations, while Gudrun, an artist, is drawn to passionate and tumultuous relationships. As they become involved with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, two men from different social classes, the novel delves into the complexities of human emotions and the struggle for genuine intimacy in a world marked by societal constraints and emotional repression. omen in Love was published as a sequel to Lawrence’s controversial The Rainbow, although they were meant to be one book. Because The Rainbow was banned in the UK for eleven years, the novel was initially published in the U.S. to subscribers only, after years of delays. Lawrence’s UK publisher backed out out of publishing the novel, and UK readers had to wait for over a year until it was finally published in England.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Polynesian Mythology

Author: George Grey

Description: Polynesian Mythology is one of the earliest printed collections of Māori traditional mythology, and is considered by some scholars to be the most authoritative and representative. Originally compiled in Māori as Ko ngā mahinga a ngā tūpuna Māori, “The Deeds of the Ancestors,” it was translated by George Grey, the third governor of New Zealand, in 1855. Grey’s primary source was Te Rāngikaheke of Ngāti Rangiwewehi, who for several years lived with Grey for the purpose of teaching him the language and customs of the Māori. Grey never acknowledged Te Rāngikaheke’s contributions, and made a number of changes. This collection of Māori mythology covers the start of the universe through to the spread of Māori tribes through New Zealand’s North Island. These stories, as part of an oral tradition, varied regionally. This volume, compiled from a number of sources, is in some cases a patchwork, representing a consensus that is not a true representation of the traditions of any one specific region. Additional sources include Hohepa Paraone of Te Ngae, the people of Mokoia, Matene Te Whiwhi, Hori Patara of Ngāti Toa, Piri Kawau of Āti Awa, and several unknown contributors.

Subjects: nonfiction, spirituality

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Description: Although perhaps best known for his novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald was also a prolific writer of short fiction, having published a large number of short works in periodicals and collections throughout his literary career. Fitzgerald mostly wrote about post-WWI America, the “Jazz Age,” and his stories tend to focus on the habits and excesses of the upper class. This collection includes many of his stories published in periodicals, as well as several of his collections: Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, and All the Sad Young Men.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Adventures of Captain Hatteras

Author: Jules Verne

Description: A letter from a sea captain, signed only with cryptic initials, directs an experienced sailor to built and outfit a ship, and to assemble a crew to sail on a dangerous adventure. The voyage starts towards a northerly destination with, as far as anyone knows, no captain aboard. After some time at sea, the captain finally appears and announces his identity, and his plan to sail to the North Pole. The crew faces dangers and hardship as they fight their way through the icy seas, while the captain single-mindedly drives them to find a passage ever farther north. In his usual style, Verne includes lots of history and scientific explanations in the story. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was first published in 1864 under the title Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras. The polar regions were not completely explored at this time. Verne speculated that the North Pole would be reachable by sea, and with the story set in 1861, it would be almost another fifty years before an explorer reached the pole.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Author: David Hume

Description: A foundational text in empiricism and skepticism, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding comprehensively examines the nature of human cognition, the limits of human knowledge, and the role of reason in understanding the world. Hume argues that our understanding of the world is based on custom, habit, and experience, rather than pure reason or innate knowledge. He challenges the notions of causality, induction, and the concepts of connections between cause and effect, arguing that our understanding of these relationships is based on probability and custom. It lays the groundwork for modern philosophy, emphasizing the importance of empirical evidence and the role of human psychology in shaping our beliefs and understanding of reality.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Henry Kuttner

Description: Henry Kuttner was a prolific science fiction and horror author. His first story was published in 1936, and from there he wrote, under a set of pen names, a large number of short stories, novels, and comic strips, up until his early death in 1958. A lot of his work was penned in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore, but she was only sometimes directly credited. Kuttner was a friend of H. P. Lovecraft—he wrote a set of stories specifically set in the Cthulhu mythos—and while he was primarily a science fiction writer, there is a streak of Lovecraftian darkness running through the majority of his work. Even in his most optimistic tales, the characters often end up with more problems than they bargained for—or at least finish feeling no happier than before. The short stories in this collection are those currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication.

Subjects: horror, science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Author: Adam Smith

Description: In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith assesses the sources of human morality and the role of human sympathies in judging the propriety of our actions and behaviors. Initially published in 1759 and revised by Smith in 1790 (as the 6th Edition), this work bookended Smith’s writing career, and served as the foundation for some of his other works like The Wealth of Nations. In Moral Sentiments, Smith delves into the inner workings and presumed sources of human morality. One important concept, frequently referenced by Smith, is that of the “impartial spectator.” This supposed viewer—who could be a stranger, a friend, a family member, or even our own conscience—observes all of our actions and judges their propriety and seemliness. Whether we express grief, anger, gratitude, benevolence, or some other feeling, the impartial spectator can only approve of our behavior to the extent they can “go along with” it, if they were to imagine themselves in our situation. Smith deals with self-interest, sacrifice, magnanimity, education, cultural expectations, self-command, justice and other factors driving the choices we make. He frequently references the great minds of antiquity, while also grappling with some of his near-contemporaries, scrutinizing their assertions and indicating where he felt they went astray. Moral Sentiments not only influenced The Wealth of Nations, but is an influential work of early modern moral philosophy in its own right, influencing many of the great thinkers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, including the crafters of modern democracies.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Getting of Wisdom

Author: Henry Handel Richardson

Description: Twelve-year-old Laura and her three younger siblings live in rural Victoria, Australia. Their father has died, and their mother supports the family through sewing and embroidery. With financial support from her godmother, Laura is sent to the prestigious Ladies’ College, a girls’ boarding school in the state’s capital city of Melbourne. There, she is exposed to the prejudice of her wealthier and more worldly peers, and learns to be ashamed of her homespun background, especially of her mother’s “working with her hands.” What kind of wisdom will she gain in her new environment, whose reigning values are appearance and conformity? The Getting of Wisdom is a coming-of-age novel that depicts the material and moral constrictions of late nineteenth-century Australian society, including some of its racist attitudes. Its main subjects are class prejudice, lying, and social “pretending.” “Henry Handel Richardson” was the pseudonym of author Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who wrote that The Getting of Wisdom was a “very fair account” of her own years at Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College. She claimed that the school refused her entry when she returned to visit in 1912, due to her representation of it in the novel. H. G. Wells admired the work as one of the best school stories he had encountered. Australian feminist Germaine Greer and critic Catherine Pratt would later compare it unfavorably with James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which also details its protagonist’s years at a boarding school. While Greer dismisses some of Richardson’s stated notions of Laura as a young artist, Pratt concedes to The Getting of Wisdom a place in the Künstlerroman genre, noting the influence of Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s novel The Fisher Girl on Richardson. The Getting of Wisdom also has a debt to Nietzsche, made explicit in some chapter epigraphs and its major theme of truth, lies, and “stories.” Despite both this and its elements of fictionalized memoir and social criticism, it is often classified as a children’s book.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: A Strange Disappearance

Author: Anna Katharine Green

Description: hen the housekeeper of a New York City magnate reports that a young woman from her staff has gone missing, both the disappearance and the housekeeper’s behavior strike the police as odd. The senior detective, Mr. Gryce, detects a few decisive clues which elude his younger colleague charged with the investigation, Q. A Strange Disappearance is the second outing for Mr. Gryce. Much like the earlier novel, The Leavenworth Case, he does not often take center stage, but his interventions are decisive in unravelling the mystery.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Doctor’s Dilemma

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a respected medical man who has developed a new cure for tuberculosis. His limited resources mean he can cure only a few people at a time, leaving him to decide who lives and who dies. The dilemma he faces is whose life is worth saving: a talented but amoral young artist, or a goodhearted public servant? Ridgeon is helped in his decision by his friends, doctors all, who represent author George Bernard Shaw’s opinion of the medical men of his day: a surgeon who prescribes an operation for every ailment; a general practitioner who sells cheap patent medicines to London’s poor; a wealthy and successful doctor to the rich and famous devoid of any medical talent but with a charming bedside manner; and a cynical retired doctor with no tolerance for modern medical science. Shaw uses this backdrop to draw out the two social problems at the heart of the play. First, what makes one man more worthy of society’s resources: personal virtue, artistic talent, or money? Second, and more important, the play highlights the danger of a medical system where every doctor has an incentive to treat their patients, but not to cure them.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Nicholas Nickleby

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby tells the story of the eponymous hero and his sister Kate after the death of their father leaves them and their mother destitute and dependent on the support of their uncle Ralph Nickleby. The latter is a cold, hard man whose only interest is in amassing money and influence, and who has no empathy for the plight of his brother’s wife and children. Though he is very rich, Ralph offers them almost nothing, other than arranging for Nicholas and Kate to be employed in degrading jobs and for their mother to live in a near-derelict house he owns. This disregard eventually turns into pure hatred on Ralph’s part after Nicholas thwarts some of his schemes. Can Nicholas and Kate eventually free themselves from Ralph’s malign influence and make a success of their lives? An important secondary character is Smike, a boy in his late teens whom Nicholas encounters at Dotheboys Hall, a Yorkshire school where Nicholas is an assistant teacher. Smike has been reduced to a pathetic wretch by years of ill-usage and half-starvation by the schoolmaster Mr. Squeers. Nicholas, taking pity on the boy, eventually leaves the school with Smike, who becomes his constant companion and friend in their subsequent adventures. Nicholas Nickleby was the third novel written by Charles Dickens. Like his previous two novels, it was originally published in serial form, appearing in Bentley’s Miscellany over nineteen monthly installments from 1838 to 1839. One of the most popular of Dickens’ novels, Nicholas Nickleby is full of a variety of interesting and amusing characters and incidents.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Under Western Eyes

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov is a student in St. Petersburg, applying himself to his studies and harboring ambitions of rising in Russian society. But his plans are shattered when a fellow student, Victor Haldin, assassinates a high-ranking Russian minister before turning to Razumov for help. Razumov is deeply conflicted, but in the moment acts to preserve his own self-interest rather than assist his friend. Haldin had spoken to Razumov of his mother and sister, living in Geneva. As Razumov is recruited to spy for the Czarist government, he makes his way to Switzerland and meets Mrs. Haldin and the sister, Natalia. The women have been deeply affected by the loss of their son and brother, and Razumov’s presence in Geneva deepens their distress. Ultimately, Razumov himself must come to terms with his choices. The narrator in the novel is an Anglo-Russian language teacher, an older man who has been tutoring Natalia Haldin in English literature. His telling of the story draws both on his own eyewitness experience, and on Razumov’s journal which has come into his possession. Joseph Conrad’s 1920 preface to this work acknowledges its contemporary unpopularity. Subsequently, however, it has been widely acclaimed as perhaps his finest political novel, sharing something of the prescience shown in The Secret Agent, written four years earlier. Ambivalence among the book’s first readers may have had something to do with Conrad’s artistic choices for the narration and structure of the novel. His unnamed narrator, the somewhat intrusive “teacher of languages,” disavows facility with words and imagination, yet the story emerges from the perceptions of his “Western eyes.” Structurally, the storyline moves in a disordered chronology. Similarly, its often-intense dialogue somehow fails to establish a connection between the participants. Conrad’s exploration of stability and revolution, loyalty and betrayal, action and abstention, love and indifference, are all deepened by these unsettling techniques, demanding that the reader engage actively in the unfolding of this political and personal drama.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: W. B. Yeats

Description: . B. Yeats played many roles in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century: playwright, essayist, critic, mystic, theater manager, revolutionary, and politician. But he was first and foremost a poet—perhaps the most famous poet Ireland has yet produced. This collection contains Yeats’ verse from his first published poem, “Song of the Fairies,” which appeared in a Dublin literary magazine in 1885, through 1928’s The Tower. In them the reader can trace the growth of the poet’s voice and the influences on his writing, from Irish nationalism to esoteric metaphysics. Included are some of Yeats’ most enduringly popular works: “The Second Coming,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Poetry

Author: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Description: Born a free woman of color in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist poet active in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, Harper agitated for the emancipation of enslaved people before the American Civil War and afterwards worked in the South as a teacher during Reconstruction. The contents of many of her poems, like “Bury Me in a Free Land,” reflect her advocacy of abolition. Other prominent themes that appear in Harper’s work, especially in later periods of her career, include retellings of Biblical narratives and the temperance movement.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Edward II

Author: Christopher Marlowe

Description: Edward II is one of the earliest English history plays. The narrative begins late in Edward’s reign, when his court is concerned and disgusted by his almost inexplicably close relationship with the nobleman Gaveston. Gaveston has just returned from exile, much to the chagrin of Edward’s court. He wasn’t born a noble, but holds immense wealth and titles bestowed upon him by Edward, as well as his almost complete attention; and when Edward begins scorning his own wife in favor of Gaveston’s company, the rest of the nobles immediately demand his expulsion from England. Edward must reluctantly oblige—but by then it’s too late, for the wheels of conspiracy are already in motion. Marlowe depicts Edward and Gaveston’s relationship as a clearly homosexual one, and the themes and events of the play revolve around their relationship’s taboo nature. But the play also focuses on social status: the nobles appear to be just as offended that Gaveston, a commoner, is gifted the benefits of nobility by Edward, as they are by the couple’s homoerotic relationship. The play is based on material found in Holinshed’s Chronicles, the same book of history that Shakespeare used as a source for many of his own history plays. Marlowe stayed fairly true to history, despite some embellishments; consequently the play was of interest and performed with regularity well into the seventeenth century, with frequent revivals since.

Subjects: drama

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Title: A Daughter of Eve

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie are two sisters raised in a very strict household, who marry very different men: the former a cutthroat banker, the latter a man who has given his wife everything she needs save money, but who lacks any adventure in his spirit. In short, he’s boring. This leads Marie-Eugénie to make some bad decisions, and it will take quick thinking and bold action if she is to be saved from certain disaster. Although one of Balzac’s shorter novels, A Daughter of Eve is full of the richly drawn characters that are his hallmark, and demonstrates less of the cynicism that is common in his Human Comedy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Russian Folktales

Author: A. N. Afanasyev

Description: Russian Folktales (also translated as Russian Fairy Tales) is a collection of folktales in the Russian language, collected and edited in the 19th century by folklorist A. N. Afanasyev. Despite the title, these stories are not just Russian ones, but are also folk and fairy tales told by people from many eastern Slavic-speaking regions like Belarus and Ukraine. The stories in this collection focus both on pre-Christian elements like spirits and pagan entities, and Christian elements like saints, angels, and apostles, who appear as characters in some of the stories. References to God and liturgical practices abound. Although traditional tales like these don’t form a uniform and consistent corpus, some stock characters appear in several stories, like Koshchéy the Deathless, Iván Tsárevich, and Bába Yága. This edition is based on the 1916 translation by Leonard A. Magnus, who curated a selection of stories from Afanasyev’s original Russian edition. The Russian edition is much larger, with over five hundred stories in total.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: Emily of New Moon

Author: L. M. Montgomery

Description: Emily of New Moon, like Anne of Green Gables, follows the life of an orphan, Emily Byrd Starr, who was raised by her relatives after her father’s death. Emily, with her vivid imagination, lives on a farm on Prince Edward Island called New Moon. There, she befriends the children Ilse, Teddy, and Perry, each possessing special talents. Emily faces challenges with her family, friends, and schoolwork, including Aunt Elizabeth’s disapproval of her writing and her schoolteacher’s stubborn injustice. All the while she learns what it means to grow up, while retaining her sense of imagination, creativity, and wonder at the world.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Washington Square

Author: Henry James

Description: Catherine Sloper is a shy, plain, and not very clever young lady. She lives with her widowed father, a respected doctor, in Washington Square, a fairly new neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Catherine has a sizable income left by her mother, and stands to inherit a fortune from her father. Men don’t pay much attention to her—until she meets Mr. Townsend. The two quickly become interested in each other, but Catherine’s father disapproves of the match. He has determined that Townsend is an idler and only cares about Catherine’s money. Catherine refuses to give up Townsend, and remains as firmly for him as her father is against him. Her meddlesome aunt, Mrs. Penniman, becomes overly involved, trying to steer each actor according to her own foolish and romantic notions. Henry James considered Washington Square one of his poorer novels, and thought that Catherine was the only good part of it. Later critics received it more favorably. It was adapted into a play, The Heiress, in 1947, and into a film by the same name shortly after.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tarzan and the Golden Lion

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Tarzan, the legendary ape-man living in the African jungle, adopts the orphaned lion cub Jad-bal-ja, raising him to become a powerful and loyal companion. Meanwhile, a former housemaid of his devises a scheme to steal the treasures of the lost city of Opar. She engages a Tarzan lookalike to deceive the high priestess of Opar, Queen La, and gain access to the city’s vaults. Tarzan and the Golden Lion first appeared as a serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1922, and was then published as a novel by A. C. McClurg Co. in March 1923.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Borough Treasurer

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: Business partners Anthony Mallalieu and Milford Cotherstone have been living in the Yorkshire town of Highmarket for thirty years. Their building company has prospered, and their property holdings expanded. But their quiet, satisfied existence is upended when one of their tenants, a retired detective, is found murdered. At first suspicion falls on an odd local character, but Mallalieu and Cotherstone themselves have a secret to hide, and ruptures in their placid exteriors begin to emerge. J. S. Fletcher’s intimate knowledge and love of Yorkshire inform this compelling mystery. As the plot thickens, local color and well-drawn characters heighten the drama and draw in the reader.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Little Nugget

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: After the heartbreak of his ex-fiancée’s sudden departure, Peter Burns, a young and independently wealthy Englishman, thinks he’s making a life for himself with a proposal to the socially ambitious Cynthia Drassilis. Almost at once he finds he must demonstrate his commitment to the match by planning to kidnap the combative, chain-smoking Ogden Ford—known as “The Little Nugget” by the kidnappers—the son of Cynthia’s patron and benefactor Nesta Ford and an American business tycoon. After Cynthia’s first attempt to return Ogden to his mother is foiled by his father’s underlings, Peter decides that his best chance of success is to attend the boy’s boarding school as an instructor. He knows that while there he must first prevent Bowery Street hoodlum Buck McGinnis and silver-tongued confidence man Smooth Sam Fisher from absconding with the Nugget, but he little suspects how profoundly both his own recent past and Ogden’s obstinacy will tangle his plans. Along with The Coming of Bill, written around the same time, this is one of Wodehouse’s few non-comedy novels, undertaken for serial publication at the behest of Munsey’s Magazine editor Bob Davis and published there first as The Eighteen-Carat Kid.

Subjects: satire

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Title: The Titan

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Description: Frank Cowperwood, a disgraced robber baron, has just been released from prison. After some canny investments pay off, he decides to head west to Chicago, where he can rebuild his fortune and his good name. He takes his mistress, Aileen, with him, and quickly learns how to use his wealth and machine politics to take over the Chicago streetcar system. The second entry in Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire, The Titan continues the dramatized story of a real life streetcar tycoon, with the character of Cowperwood standing in for the historical figure of Charles Yerkes. Dreiser uses Yerkes’ story to illustrate the magnifying and corrupting influence that money can have on the lustful and the covetous: can society benefit from a powerful man who, yes, does deliver some streetcars, but whose only real interest is sex, money, art, power, and glory? While Cowperwood seems to succeed again and again at amassing wealth and power, he too often finds himself unhappy, while those around him are laid to waste by his unbridled ambition and capital.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The American Senator

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: When John Morton returns to his rural English estate from a diplomatic posting in Washington, he returns not only with an American senator seeking to understand England, but also with a fiancée, the aristocratic beauty Arabella Trefoil. Morton’s return also brings him back into contact with his slightly older and estranged cousin, Reginald, who still resides in Dillsborough, their ancestral town. Out of these elements, Trollope constructs a “chronicle of a winter at Dillsborough”—as the Senator of the title does not, in fact, take pride of place, which instead goes to the goings-on among residents of the town and its environs. As romantic intrigues unfold, elements of status, class, and wealth propel and dispel various attachments. The Senator acts as a foil to reflect on the absurdities of English life—somewhat tempered by the noble but headstrong character of the American. As is so often the case with Trollope, some female characters are drawn with especial depth and clarity. Chief among these is Arabella Trefoil, whose heartless predatory pursuits of a husband are nonetheless depicted with some poignancy. Likewise, some minor characters—the wife of Dillsborough’s leading lawyer in particular—are nevertheless forcefully present. Trollope wrote The American Senator between the last two installments of his political Palliser series, and a few characters from those novels make cameo appearances here. Trollope began writing the book while in Australia, and completed it at sea during the return voyage to England. Perhaps something of that distance contributes an ambivalence about life in his home country: so often marked by deep irrationalities, but so lovingly defended by the novel’s English protagonists.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Jean-Christophe

Author: Romain Rolland

Description: Jean-Christophe Krafft, born into a Belgian-German family of musicians, seems destined for music from an early age: he is sensitive to sound, learns to play the piano, and, with the help of his grandfather, soon writes his first compositions. This leads him to become a court musician of the Grand Duchy on the Rhine, where he lives. Along the way, he experiences love, setbacks, poverty, but also success. After a violent incident forces him to flee, he finds shelter in Paris, where he meets a friend for life: Olivier. But his idealistic worldview and stubborn character repeatedly get him into trouble, forcing him to seek refuge in Switzerland. Jean-Christophe is the story of a man, chronicled from his birth to his death. Romain Rolland, strongly motivated by his own biography of Beethoven, always envisioned it as a novel that flows “like a river”: meandering, propelled by its own force, not to be channeled by plot. This is embodied in Jean-Christophe through extensive digressions on the author’s views on nationality, politics, music, and culture in early twentieth century Europe. Jean-Christophe thus became the first roman-fleuve, or river-novel, a term most famously applied to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. For this contribution to literature, Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. Jean-Christophe was published in ten volumes in the original French, while Gilbert Cannan’s English translation appeared in 3 volumes, roughly encompassing Jean-Christophe’s youth and adolescence, his adulthood, and the latter years of his life. This Standard Ebooks edition brings all volumes of Cannan’s translation together.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: How the Other Half Lives

Author: Jacob Riis

Description: The Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis visited the slums of New York City to highlight the squalor in which the “other half” lived. He used flash photography (a new innovation), tables of statistics, and personal stories to vividly depict the city’s various neighborhoods and ethnic groups. But the book isn’t merely a factual documentary—it’s also a moralistic appraisal of greedy landlords, the abundance of cheap beer dives and saloons, the low character of the tenants, and the very low wages on which the poor tried to subsist. He described some reforms already implemented, as well as those still needed. How the Other Half Lives was written at a time when many people were crowding into New York City. It was first published as an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1889, along with many illustrations that were based directly on Riis’s photography. It was expanded into a full book in the next year, with the inclusion of more illustrations and some of Riis’s original photographs. The middle and upper classes were shocked by what the book described, about which they knew very little. Christian organizations in New York and beyond had similar reactions. The book was widely praised, and led to the enactment of many reforms in the following years aimed at improving the conditions of the tenements and the working poor.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Leavenworth Case

Author: Anna Katharine Green

Description: Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy and widowed philanthropist, raises his two beautiful orphaned nieces, Mary and Eleanore. One of the cousins, Mary, is his designated heir. When Mr. Leavenworth is murdered in mysterious circumstances, a young lawyer is called upon to support the distraught cousins. At the coroner’s inquest it becomes clear that the perpetrator can only be a member of the household—but no positive evidence is found to incriminate anyone. As the investigating detective digs in, the lawyer, Mr. Raymond, becomes ever more deeply embroiled. The Leavenworth Case is Anna Katharine Green’s first novel, and quickly became a best-seller. Among the very earliest women to write mystery novels, Green’s expert handling of legal details enhanced her reputation and contributed to this novel being widely admired. “Have I read The Leavenworth Case?” Wilkie Collins wrote to Green’s American publisher, “I have read it through at one sitting.” The Leavenworth Case is also notable for having launched the career of the character Ebenezer Gryce, one of the first “series” detectives, years before his more famous English counterpart, Sherlock Holmes. He appears in a dozen of Green’s later whodunits.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The New State

Author: Mary Parker Follett

Description: In the New State, management consultant and social theorist Mary Parker Follett investigates the problem of democracy in a pluralistic society. Follett contends that representative democracy has failed to allow citizens the opportunity to express their unique creativity. This goes hand in hand with a public life that is increasingly atomized and unsuited for genuine societal cooperation towards shared goals. In short, a new kind of societal organization is needed. Follett draws on her experience with group organization to design a new democratic system to take advantage of people’s natural desire to belong to groups. Neighborhood groups, social groups, and professional groups all allow individuals to learn how to cooperate and to set and achieve goals that otherwise could not be completed. Though individuals differ in many important ways, this diversity can be a source of strength in groups in which pluralism is encouraged instead of uniformity. These kinds of inclusive groups can lend structure to a new form of governance: one that is creative, caring, and truly free. Follett predicts that from small scale groups an ever-widening circle of larger and larger groups will bloom, encompassing local, state, national, and even international communities. Though certainly ambitious, her plan is meticulously crafted and persuasively argued both from an empiric and a philosophic point of view. First published in 1919 at the end of World War I, Follett’s social theories have garnered renewed interest today, especially among advocates of a more participatory form of democracy.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Don Juan

Author: Lord Byron

Description: Don Juan is an epic satirical poem that reinterprets the legendary figure of Don Juan as a young, naive, and passive adventurer who becomes involved in various romantic and adventurous exploits more by circumstance than by intent. The poem opens with Juan’s early life in Seville, where his strict upbringing by his mother Donna Inez contrasts sharply with his eventual affair with Donna Julia, a married woman. This scandal forces Juan to flee, setting him on a series of adventures across Europe and beyond. During his travels Juan is shipwrecked and captured by pirates, and then enslaved in Constantinople, where he is placed in a Sultan’s harem disguised as a woman. His journey takes him to Russia, where he becomes a favorite of Empress Catherine the Great, and later to England, where Byron satirizes British society’s pretensions and moral hypocrisies. Juan’s adventures are marked by his innocence and charm, which lead him into and out of various romantic entanglements and perilous situations. Don Juan was published in fits and starts between 1819 and 1824, having been written during a period of personal and political turbulence for Lord Byron. Byron, known for his rebellious and controversial lifestyle, composed the poem while living in exile in Italy, having fled England due to scandals and debts. Although the poem remains unfinished, with Byron having completed only sixteen cantos before his death, Don Juan stands as a profound and humorous exploration of the absurdities and contradictions of the human condition, wrapped in the adventures of its iconic protagonist.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Cloven Foot

Author: M. E. Braddon

Description: The Cloven Foot follows the fortunes of John Treverton, who is at a very low point in his life. He has squandered his small inheritance and has had to sell his commission as a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment. Though he has been making a small amount of money from drawing comic sketches, he is feeling desperate and miserable when a telegram unexpectedly summons him to the death-bed of his wealthy uncle Jasper. The dying man tells him that he will will his estate to the younger man on one condition—that he marry Jasper’s adopted daughter Laura within twelve months. But events in Treverton’s past threaten this boon, and soon complications multiply. The novel was generally well-received, with praise for Braddon’s deft handling of a complex plot. Sensational elements such as murder, mistaken identity, and bigamy feature prominently in The Cloven Foot, as they do in many of her novels; but an important new theme is that of fraud—a theme which has been identified as part of an increasing trend in the era’s sensation fiction towards featuring more white-collar crimes. The Cloven Foot was initially published in serial form in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle in 1878. It was subsequently published in three volumes in 1879. A stage play based on the novel, radically simplifying the plot, was performed in 1890.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Description: Charles Dexter Ward is the heir of a wealthy family from Providence, Rhode Island, whose family wealth allows him to dedicate himself to scholarly pursuits. As a young man, he starts to research antiquarianism and architecture. During his genealogical research, he comes across the name of Joseph Curwen, a man who lived in the early 18th century and to whom Ward discovers he is related. After delving into Curwen’s life and work, Ward realizes that the dead sorcerer is more powerful than he originally thought. ritten in 1928 but never published during H. P. Lovecraft’s life, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was first serialized in Weird Tales in 1941, and published later, in an expanded edition, in 1943. This edition is based on the original Weird Tales publication.

Subjects: horror

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Title: The Blue Lagoon

Author: H. de Vere Stacpoole

Description: After being shipwrecked in the South Pacific, cousins Dick and Emmeline Lestrange are stranded upon an island, fortunately populated with plentiful resources and the beauty of nature. With the guidance of the ship’s cook, the only other survivor, they learn how to live off the land, foregoing their civilized upbringing and adopting a more primitive way of life. Of course, with this environment and its pleasures come a great number of dangers, from animal attacks to hazardous weather, and as Dick and Emmeline mature they experience one of the strongest forces of nature: love. Inspired by a sleepless night ruminating primitive man and how they might have responded to natural wonders, H. de Vere Stacpoole wrote and published The Blue Lagoon in 1908 to great praise and acclaim for its captivating descriptions of the titular lagoon, as well as for the character development of Dick and Emmeline as their romance blossoms. This adoration did not wane, with two sequel novels and a number of adaptations for stage and screen produced in the decades following its publication.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

Description: alter M. Miller Jr. was an author who was extensively published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s. These days, he is best remembered for his award-winning novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, but his true craft lay in short stories. Between 1950 and 1957, he had over thirty-five of them published in magazines such as Amazing Stories, Other Worlds, and If. The themes he explored were varied, but tended towards the human experience and the changes that affect society over large timescales. This collection includes stories about an early form of meme theory, the societal effect of genetically altered pets, the loss of scientific knowledge leading to potential catastrophe, and more. The short stories in this collection are those currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Vivie Warren is a well-educated young woman, with clear, dispassionate plans for her future life and career. Over the course of two days, those plans are upended as she discovers how her mother earned the fortune on which they both live. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was shocking to the audience for which George Bernard Shaw wrote it in 1893; so much so that it could not be publicly performed until 1925, with the 1902 London premiere taking place in a private club for legal reasons. Its New York premiere, in 1905, was halted by the police and the cast arrested. The London press was outraged by the 1902 performance, and in response Shaw wrote a new preface, included in this edition, furiously attacking the hypocrisy of his critics who praised plays like La Dame Aux Camélias that glamorized the lives of fashionable courtesans, but condemned his play’s attack on the sordid reality of Victorian prostitution and the poverty that drove women to it. Shaw’s delicate handling of the controversial subjects of prostitution and incest may seem tame or even prudish to a modern reader; Mrs. Warren’s profession is never even named in the course of the play. But in other respects the play is strikingly modern. Vivie’s struggle to reconcile her ethical principles with the realities of the world around her is still relevant today, and the central relationship between Mrs. Warren and her daughter is complex and nuanced as any modern psychological drama. In the end it is the strength of the characters, not the once scandalous subject matter, that makes Mrs. Warren’s Profession one of Shaw’s most enduring plays.

Subjects: drama

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Title: A Voice from the South

Author: Anna Julia Cooper

Description: A Voice from the South was published in 1892 by Anna Julia Cooper, an educator who was one of the first two African-American women to be awarded a master’s degree. Since then it has been recognized as one of the first works of Black feminist theory. Setting forth a perspective that would be described as “intersectional” in contemporary terms, Cooper explores her own lived experience as an educated African-American woman, and advocates for the education of African-American women as a necessary means of achieving racial equality. However, her marked emphasis on women’s roles in the household has been critiqued by later theorists as a concession to the 19th century “cult of domesticity”—or, alternatively, a strategic engagement with the dominant cultural view towards women in her time. A Voice from the South continues to be read and analyzed today for its pioneering role in African-American female scholarship.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Bertram Cope’s Year

Author: Henry Blake Fuller

Description: Bertram Cope’s Year chronicles the experiences of Bertram Cope, a young literature instructor who arrives in the fictional town of Churchton to pursue his graduate studies. Set in early 20th-century America, the novel explores Cope’s interactions with the town’s residents, where his charisma and charm quickly captivate those around him. As Cope navigates social engagements and forms close relationships, particularly with his friend Arthur Lemoyne, the narrative subtly examines themes of companionship, love, and societal expectations. Fuller’s writing is distinguished by its witty dialogue and astute social commentary, offering a critique of American social norms of the period. Published in 1919, Bertram Cope’s Year is recognized for its early portrayal of same-sex relationships in literature, depicting them with nuance and sensitivity uncommon for its time. The novel invites readers to reflect on the complexities of identity and relationships in an evolving society.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

Description: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō is one of Japan’s most famous authors. His stature, not hindered by a Nobel Prize nomination in 1964, has only grown over time as his elegant stories of hidden desires and power in Japanese society and family life were translated into many different languages. Tanizaki turned his hand to novels, plays, and even screenplays for early Japanese film, but novellas and short stories were his staple. Tanizaki studied literature at university in the early years of the twentieth century, but dwindling finances meant that his focus turned to writing as a means of support. His initial plays and short stories received public acclaim, but it was in the twenties and thirties that he saw real success, with a series of novels leading up to perhaps his best known work: The Makioka Sisters. Post-war and up until his death in 1965 his fame grew, and he became better known outside of Japan as one of the central literary figures of his generation. Tanizaki’s tales have retained their power up to this day, as their themes of buried obsessions are an undeniable part of the human condition. Tanizaki’s fame outside Japan didn’t really begin until the 1950s, so consequently early translations are difficult to source and reliably prove as being in the U.S. public domain. This edition contains the only works that we have currently been able to verify, but will be updated as more transcriptions become available.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: A Start in Life

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Oscar Husson is a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. His mother, who has pampered him excessively, places him on a coach to go spend time with a friend of hers to see if Oscar’s prospects can be improved, but Oscar proceeds to make a fool of himself. Suffering the consequences of his humiliation, his mother pulls other strings to land him a lesser job, where Oscar eventually falls flat again. Forced into the military by his circumstances and his lack of other prospects, he finally redeems himself. At its core a bildungsroman, A Start in Life is filled with the types of side characters that inhabit every Balzac story: the rich, the pretenders striving to be rich, the everyman and woman. The novel opens with an extended journey on a French carriage and the claustrophobic conversation that takes place between the passengers; it closes with another, similar, journey years later that includes most of the same travelers. In between are multiple intrigues involving Oscar, written in the vivid style for which Balzac is known.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Histories

Author: Herodotus

Description: Written in the fifth century BC, the Histories is considered to be the founding work of history in the Western canon, and one of the foundational works of Western literature in general. The narrative centers on the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, and is an important source of information about the peoples, locations, and events of the ancient Greek world and the Persian empire. This work is an early source on the lives of significant historical figures and events, such as the defeat of the kingdom of Lydia, the foundation of the first Persian empire, Cyrus the Great’s ill-fated invasion of Scythia, and Leonidas’ defense, and ultimate demise, alongside his 300 warriors at the Battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus wrote his history in order to preserve the knowledge of the actions of Greeks and “barbarians.” He is the first (and sometimes only) source for many of the names of locations and people featured in the book. Before the Histories, the transmission of history existed primarily via oral storytelling and the occasional written chronicle; Herodotus can therefore be credited as the first person to treat the past in a more objective and scholarly manner, even if the Histories cannot be considered an unbiased or primary source by modern standards. Although it contains some inaccurate—and sometimes even absurd—claims, it remains an important work both as a historical source and as classic literature. The Histories was widely read in the ancient world, and its popularity led to Herodotus being called both “The Father of History” by Cicero and “The Father of Lies” by Plutarch.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Cordwainer Smith

Description: Cordwainer Smith was one pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, a U.S. Army officer, scholar on East Asian matters, classmate of L. Ron Hubbard, advisor and godson of Sun Yat-Sen, and an expert in psychological warfare. His identity remained a secret until shortly before his death. Though his writing was cut short by his relatively early death, his stories, mostly concerning a far future involving a millennia-spanning “Instrumentality of Mankind,” were nominated for two Hugo awards and a Nebula award. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, intended to shine a light on authors deserving of renewed attention, is named for him.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Exiles

Author: James Joyce

Description: Having spent nine years in Italy, writer Richard Rowan and his de facto wife Bertha have recently returned to Dublin with their eight-year-old son Archie. Beatrice Justice, who arrives at the Rowans’ house at the play’s opening, has corresponded with Richard throughout their absence, and her appointment as his son’s piano teacher is an excuse for them to see one another. The beginnings of a relationship have also formed between Bertha and Richard’s friend the journalist Robert Hand. Exiles, James Joyce’s only surviving play, explores without fully resolving a possible outcome of this premise. Its main themes are freedom and doubt in personal relationships, marital infidelity, and what Joyce refers to in his notes as Richard’s “spiritual abandonment” of Bertha. Without being entirely autobiographical, Exiles contains elements of Joyce’s own life: he and his wife Nora did not marry until long after their children had been born in Italy, where they too lived as “exiles” from Ireland. Reception of Exiles was initially mixed, mostly drawing unfavorable comparisons with Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Just as he had struggled to find a publisher for Portrait and Dubliners, Joyce too struggled to find a theater willing to stage Exiles. It was sent to the Stage Society in early 1916, who then rejected it. Joyce then sent it to W. B. Yeats in the hope of acceptance at the Abbey Theatre, but Yeats also rejected it, replying that “[he did] not think it at all so good as [Portrait].” The first performance of Exiles was in German in 1919 at a theater in Munich, where it was withdrawn after that single performance. It was not until 1925 that it was first staged in English, where it ran for forty-one performances in New York. Exiles has tended to be regarded by critics and readers alike as an ignorable aberration within a canon of more important prose works, at best passably derivative of the dramas of Joyce’s early literary hero Henrik Ibsen. But far from considering his first published foray into drama an imitation or failed experiment, Joyce pursued its publication with the same energy as he did his more successful works, and appeared to treat it with the same care and seriousness. His notes also show that his vision for the work drew not only on Ibsen’s art but on various other sources, including Nora’s childhood and his own original symbols and notions, some of which biographer Richard Ellmann noted to have been also incorporated into his next project, Ulysses. Joyce’s notes for Exiles date from late 1913, shortly before work started in earnest on Ulysses, the longest and most colorful chapter of which was also to take the form of a play. This fact, and the conception of Exiles itself, were natural consequences of Joyce’s longstanding fascination with both drama as a literary form and, as expressed in the title of one of his best-known critical essays, the connection between “drama and life.” Foregrounding a faltering marriage and fading youth, Exiles stands as a transitional work—a potentially instructive bridge, if a short, overlooked, and critically disappointing one—between Portrait and Ulysses. Like the latter, it keeps Joyce’s “mature persona” of, in Ellmann’s phrase, the “husband-hero” at its center. Exiles was first published in 1918 in London. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 1921 Egoist Press second English edition, proofs of which Joyce reviewed and annotated with corrections before publication.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Coming of Bill

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Superb physical specimen and independently wealthy Englishman Kirk Winfield lives the bohemian life of an aspiring painter in New York, sparring with his prizefighting friend Steve and daubing at canvases, until his life is upended by a chance encounter with Lora Delane Porter, an autocratic author of books on eugenics and hygiene. She determines at once that he will marry her niece Ruth Bannister, the daughter of a Wall Street business magnate, and that their child will be raised according to her own unsparing principles. When their son Bill arrives, Kirk and Ruth must discover a way to navigate their new life together against the currents of her family’s wealth, his artistic aspirations, and Lora’s meddling. Along with The Little Nugget, written around the same time, this is one of Wodehouse’s few non-comedy novels, written for serial publication at the behest of Munsey’s Magazine editor Bob Davis and published there first as The White Hope. In the United States it was published as Their Mutual Child, and in the United Kingdom with its present title.

Subjects: satire

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Title: Aurora Floyd

Author: M. E. Braddon

Description: Aurora Floyd focuses on its eponymous heroine, Aurora Floyd, the daughter of a wealthy banker, who in his late forties scandalously married a poor actress from a northern county. His young wife died not long after Aurora’s birth, and her daughter was raised by her grieving father, who idolizes the child. Aurora thus grows up spoiled and somewhat headstrong. After she returns from a Parisian finishing school, it is clear that something happened to her there which has caused a dark cloud to hang over her, causing her father immense grief. When a few years later she is courted and then marries, the secrets of what happened in her teenage years eventually come to light, leading to tragedy. The novel was published in 1863 after having been serialized in Temple Bar magazine. This came only a year after Braddon first achieved wide popularity with her best-selling novel Lady Audley’s Secret. Aurora Floyd didn’t achieve the same level of popularity, but it was nevertheless well received. It was almost immediately turned into a stage play, and was the basis of a short silent film in 1912.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Yankee in the Trenches

Author: Robert Derby Holmes

Description: Before the United States entered the First World War, Robert Derby Holmes made his way from Boston to England to join the British army. He’s looking for adventure, and has some vague sympathy for the Allied side. Afterwards, he wrote this personal memoir about his experiences. The narrative ranges from the everyday discomforts of living in the trenches—with the mud, “cooties,” and work details—to the terrifying and deadly battles against the Germans on the Western Front. The horror of war is lightened by Holmes’ sense of humor, and scenes include going “over the top,” sneaking around on patrol, and seeing some of the first tanks in action.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Wyvern Mystery

Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Description: Alice Maybell is a young orphan who has grown up in Wyvern Manor with old Captain Fairfield and his two sons. She has grown into a beautiful young woman with a bright future; but her marriage, and her husband’s secret, will lead her down a dark path. Today, Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is remembered of as an early master of horror. In his own day, he would have thought of his work as falling into different genres, with his well-loved ghost stories, like “Green Tea,” in one genre, and his “sensation novels,” like Uncle Silas, in another. In The Wyvern Mystery, the suspense is created not by the Gothic or the macabre, but by the all-too-prosaic secret held by Alice’s husband, and how it grows to threaten both their futures.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Special Correspondent

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Set in the early 1890s, The Special Correspondent tells the story of Claudius Bombarnac, special correspondent from the Parisian newspaper Twentieth Century, assigned to travel the newly completed Grand Transasiatic Railway running from Uzun Ada (on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea) to Peking (Beijing), China. Over his thirteen-day journey he meets an eclectic cast of characters, including an impatient American businessman, a detached English lady, a Russian major, a French actor and actress, a young Chinese noble accompanied by an eccentric Doctor, and a German baron racing to circle the globe in thirty-nine days—perhaps a nod to Verne’s Around the Word in Eighty Days, published twenty years earlier. As he meets them, Bombarnac assigns each a number in his notebook, and seeks to get to know them as they travel together. As a dedicated special correspondent, Bombarnac’s greatest fear is that his nearly two-week journey will pass without anything interesting happening to fill his columns. But his fears turn out to be unfounded, and he sees as much—and perhaps even more—danger and adventure than he had hoped. Between these episodes, we’re also given an interesting look at Central Asia at the cusp of the twentieth century, influenced by the expanding political scope of Russia and China, and by the forces of modernity—Bombarnac mourns the sight of electric streetlamps in ancient towns, and expresses horror when passed by two locals in Samarkand riding bicycles. The Special Correspondent was originally published in France in 1892 under the title Claudius Bombarnac. Written later in Verne’s life, it shows off his knowledge of languages, people, and customs, as well as his wry sense of humor. This English translation, originally appearing in The Boy’s Own Paper of October 1893, feels surprising fresh and modern, and takes the reader on an entertaining ride along with Verne’s indefatigable news correspondent.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Luzumiyat

Author: Abu al-ʻAlaʼ al-Maʻarri

Description: At the height of the Islamic Golden Age, in the first half of the 11th century, the Arab poet and freethinker Abu al-ʻAlaʼ al-Maʻarri touched off an entire literary scene around himself in his hometown of Maʻarra, Syria. With a religious skepticism bordering on atheism, al-Maʻarri attacked the established religious orthodoxy of his day, venturing to criticize Islamic, Christian, and Jewish doctrines alike. Calling himself “thrice-imprisoned” by his blindness, isolation, and physical embodiment, he argued for the ethical position of antinatalism and lived a life of asceticism (becoming in the process one of the first recorded individuals who intentionally lived what contemporary individuals might call a “vegan” lifestyle). These concepts all emerged in his poetry, part of which has survived in a collection known as the Luzumiyat or Unnecessary Necessity, a title referring to a challenging rhyme scheme that he invented and adopted for his quatrains. This Standard Ebooks edition of the Luzumiyat is based on Ameen Rihani’s translation. Rihani, a notable Syrian-American poet and author in his own right, was one of the first major translators of al-Maʻarri into English. This translation is not a complete translation of the Luzumiyat, which even today is not generally available to the English-reading public, but is a selection of quatrains presented alongside some from an earlier poetry collection, the Saqt az-Zand.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Bambi

Author: Felix Salten

Description: Bambi follows the life of the eponymous roe deer, from birth to maturity. Through the years Bambi meets friends, learns how to survive in the forest, finds love, and learns how to survive “He”—the name animals give to man. The novel gives a glimpse into forest life: dangerous, yet awe-inspiring; unforgiving, yet beautiful. ritten by Felix Salten and published in 1923 in German, it was translated to English in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers. It is considered one of the first environmental novels, and in 1936 was banned by Nazi Germany for being a parable of the persecution of Jews in Europe. Although adapted into multiple movies, ballets, and plays, Bambi is perhaps most popularly remembered as the subject of Walt Disney’s famous animated feature of the same name.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Kusamakura

Author: Natsume Sōseki

Description: Walking along a mountain path towards a remote hot springs hotel, our unnamed protagonist muses on his theory of “unhumanity” and his hopes that it will break him out of his creative block. On arrival, the town itself has plenty of unhumanity on display, but while poems on those subjects spring easily to mind, painting still eludes him. Will the mysterious Nami-san, the daughter of the hotel owner, be the catalyst that unlocks that frustratingly out-of-reach art? Natsume Sōseki was already a household name in Japan after his previous novels I Am a Cat and Botchan, but it was the success of Kusamakura that allowed him to give up his role as a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University to focus on writing. Kusamakura translates to English directly as “grass pillow,” which for the Japanese reader has a connotation of a poetic wandering; for this edition Takahashi Kazutomo added the subtitle “Unhuman Tour” to bring the same feeling to the translation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Ozma of Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Description: Three years after the publication of The Marvelous Land of Oz and encouraged by young fans’ letters, L. Frank Baum once more returned to write about lands full of magic and wonder. On a ship on her way to Australia for a holiday with Uncle Henry, Dorothy Gale gets tossed overboard during a storm. Washing ashore in a chicken-coop, Dorothy and her newfound friend, a hen she names Billina, embark on an exploration of the new land. After meeting old friends and making new ones, Dorothy joins the Princess Ozma of Oz on a mission to restore the royal family of Ev to their rightful place on the throne. This is the first book in which it becomes clear that Baum intended to make Oz a series, and, like its predecessors, Ozma of Oz has been adapted to theater and film.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Ulysses

Author: James Joyce

Description: James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin. The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A. and a period of attempted further study in Paris. The focus then shifts to the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser and social outsider. It is a work day, so both Bloom and Stephen depart their homes for their respective journeys around Dublin. hile containing a richly detailed story and still being generally described as a novel, Ulysses breaks many of the bounds otherwise associated with the form. It consists of eighteen chapters, or “episodes,” each somehow echoing a scene in Homer’s Odyssey. Each episode takes place in a different setting, and each is written in a different, and often unusual, style. The book’s chief innovation is commonly cited to be its expansion of the “free indirect discourse” or “interior monologue” technique that Joyce used in his previous two books. Ulysses is known not only for its formal novelty and linguistic inventiveness, but for its storied publication history. The first fourteen episodes of the book were serialized between 1918 and 1920 in The Little Review, while several episodes were published in 1919 in The Egoist. In 1921, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice won a trial regarding obscenity in the thirteenth episode, “Nausicaa.” The Little Review’s editors were enjoined against publishing any further installments; Ulysses would not appear again in America until 1934. The outcome of the 1921 trial worsened Joyce’s already-considerable difficulties in finding a publisher in England. After lamenting to Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, that it might never be published at all, Beach offered to publish it in Paris, and Ulysses first appeared in its entirety in February 1922. The first printing of the first edition was filled with printing errors. A corrected second edition was published in 1924. Stuart Gilbert’s 1932 edition benefited from correspondence with Joyce, and claimed in its front matter to be “the definitive standard edition,” but was later found to have introduced errors of its own. The novel’s initial reception was mixed. W. B. Yeats called it “mad,” but would later agree with the positive assessments of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, stating that it was “indubitably a work of genius.” Joyce’s second biographer Richard Ellmann reports that one doctor claimed to have seen writing of equal merit by his insane patients, and Virginia Woolf derided it as “underbred.” Joyce’s aunt, Josephine Murray, rejected it as “unfit to read” on account of its purported obscenity, to which Joyce famously retorted that if that were so, then life was not fit to live. The sheer density of references in the text make Ulysses a book that virtually demands of the reader access to critical interpretation; but it also makes it a book that is easily obscured by the industry of scholarship it has generated over the last century. The dismissal of a serious interpretation is tempting, but would trivialize Joyce’s enormous project as an extended joke or an elaborate exercise in ego. Likewise dismissing it as uninterpretable would ignore the profusion of earnest critical analyses. Today Ulysses is considered by many to be the zenith of 20th century literature: both one of the richest, and also the most difficult, books to ever be written. To appreciate that is not to accept that it is unintelligible; rather, perhaps the best description of it is the one used of Ulysses himself in a 21st century translation of Homer’s epic—“complicated.” This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a transcription of the 1922 Shakespeare and Company first edition, with emendations from pre-1929 errata lists and the second edition in its 1927 ninth printing by Shakespeare and Company. It does not track any one particular edition, but rather is a blend of pre-1929 editions that aims to contain what scholars might consider to be the most accurate version of what was printed before 1929. Therefore, various probable misprints have been retained that were corrected in post-1929 editions.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Well of Loneliness

Author: Radclyffe Hall

Description: Confident of a son, Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon plan to name their first child Stephen. Instead they receive a daughter—but they decide to keep the name anyway. Young Stephen Gordon continues to surprise her parents with her boisterous play, demands for shorter hair, and insistence on riding her horse astride. After a childhood crush on a housemaid, Stephen begins to realize for herself that she is different than the world expects. As Stephen grows into adulthood and leaves her home and then England, her life is continually shaped by her love and affection for other women. Radclyffe Hall, like her protagonist, had a number of romantic relationships with other women, and identified herself as an “invert” following the theory of sexual inversion that was developing at the time. Hall wrote the novel partly to promote the theory and directly references some of its advocates within the book. The novel caused a sensation when it was published, leading to parodies, imitators, and even a theatrical adaptation. Pressure on the publisher to censor the novel led them to stop printing it in England, only to quickly import copies from France to meet demand. Today it remains a touchstone of queer fiction.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Argonautica

Author: Apollonius of Rhodes

Description: The Argonautica is an epic mythical poem by Apollonius of Rhodes. The myth tells of how Jason and his crew of Argonauts sail to Kolchis at the far end of the world to retrieve the Golden Fleece. They face many dangers and ask the favor of the Greek gods to help them along the way. These gods induce Medea, a daughter of the king of Kolchis, to fall in love with Jason so that she will be bound to help him win the Fleece. The voyage takes the crew through the Hellespont to the Black Sea, and back out to further adventures around the Mediterranean. While the characters were already known to ancient audiences, this is the first known work to tell this particular story in full. This edition was translated into English verse from ancient Greek by Arthur S. Way. Way states in his epilogue that this poem, written in the third century BC, is the one great epic between Homer and Virgil. When Apollonius wrote this story, it was thought by the literary elites in Alexandria that the era of epic poetry was over, and there was nothing left to write except for short, carefully polished works—certainly no attempt should be made to improve or expand on Homer. Yet this work became well known in the ancient world, and was used as inspiration by the later Latin writers.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Vortex

Author: Noël Coward

Description: When Nicky arrives back from Paris to his London family home with new fiancée Bunty in tow, relations with his friends, family, and particularly his mother Florence seem as good as they ever were. Cracks, however, soon start appearing: Nicky has a new drug habit (and there are other hinted-at transgressions); Bunty is uncomfortable in her new role with Nicky’s friends and family; and the façade Florence is vainly putting up against her increasing age and dissatisfaction with life is starting to fail. The Vortex is an early play of Noël Coward’s, and was the first to reach large acclaim. Given the themes of drug abuse, the censors in the UK at the time nearly chose to block its staging, and even after it was passed Coward (as writer, director, and star) had trouble finding a venue. Eventually it was picked up by a small theater in north London, and after critical success and popular interest it moved to London’s West End. The play has been adapted for television, film and radio many times over the years, and is still a popular choice for theaters today. While the drug abuse and coded homosexuality has less shock value than when first performed, Nicky and Florence’s increasingly obvious difficulties in living outside the boxes created for them by society is a theme that stands the test of time.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Lay Down Your Arms

Author: Bertha von Suttner

Description: In The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling, the pacifist Bertha von Suttner writes the fictionalized autobiography of the eponymous Austrian noblewoman. Beginning with the Austro-Sardinian war of 1859, continuing through the Second Schleswig War and the Austro-Prussian war, and concluding with the Franco-Prussian war, von Tilling paints a graphic and often intense portrayal of war and the effects it has not just on the protagonist, but on family and society. Drawing on her own wartime experiences as a civilian as well as interviews with war veterans, von Suttner produces a memorable critique of the war-mentality, along with a passionate plea for peace between the European nations. Little is spared from criticism: from scrupulous kings and political leaders praying on ill-conceived notions of nationalism, to religious leaders tying themselves in knots to provide biblical justifications for war, to an educational system that sets out soldiering as the highest ideal of manhood and supporting soldiers as the highest ideal of womanhood. Von Suttner was a prolific anti-war activist, and would later become the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Originally published in German in 1889, Lay Down Your Arms is her most well-known statement on the disastrous effects of war. It has been translated into at least sixteen languages and was praised shortly after its release by Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Cycle of the West

Author: John G. Neihardt

Description: A Cycle of the West is an anthology of five epic poems published over 26 years: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, and The Song of the Messiah. John G. Neihardt captures the essence of the American West through the intertwining stories of various historical and mythic figures. As the cycle unfolds, the vivid imagery, rich symbolism, and lyrical verse paint a vivid portrait of pivotal moments in Western history, from the brutal survival story of Hugh Glass in The Song of Hugh Glass to the clashes between settlers and Native Americans in The Song of the Indian Wars. The Song of Three Friends introduces readers to three trappers—Joe, Fred, and Hugh—whose friendship is tested by the harsh realities of frontier life. Through their experiences, the poem explores camaraderie, survival, and the relentless pursuit of freedom amidst the untamed wilderness. The Song of Hugh Glass explores the legendary tale of the eponymous Hugh Glass, a fur trapper who survives a brutal bear attack only to be left for dead by his companions. Against all odds, Glass embarks on a journey of vengeance and redemption, embodying the indomitable spirit of the American frontier. The Song of the Indian Wars delves into the tragic conflict between Native American tribes and the encroaching forces of colonization. Neihardt portrays the complex dynamics of this struggle, highlighting the perspectives of both Native warriors and settlers as they grapple with violence, displacement, and the erosion of traditional ways of life. The Song of Jed Smith and The Song of the Messiah are not yet in the U.S. public domain, and are therefore not yet included in this edition.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Pastors and Masters

Author: Ivy Compton-Burnett

Description: Charles Merry is the senior schoolmaster at a small prep school for boys. He masks his shortcomings, and those of his staff and students, with bluster and bravado. The book explores themes of authenticity, loyalty, love, death, and friendship through dense passages that are often exclusively spoken dialog with minimal supporting text—a style that came to define the author’s future works. Rich with intriguing characters and cleverly constructed conversations, Pastors and Masters was published in 1925 and became the first breakthrough success for its author, Ivy Compton-Burnett. The book was critically acclaimed upon its release and hailed by the New Statesman as “like nothing else in the world” and “a work of genius.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Financier

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Description: Frank Cowperwood is a teenager living in Philadelphia when he comes across a lobster kept in a tank. As the lobster lunges at and devours the other sea creatures helplessly trapped with it, Frank decides that this pitiless example of nature red in tooth and claw is the most effective way of advancing in wealth and human affairs. After making some easy money acting as a middleman for a castile soap distributor, Frank quickly finds himself amassing a fortune in business and investments as the Civil War tears across America. Soon he finds himself willingly embroiled in an embezzlement scheme with the hapless city treasurer—only for it all to violently collapse when the Great Chicago Fire causes a stock market crash. The character of Frank Cowperwood and the events surrounding his life are based on the biography of the real-life streetcar tycoon Charles Yerkes, a man so reviled by his contemporaries that he attempted to rehabilitate his public image by building the Yerkes Observatory, which was to be at the time the world’s largest telescope. Frank, a ruthless and calculating man of acquisition, is a classic example of the type of warped and avaricious robber baron that became a popular stock character in fiction of the era, and that figured prominently in other milestone works, like The Forsyte Saga, that are critical of the spiritual rot that unimaginable wealth can engender in a hyper-capitalist society.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Everlasting Man

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: The Everlasting Man is inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History, which explains the history of mankind and religion as solely a product of natural selection and other material causes. In contrast, G. K. Chesterton presents the case for Christianity throughout history, by illustrating firstly, the uniqueness of man amongst the animals, and secondly, the uniqueness of Christ and the Church amongst other religions and philosophies. ritten in Chesterton’s typical style, already familiar to readers of Orthodoxy and Heretics, and ripe with humor and symbolism, The Everlasting Man doesn’t aim to be a scholarly history treatise. Rather, like the title of Wells’ work, Chesterton merely presents us his outline of history. It is in this outline that his Christian, specifically Catholic, perspective contrasts with secular views common in modern times.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Author: Peter Kropotkin

Description: Peter Kropotkin begins his autobiographical Memoirs in his childhood, in a landholding family in Russia. During his adolescence, he notes the difference between the life of the servant class and that of the aristocracy. He relates the political efforts to end serfdom, and the push by reformers for more radical change, which runs against a reactionary response from the Russian rulers. Graduating from military school, Kropotkin chooses an assignment in Siberia, and goes on geological expeditions to explore the eastern regions of the Russian Empire. Along the way he develops relationships with common peasants and workers, and wishes for a better life for them. After coming back to St. Petersburg and attending university, he starts spending time with like-minded intellectuals and activists, before he is arrested and put into prison. He eventually escapes Russia and spends the next part of his life in western Europe, running newspapers, organizing meetings, and pushing forward his ideas on social reform. Kropotkin was an anarchist, and did not believe change could be achieved through political methods. The masses would have to rise up and take what they felt was rightfully theirs. And yet Kropotkin was more intellectual than activist. He believed in improving the life of the poor through education, and decentralized, voluntary organizations. The Memoirs were published in 1899, while he was still quite active, with the momentous events of the early twentieth century still to come.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Anne of the Island

Author: L. M. Montgomery

Description: Anne Shirley leaves home to attend Redmond College and pursue a degree. Some of her classmates are going with her, including her childhood enemy turned friend Gilbert Blythe, while other childhood friends are staying in Avonlea to work, get married, and start families. She is also leaving behind her friends and family, but will stay in touch with them through letters and visits home during winter breaks and summer vacations. The story follows the adventures of Anne and her friends during their college years, focusing on the female relationships and emotional growth of the characters. Anne of the Island is chronologically the third novel in the Anne of Green Gables series, but is the fourth one to have been published. It’s written with L. M. Montgomery’s signature blend of humor, literary allusions, keen observations of human nature, and enchanting descriptions of the natural world.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Food of the Gods

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: In the early twentieth century, two scientists develop a substance to promote continuous growth in plants and animals. In testing it on poultry at an experimental farm, the “Food of the Gods” is carelessly scattered about, resulting in giant insects, giant rats, and so on. When anxious parents give it to sickly children, it creates a race of giant humans. Though there are many touches of humor in this somewhat satirical look at society and how one invention or discovery could overturn it, the book ends on a much more serious and thoughtful note, and includes a warning against unchecked technology in the hands of capitalism. It also points out how easily a rabble-rousing politician can incite hatred towards those who are different. The book was published under its full title, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, in 1904, and has since been used as the basis for a number of movies and comic books.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Shore Road Mystery

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: The city of Bayport is at the mercy of a ring of car thieves! Vehicles have been disappearing off of the well-traveled Shore Road for three weeks; eventually, the gang gets bolder and starts moving their sights to the city. With the police and even Fenton Hardy running into dead ends, the town is in an uproar. The ring runs like a well-oiled machine: no one sees the thieves and the cars seemingly disappear into thin air despite patrols on either end of the Shore Road. Incentivized by a victimized friend, the Hardy Boys are determined to bring down the gang … but at what cost? This is the sixth book of the Hardy boys series, first published in 1928 and then rewritten in 1964. While the author is credited to be Franklin W. Dixon, in reality, Leslie MacFarlane and Edward Stratemeyer are primarily responsible for the original, early volumes, including this one. David Grambs is primarily responsible for writing the revised version. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the original 1928 text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Hunting for Hidden Gold

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: During an extended winter holiday, the Hardy boys are summoned to Montana by their father to help with a case: recovering stolen gold. The trip out West is anything but easy; the boys’ fame and success as amateur detectives has reached their father’s enemies, who are determined to undermine a reunion. Facing dangers from man, beast, and nature, the Hardy boys embark on a journey to recover the missing gold and bring justice to the small mining town of Lucky Bottom. This is the fifth book of the Hardy boys series, first published in 1928. While the author is credited to be Franklin W. Dixon, in reality, Leslie MacFarlane and Edward Stratemeyer are primarily responsible for the early volumes, including this one. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the original 1928 text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Stover at Yale

Author: Owen Johnson

Description: Dink Stover was introduced to readers in earlier volumes of the Lawrenceville Stories as a brash young newcomer whose biggest ambition is to play football for his school. At the start of Stover at Yale he seems much the same, arriving at the prestigious university determined to captain the football team, earn a place in the most prestigious secret society, and generally become the hero of a much less interesting novel. Gradually, though, the novel shifts its focus, as both Stover and the novel move outside the comfortable world of Stover’s prep school chums and examine the ways in which the school fails to live up to its “democratic” ideals. Johnson never abandons the form of the school novel, but he stretches it to include types of heroism beyond the football field. The novel’s criticism of Yale’s powerful and prestigious secret societies caused controversy on its release, but it was more than a succès de scandale. Its unique combination of convention and ambition captured the public imagination, and for decades afterwards Dink Stover was shorthand for a certain type of undergraduate. The book is referenced even today by writers on American college life, and even put in an appearance in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Sea Mystery

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: A body of a man is discovered after a chance recovery of a crate from the bottom of a Welsh bay. The local police realize that this is outside their jurisdiction, and soon welcome Inspector French into the investigation. While there’s little to go on initially, French’s approach to methodically breaking down the problem and questioning everyone about everything soon starts to throw up some leads that show just how much care the murderer has put into covering their tracks. This is the fourth in Freeman Wills Crofts’ classic Inspector French series. French is never happy until every last clue and tidbit of information has been slotted into their rightful place, and his process for doing so is so methodical that the original cover proudly announced that the reader could “listen in to Scotland Yard!”

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Kural

Author: Thiruvalluvar

Description: Traditionally attributed to the weaver-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, the Kural is a philosophical text composed of 1,330 Tamil couplets called kurals. Written sometime before the 5th century CE, the Kural is a comprehensive ethical work divided into three parts, which address righteousness, wealth, and love respectively. (These largely correspond with the life objectives of dharma, artha, and kama found in Hindu thought and Sanskrit literature, omitting the fourth, moksha, or liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.) It’s celebrated as one of the foremost works of classic Tamil literature, having won high acclaim not only in its home country but also internationally among thinkers like Leo Tolstoy, who quoted from the Kural in his “Letter to a Hindu.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The House Without Windows

Author: Barbara Newhall Follett

Description: A young girl named Eepersip lives with her parents in a cottage, but she feels trapped within its confines, so she leaves home to live a freer life in the wild. After leaving her parents’ home, she establishes a life for herself outdoors, rejecting both the society of adults and the comforts of civilization. Initially, she is happy to live in a meadow near her family’s home, but over time she is tempted to seek out new natural environments to live in. Meanwhile, her parents attempt to locate their daughter and to bring her back home. Follett started writing the novel in 1923 at the age of 8, but the first draft was lost in a house fire, which led her to rewrite the entire work. It was eventually published to critical success in 1927, when she was just 12 years old.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Missing Chums

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: To their friends’ envy, Biff and Chet plan to take a boating vacation up the coast. The joy of sending them off soon turns to anxiety as neither of them make contact with home for several days. Convinced that something’s happened to them, the Hardy boys and their friends go on a search filled with adventure and peril in hopes of retrieving their missing chums. This is the fourth book of the Hardy boys series, first published in 1928. While the author is credited to be Franklin W. Dixon, in reality, Leslie MacFarlane and Edward Stratemeyer are primarily responsible for the early volumes, including this one. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the original 1928 text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Honeycomb

Author: Dorothy M. Richardson

Description: Honeycomb is the third installment in Dorothy M. Richardson’s pioneering sequence of semi-autobiographical novels, Pilgrimage. Miriam Henderson, after spending time as a teacher in a German school in the first novel, Pointed Roofs, and in a suburban London school in the second, Backwater, has found a place as governess with a wealthy English family. From her perspective as an outsider she observes the lives of the wealthy women who live in, and visit, the house. At the same time, after her father’s disgrace Miriam’s own family faces challenges and changes—including her sisters’ marriages—leaving Miriam with a closer relationship, and a new understanding, of her mother.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mr. Incoul’s Misadventure

Author: Edgar Saltus

Description: After the sudden, untimely death of his wife, the wealthy Mr. Incoul proposes to Miss Maida Barhyte: “Marry me, and you will never want for anything again.” Young Maida, under pressure from her mother and facing a future as a housemaid, reluctantly agrees, on the condition that they live as though unmarried—as brother and sister would—until she feels they’ve each come into their own. They wed on these terms and subsequently embark on a honeymoon across Europe. But just as Maida begins to adjust to this unconventional arrangement, the unexpected occurs: at a bullfight in Spain, a former lover resurfaces, vying for her attention once more. Mr. Incoul remains blissfully unaware of this development. Or does he? In Mr. Incoul’s Misadventure, his first published work of fiction, Edgar Saltus eruditely applies the biting pessimism that he previously studied in his philosophical works The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Coming Race

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Description: An engineer encounters a strange sight while exploring a mine, and reluctantly reports it to the narrator. The two descend into the mine together, but an accident causes the narrator to fall through a crevice and into a secret subterranean world. The inhabitants seem to be an offshoot of an ancient human race who have been living and evolving underground. They have command over a fluid called vril, which gives them both great destructive and great creative and healing powers. Because of their ability to destroy so easily, their society has developed into a very peaceful, utopian one. They don’t eat or kill animals, and only take life that is a threat to their community. These people call themselves the Vril-ya, and consider themselves to have a superior form of government that has developed over many ages. While our narrator considers his native United States a great society that all should be proud of, the Vril-ya dismiss it as Koom-Posh (their word for “democracy”), which in their view is government by the ignorant, and destined to collapse into chaos. The above-ground world, with its achievements based on rivalry and conflict, is in contrast to the world of the Vril-ya, where personal achievement and honors are not pursued. The narrator spends some time exploring this society, but thinks about how, if ever, he will return home. But before he can return, he unwittingly becomes the object of romantic interest—putting his life in peril. The Coming Race was published anonymously in 1871, and is considered one of the earliest works of science fiction.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Vampire

Author: John William Polidori

Description: Aubrey, a young gentleman moving in London society of the early 1800s, meets the mysterious Lord Ruthven, recently arrived to London, at a party. Aubrey finds himself intrigued by the cold and expressionless Ruthven, and soon finds himself agreeing to travel with him on a trip across the continent. As their trip progresses, Aubrey is shocked at Ruthven’s sadistic and degenerate behavior, and can’t help but note how anyone who Ruthven meets ends up debauched and ruined. Dismayed by his new friend’s eagerness to wallow in depravity and licentiousness, Aubrey parts ways and goes to Greece. There he meets the young daughter of an innkeeper, who warns him of a local legend … the legend of the vampire. In the summer of 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont went to visit Lord Byron and his physician, John William Polidori, in Geneva for what was supposed to be a vacation of outdoor relaxation. Bad weather forced them to stay indoors, and to pass the time, Byron suggested a contest in which the participants try to compose the best ghost story. Mary Shelley composed what would become Frankenstein; Polidori composed “The Vampire,” the first appearance in Western literature of what we now recognize as the classic vampire trope. “The Vampire” was based on an unpublished fragment of a story by Byron. In 1819 Polidori published his story in the New Monthly Magazine, but the publisher, seemingly swept up in the Byromania surrounding the charismatic lord, misattributed the story to Byron himself. As the tale grew in popularity, both Byron and Polidori strenuously argued for the correct attribution; for a while, the best Polidori got was the removal of Byron’s name, but without the addition of his own. Buoyed by its association with the popular Lord Byron and playing straight into the public’s interest in Gothic fiction, “The Vampire” became a huge success, and the glamorous and charismatic figure of the undead aristocrat immediately began influencing contemporary writers. Eighty years later Bram Stoker would write Dracula, whose own Count, directly inspired by Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, would seal the vampire trope into the form still familiar to readers over a century later.

Subjects: horror

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Title: The Absolute at Large

Author: Karel Čapek

Description: The Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote his novel Továrna na absolutno in 1922. It was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1927 as The Absolute at Large. The novel is a satirical piece of science fiction, and starts with the invention of an “atomic engine” in the future year 1943 which can convert matter directly into energy. Such engines can operate machinery for months from a single bucket of coal. But the inventor quickly discovers that his engine has an unfortunate side-effect: It generates pure divinity as a waste product. The consequences of the wide-spread adoption of the new engines therefore gives rise to unexpected complications in human society. The novel is full of sardonic but incisive comments on society, capitalism and religion.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Candida

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a respectable socialist clergyman, spends his days giving lectures and sermons while his wife, Candida, sees to his comfortable London home. That home is disrupted by the arrival of the poet Eugene Marchbanks, who is in love with Candida and determined to rescue her from what he sees as an unromantic life. Shaw wrote Candida as a reaction to Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas, and especially A Doll’s House. But where Ibsen’s play is bleak and harrowing, Shaw’s answer takes the form of a conventional drawing-room comedy, complete with comic relief characters in the form of a Cockney capitalist and a short-tempered typist. Candida captured the public imagination by rejecting the traditional moral framing of this love triangle, with its choice between passion and duty. Instead Candida emerges as a new kind of heroine, skeptical both of her husband’s religion and her lover’s idealism. The play became so popular in New York that one newspaper described the phenomenon as “Candidamania.” Shaw himself characteristically complained that many of those obsessed with the play had missed the point, later satirizing the “Candidamaniacs” themselves in his short play “How He Lied to Her Husband.”

Subjects: drama

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Title: David Harum

Author: Edward Noyes Westcott

Description: John Lenox meets an old acquaintance, Mary Blake, aboard a ship bound for New York from Europe, and a romance begins to blossom. The love interest continues to grow until Mary must move away for warmer climes in order to help her sister care for her ailing husband. Not long after this loss, John experiences an even greater one; he then stumbles upon, and accepts, an opportunity to move to a small village in upstate New York to work for a country banker. His new boss, David Harum, is not only a banker, but also partakes in horse-trading. David turns out to be a uniquely quaint, humorous, and original character who shares with John his many wise views on life. The lighthearted nature and humor of the novel are in contrast with the circumstances in which it was written; Edward Noyes Westcott completed the work on his deathbed, and it was not published until six months after his death. It was an immediate success, selling over half a million copies in its first two years. David Harum was later adapted as a play, a silent film, a talking film, and a radio serial program. Many similarities have been noted between the novel’s character David Harum of Homeville, NY and the real-life David Hannum of Homer, NY, who was also a banker and horse-trader. Hannum is best remembered for his role in the Cardiff Giant hoax, in which he claimed to have found the petrified remains of a ten foot tall man buried in Cardiff, NY.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Last Post

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: Some time has passed since the end of the Great War and the Armistice Day celebration in A Man Could Stand Up—, and Christopher Tietjens and his partner Valentine Wannop are living together with his brother Mark and Mark’s French wife Marie Léonie in a small cottage in the English countryside. Mark has suffered an illness and is now an invalid, tenderly cared for by Marie Léonie. Christopher has turned to dealing antique English furniture to American buyers, and is away on business for much of the novel. The Tietjens’ ancestral home, Groby, is now inhabited by an American renter, and Sylvia, Christopher’s melodramatic and treacherous wife, lurks in the background, her bag of vengeful tricks not yet depleted. The events of the novel take place in a window of just a few hours, but the stream-of-consciousness style invites the reader deep into the thoughts of each of the major characters in the Parade’s End saga—with the notable exception of Christopher. Mark, paralyzed and mute but aware of his surroundings, is the major narrator, but the narrative dips in and out of the thoughts of Marie Léonie, Valentine, Sylvia, and others. Like the rest of the Parade’s End saga, The Last Post is a complex, dense thematic exploration of the Great War and its generational consequences. Christopher, the “last Tory” and embodiment of the traditional English gentleman, finds himself surviving by literally selling off his country’s physical heritage to the newly ascendant American empire. Mark, an immensely wealthy English landowner, suddenly finds himself not just impotent physically, but, misled by cruel rumors, feuding emotionally with his brother, with each of them unable to forgive the other. Meanwhile Sylvia, the avatar of the decadence, pettiness, and stupidity of the old guard, devotes her energies to striking a mortal blow against her own kind by tricking the American renter into cutting down Groby Great Tree, the very symbol of the stalwart and ancient Tietjens—and English—spirit. Graham Greene, when editing the Parade’s End saga for the Bodley Head in 1962, famously omitted The Last Post, publishing the saga as a trilogy and not a tetralogy. He considered this concluding volume to be unnecessarily sentimental, tying up loose ends that were better left ambiguously unresolved at the end of A Man Could Stand Up—. But critical opinion has since shifted, and The Last Post now stands proudly as a multifaceted and unashamedly modernist capstone to what some consider to be one of the greatest series in 20th century English letters.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Secret of the Old Mill

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: During a hike of the countryside, the Hardy boys and their pals learn that an abandoned mill has recently gotten new owners. When the boys go to look, the new owners claim to be producing a new breakfast food, field a few questions, and then shoo the boys away. But that’s enough to make the Hardy boys suspicious. Are the men to be trusted? Are they merely surly scientists, or are they covering up a darker secret? This is the third book of the Hardy boys series, first published in 1927. It was rewritten in 1962; this Standard Ebook contains the original 1927 text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: The Three Just Men

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Having recently been pardoned by the British government, the Just Men continue their mission to bring criminals to justice, but now by employing mostly legal means. London has been terrorized with the death of several men connected with Doktor Oberzohn, the head of an international cartel, with the deaths thought to have been caused by an escaped venomous snake. After forming a detective agency, the Just Men begin working with Scotland Yard to investigate Oberzohn, who is also suspected of having instigated revolts and overthrown governments for profit. In the course of their investigation, the Just Men become intrigued by the sudden interest Oberzohn has shown in a simple farm girl named Mirabelle Leicester, and her connection with her dead father’s Angolan land claim.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Book of Jade

Author: David Park Barnitz

Description: Anyone who reads The Book of Jade will quickly notice a few things: the author of this collection of poems holds a pessimistic, misanthropic view of life, and his obsessions lean towards the macabre, particularly focusing on themes of death, darkness, graves, corpses, and a longing to rest among the worms. The collection presents a world where God is portrayed as foolish, other people as imbeciles, and the fate of the dead as something to be envied. Certainly not light-hearted fare! Although The Book of Jade was initially published anonymously, it didn’t take long for readers to discover the identity of its author when the obituary of David Park Barnitz, a young oriental studies scholar who passed away mere weeks after the book’s publication, admitted as much. Though somewhat uneven in quality, the work has garnered admiration from figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Donald Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith, firmly establishing its place in the canon of decadent literature. This edition includes all the poems of the original 1901 edition, as well as the poem “After-Life,” which was published in Overland Monthly.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Author: John Maynard Keynes

Description: Before becoming one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated economists, John Maynard Keynes served as a financial representative for the British Treasury at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to negotiate the Versailles treaty which would officially end World War I. Keynes resigned from the treasury in protest about a month before the final treaty was signed, and The Economic Consequences of the Peace describes his reasons for doing so. Keynes contends that domestic political considerations and a desire for revenge led to an unreasonably high burden being placed on the defeated Germany. In making the argument he paints unflattering portraits of the then French President Georges Clemenceau, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and the American President Woodrow Wilson. According to Keynes, the effect of a negotiated treaty on the population of an already impoverished enemy was considered a far lower priority than disputes involving borders. Meanwhile, the exceptionally high cost of reparations placed on an economically spent Germany could never be repaid, and was mainly an act of political grandstanding. Keynes predicted widespread suffering in the defeated powers, resulting in a turn towards political extremism. Unfortunately, subsequent events would prove his predictions right. The Economic Consequences of the Peace was an immediate bestseller in both the U.S. and the U.K. and has never been out of print. Though today some economists contend that Keynes may have been overly pessimistic about Germany’s ability to pay and the leniency of the Allies, many of the recommendations presented in the book were adopted as part of the Marshall Plan after the conclusion of World War II.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: H. Beam Piper was a well-regarded and popular American science fiction author active in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, who published many science fiction short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels. One major strand in his writing is envisioning a future history based on human civilization expanding throughout the galaxy, with a rather paternalistic approach to sentient alien species. Another important theme was Piper’s concept of “Paratime”: the idea that there are many parallel timelines branching off from each other, and that it’s possible—with the right technology—to move, and even carry out commerce, between these different timelines. Many of these stories are also frequently feature a rather tongue-in-cheek humor. This collection covers a wide range of his shorter fiction, almost all of which was published in various American science fiction magazines. One additional story included in this collection, “Rebel Raider,” however, is not science fiction or fantasy but a lightly fictionalized account of events in the U.S. Civil War. A few of the stories were written in collaboration with John J. McGuire.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Ghost Stories

Author: E. F. Benson

Description: E. F. Benson was a prolific writer of both novels and short stories, but he’s perhaps most famous for his ghost stories. These stories range widely in tone, from the quietly atmospheric country road in “The Dust-Cloud,” to the slick gruesome body horror in “Caterpillars,” to the chuckles elicited in the satirical “Mr. Tilly’s Séance,” to the Gothic terror in what might be Benson’s most famous ghost story, “The Room in the Tower.” These stories were all largely published as one-offs in various magazines before later being compiled into a series of collections by his publisher. Today they from a foundation of the genre, having influenced writers for decades.

Subjects: fiction, horror, shorts

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Title: World’s End

Author: Richard Jefferies

Description: World’s End is Richard Jefferies’ third book. He had not yet settled into the nature-focused style that would come to define his later works, and it was only incrementally more successful than his previous two novels. However, contemporary critics noted his improved plotting and the more believable motives of his characters. The novel documents the rise of a great city, Stirmingham, the enormous wealth of its founder, and a plot to acquire the founder’s estate by any means necessary. Caught up in the middle are Aymer and Violet, two young lovers engaged to be married.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Call Mr. Fortune

Author: H. C. Bailey

Description: Call Mr. Fortune is the first set of short stories featuring Reggie Fortune, a detective who solves mysteries using his medical talent and “unequaled sanity of judgment.” The first case finds him suspecting that his patient might have been a victim of a failed assassination. In “The Hottentot Venus,” Mr. Fortune’s investigation into some incidents at his acquaintance’s all-girls school leads him into a predicament; meanwhile, what seems to be an ordinary leak scandal in “The Business Minister” is soon complicated by the discovery of a dead body, which seems to be unrelated to the leak, yet holds the key to the truth. Each of the cases in the collection characterizes Mr. Fortune as not only an extraordinary detective, but also an excellent doctor.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: Melmoth the Wanderer

Author: Charles Robert Maturin

Description: The Gothic novel of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often feature charismatic villains and brooding Byronic heroes. Melmoth, the mysterious title character, is both of these in this, Maturin’s best-known work and one of the last of the classic Gothic novels. Melmoth the Wanderer is a slow-burning supernatural story of suspense and horror that follows the menacing, ageless Wanderer through a complex web of nested stories within stories, told by his would-be victims and others who have crossed his path over his unnaturally long life. Along the way the tales take us from nineteenth-century Ireland, to utopian Indian islands, to a romantic castle in the seventeenth-century English countryside, to Spain in the days of the Inquisition, where human horrors vie with the supernatural. Maturin’s influence on the modern horror novel can be seen in later works like Dracula, another novel that follows its title character across Europe, while weaving the tales of different narrators into a portrait of a mysterious and terrifying figure.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: The Well of the Saints

Author: J. M. Synge

Description: The Well of the Saints opens with the arrival of a wandering holy man and his can of water from a remote holy well to a small Irish village, promising to restore the sight of the blind beggars who live by the crossroads there. Synge uses this simple story to expose and ridicule the pretensions and hypocrisies of every character in the story—the holy, the lowly, and the respectable alike. His ruthless and irreverent comedy—and especially his treatment of the holy man, and by implication, the Catholic Church—enraged contemporary critics. This same satirical style is what would later lead to riots in Dublin and New York on the premiere of his next play, The Playboy of the Western World.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

Author: Mark Rutherford

Description: Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography concludes on the sad note of the death of his two close friends, and on his settling into the life of a journalist in London, having abandoned his previous calling as a dissenting minister. His (fictional) editor, Reuben Shapcott, has managed to track down the sequel—mentioned as having been lost at the end of the Autobiography—and this manuscript is now presented as Mark Rutherford’s “deliverance,” although a deliverance from what, and to what, remains unstated. Rutherford has settled into a dreary London life, relieved on Sundays by a meeting established with a friend that seeks to improve the lot of the lower-class working poor whose desperate circumstances strike Rutherford so deeply. As these efforts unfold, some threads from his past life re-emerge into his present and are taken up again, refining his peculiar set of commitments. In spite of the confessional nature of the narrative, just what constitutes those beliefs remains elusive, except for the clear point that reconciliation, for Rutherford, has to do with the recovery of contentment in a broken world. As with the Autobiography, the uneasy blend of fact and fiction remains. In his book Some Late Victorian Attitudes, the literary critic David Daiches wrote an extended essay on Rutherford’s work (as written under the pen name of William Hale White). Daiches considered the Deliverance and its predecessor “the finest and most sensitive account of the Victorian crisis of faith and its resolution.” Even more, he judged that, in these works, “William Hale White invented a new kind of novel, that is a kind of fable that is much richer and more complex than a fable, that is autobiography yet which transcends autobiography, … that is a ‘novel of ideas’ while remaining a quietly honest narrative deeply human in its significance and genuinely moving as a human document.” This edition of Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance concludes with two essays added by Shapcott from among Rutherford’s papers, sometimes omitted in reprints. Both appendices inform the reader’s understanding of Rutherford’s beliefs.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Law of the Four Just Men

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: A group of wealthy vigilantes known as The Four Just Men are famous for their ability to punish criminals that have evaded the authorities. In this collection of short stories, the Just Men set their sights not only on murderers, kidnappers, and embezzlers, but also on those wrongfully convicted. Often the pursuits of the Just Men require the unwitting assistance of the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. The ten short stories in this collection were originally published separately in The Strand Magazine and the The Novel Magazine in 1921.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: Culture and Anarchy

Author: Matthew Arnold

Description: In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold sets out what he sees as the major flaws in the various classes of British society: the aristocrats are too out of touch with mainstream society; the middle class has energy but needs refinement; and the working class doesn’t know what it wants. Arnold worries that democratic freedom will devolve into anarchy, and argues that culture—“the best which has been thought and said”—must be developed in each person in order to achieve perfection. Incubating culture in this way will provide the cohesion needed to keep society together. Arnold places the collective identity of the people in the State, and yet as a British liberal, seems to understand his countrymen’s mistrust of a centralized authority. He leaves it to each person to look inward, to be well informed, to cultivate the kinds of things that will bring about “sweetness and light,” which are his terms to represent beauty and intelligence. He sees each class as fixed on certain “stock notions.” But rather than look for a “rival fetish” to take the place of any such false notion, society should “turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question.” These writings came at a time of great political, social, scientific, and religious change, and attempted to provide a blueprint for society to navigate through it all. Culture and Anarchy was first published as a series of essays in Cornhill Magazine, and then was collected into a book in 1869. This ebook is based on a 1925 edition, which is essentially the 1882 third edition.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Plague of Pythons

Author: Frederik Pohl

Description: Chandler is on trial for rape and murder in a world where such acts have become commonplace due to spontaneous, unexplained demonic “possessions.” His trial is deemed necessary, as the location where his acts were carried out was assumed to be immune to such possessions. Chandler’s trial ends with his exile and his being branded on the forehead. His experiences after the trial take him far from his home and put him on the trail of the source of these mysterious possessions. First serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1962, Frederik Pohl’s Plague of Pythons was later published as a novel in 1965, and then further revised and re-published under the title Demon in the Skull in 1984. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first Galaxy serialization.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Human Nature and Conduct

Author: John Dewey

Description: Delivered as a series of lectures at Stanford University in the spring of 1918, the pragmatist John Dewey introduces a theory of morals that draws upon the observation that social environment plays a prominent role in the development of human thought and society. Dewey takes issue with the then-popular religious view that morality is an internal quality that can be separated from personal conduct and its effects on society. But, in classic pragmatic tradition, he also takes issue with the opposite extreme viewpoint: that observable outcomes are the only way to judge human conduct—or in other words, that “the end justifies the means.” Mechanically following instructions to produce a desired outcome misses something vitally human. These extreme views can be reconciled with the claim that while concrete material ends are important, the separation from intention is artificial. There is a constant evolution of the material environment, which leads to an evolution in the psychological environment and new desires. A society creates an environment, and this environment creates new feelings which lead to new customs and a new society. Thus, in a very real sense we are all connected to everyone else, not through feelings but though actions and their impacts—whether intentional, or much more often, unintentional and unobserved. This motivates us to take much more responsibility for our actions than their immediately observable effects. Dewey maintains that understanding how society, habits, impulses, and customs co-exist and evolve is the challenge for anyone who wants to create a fairer society. There may be ways to control these various factors to create that society, but those controls will not be static and must be updated based on observation. Touching upon his work in Democracy and Education he stresses again the importance of education in shaping how society functions.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Poetry

Author: Mina Loy

Description: Mina Loy tried her hand at many things: painting, prose, manifestos, and even lamp-making. She was, however, unquestionably most successful with poetry. Long under-appreciated (perhaps because of her unabashed writing on sexuality and feminism) she has in the last few decades gained critical acclaim as a key voice of the modernist movement. Loy’s somewhat chaotic life and relationships brought her into contact with many of the great artists and writers of the age. She spent time with Gertrude Stein and the Italian Futurists in Florence, before emigrating to New York and finding a circle centered around the magazine Others including William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. While she only published two books of poetry and a novel in her lifetime, the natural home for her work was the magazines she contributed to. This collection comprises all the poems by Mina Loy that are in the public domain, with the exception of “Love Songs,” which is an abridged version of “Songs to Joannes.” The poems are presented in chronological order of initial publication.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Circular Staircase

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Description: ealthy spinster Rachel Innes and her niece and nephew, Gertrude and Halsey, rent a country house called Sunnyside for the summer. Upon arrival, the butler reveals to them that he believes there’s a ghost in the house. During the first night, Rachel is roused from sleep by strange sounds. The next night she’s awakened by a revolver shot, and discovers a dead body at the foot of the house’s circular staircase. The investigation into the murder reveals the house and its owners, the Armstrong family, hold many secrets. The Circular Staircase was published in 1908 and is credited with pioneering the “Had I but known” school of mystery writing, a form of foreshadowing that hints at impending disaster through the narrator’s regrets of their actions. The novel was adapted as a silent film in 1915, and most notably as a hit Broadway play, “The Bat” in 1920.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Just Men of Cordova

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: The Just Men of Cordova, the third novel in the Four Just Men series, finds the Just Men seeking to bring right the wrongs of criminals in the world of upper-class high finance and horse racing. Colonel Black, a notorious London financier, has moved up in the world due to the convenient deaths of his investment partners. The Just Men soon catch wind that Dr. Essley, a colleague of Dr. Black’s, has purchased a small supply of an extremely fatal poison that leaves no trace on the victim, and so they recruit a fourth Just Man to help them in their work. But despite several warnings from the Just Men, Colonel Black continues his murderous ways. Can the now-four Just Men stop him? Edgar Wallace wrote The Just Men of Cordova some nine years after The Council of Justice, the previous novel in the series. During that time, Wallace had become increasing popular with the reading public—in fact, one of his publishers even claimed that he had written fully one quarter of all the books being sold in England.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford

Author: Mark Rutherford

Description: Born to a pious non-conformist home in the Midlands, Mark Rutherford trains for dissenting church ministry almost by default. Although outwardly not an especially devout young man, he nonetheless has depths to his spirit which lead him to seek meaning in his beliefs. As he settles into his first pastorate, Rutherford discovers that the substance of his creed is too faint to support his public ministry. As he reaches this crisis of faith, so too he reaches a point of crisis in personal relationships. The Autobiography is the first novel by Mark Rutherford, the pen name of William Hale White. Beyond the pseudonym, the novel’s “editor,” Reuben Shapcott, who ostensibly contributes the preface as well as the concluding paragraphs, is a figment of White’s imagination. Even after White’s identity as the real author of the novel was uncovered, readers continued to wonder just what the relationship was between author and character, as the boundary between them is difficult to discern. How much this work of “autobiography” is actually fiction remains an open question. By 1908 the Autobiography was being used as the leading example of what one essayist termed “autobiografiction,” or the blending of autobiography and fiction—an apt category for this story, in which so much of White’s real life is infused. As for the novel’s legacy, White’s contemporary, William Dean Howells, was deeply impressed by the novel, although he was also baffled by it. “We hardly know … whether to call [it] fiction,” he wrote in Harper’s Magazine, at a time when the true identity of the author was as yet unknown. Howells’s sense that “readers who can think and feel” would find themselves “deeply stirred by it” remains true well over a century later.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Calvary

Author: Octave Mirbeau

Description: Despite a troubled youth and harrowing experiences in the Franco-Prussian war, Jean Mintié is on the rise in Paris. He mingles in artistic circles and has modest success with his first writings. That all changes when he meets socialite Julie Roux. Feeling both intrigued and unsettled by her extravagance and outspokenness, he can’t shake her from his thoughts. Their ensuing affair, initially captivating, takes a sharp turn as other aspects of Julie’s personality come to the fore. Calvary, also commonly referred to by its French title Le Calvaire, is a tale of ruin, obsession and redemption. It marked Octave Mirbeau’s debut under his own name, after he anonymously penned no less than ten works for others. He didn’t have to look far for inspiration: the novel’s portrayal of Jean and Julie’s relationship parallels Mirbeau’s own disastrous love affair with the notorious Judith Vinmer. He would later revisit this exercise in “writing as trauma therapy” in his third book Sebastien Roch, a novel about sexual abuse at a Jesuit school for boys.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Behind a Mask

Author: Louisa May Alcott

Description: Behind a Mask is a short novel published by Louisa May Alcott, writing as A. M. Barnard, in 1866. It was largely forgotten until 1975 when it was republished by Madeleine B. Stern, causing it to become an important part of the critical study of Alcott’s body of work. Jean Muir is a governess recently employed by the Coventry family to educate their young daughter, Bella. Muir is charming and solicitous, but everything is not as it seems—it’s quickly revealed that she’s a actually an older actress, working under more duplicitous motives. The story follows Jean as she schemes for the affections of the Coventry men. It has been critically analyzed as a commentary on female agency, class struggle, and acting and theater—all controversial themes in Victorian England. Modern critics often treat the novel with feminist readings, as Muir is a powerful if deceptive figure that skillfully manages to hold the Coventry family tightly in her grasp.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Orley Farm

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: When the elderly magnate Sir Joseph Mason died, he left behind a very young widow and their little boy. This was his second marriage, the children by his first wife being fully grown with families of their own. He left his main Yorkshire estate to his eldest son, also Joseph Mason, but a codicil to his will left his town estate, Orley Farm, to the infant son of his second marriage. The eldest son believed his father intended to leave him the full estate, however, and the matter was taken up in court. The codicil was proved, despite irregularities, and Orley Farm became the home of Lady Mason and her boy, Lucius. This is the state of affairs as Orley Farm begins, with Lucius now coming of age and taking possession of his inheritance. Owing to his own ambitious and stern personality—something of a Mason family trait—he claims back some acres that a local solicitor had been managing. The aggrieved solicitor cannot let matters rest, goes back over old papers, and discovers evidence which he believes demonstrates that the eldest son, Joseph Mason, had been in the right all along. This sets in motion the main plot of the novel, declared already in its opening paragraph. But the plot thickens nicely and, as the legal case develops, a number of subplots emerge. The neighboring gentry, the lawyers, the judges, the witnesses—these each have their own tales to tell, and across generations: both the older ones who remember the original case, and the younger ones (contemporaries of Lucius Mason himself) embarking on adult life, with hopes and ideals of their own. As ever, Trollope will not (and, it appears, cannot) keep secrets from his readers. The inherent drama of “Did she? or didn’t she?” is of little concern to Trollope’s crafting of the plot. In his autobiography he expresses some regret that he didn’t withhold a little more from the reader to heighten the drama, although he was pleased overall with the story itself. Despite this, his chief gifts as a novelist reach maturity with Orley Farm—his insight into human nature in particular—and these gifts have ample scope for expression in a novel deeply engaged in the great themes of sin and forgiveness, greed and avarice, truth and justice. It’s no wonder that C. P. Snow includes Orley Farm as one of his recommended entry points into Trollope’s vast body of work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Cords of Vanity

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: The Cords of Vanity by James Branch Cabell is the thirteenth installment in his Biography of the Life of Manuel series. Robert Etheridge Townsend is an arrogant young man from a prominent wealthy family (he is the great-grandson of Jurgen of Poictesme). As a teenager, he falls in love with Stella, beginning the first of many love affairs. Townsend’s vanity allows him to proceed through these love affairs with disregard for the women who are the objects of his “affection.” As the years pass, he begins to mature, but still struggles to overcome the need to avoid any situation that may cause him unpleasantness. The Cords of Vanity was originally published in 1909, and was revised in 1920 (the edition on which this ebook is based) with an introduction by author Wilson Follett. Six of the chapters were originally published as short stories in the monthly literary magazine The Smart Set.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: Essays

Author: Errico Malatesta

Description: Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Errico Malatesta was a leader in the Italian anarchist movement. A prolific theoretician and propagandist, Malatesta outlined his anarchist views in articles and pamphlets like “Anarchy,” in which he defines anarchy as “society without government,” a situation that will equate to “complete liberty with complete solidarity.” Besides addressing general theoretical issues in his essays, Malatesta also commentated on contemporary events of his lifetime like World War I, during which he penned articles like “Pro-Government Anarchists” criticizing fellow anarchists who took the side of the Entente against the German-led Central Powers.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Marrow of Tradition

Author: Charles W. Chesnutt

Description: Following the events of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 and the sensationalist news reports and novels that framed the events as a race riot incited by members of the black community, The Marrow of Tradition was written as a critical response to these harmful reports and provided a perspective that had otherwise been ignored. Developed out of the stories and accounts provided by members of the black community in Wilmington and from his own experience growing up and living in North Carolina, the novel is a probable accounting of the events leading up to and surrounding the Wilmington massacre. On a hot and sultry night, Major Carteret sits anxiously beside his wife, Olivia, as she enters early labor. After the fall of the Southern Confederacy, Major Carteret’s family, one of the oldest and proudest in the state, fell to ruin, culminating in the deaths of his father and eldest brother. Only through winning the hand of Olivia Merkell did his fortunes turn around, and he goes on to found the Morning Chronicle, which becomes an influential paper among the discontented citizens. With the rising political power of the newly enfranchised black community, Major Carteret wishes for a radical change in direction for his state. Yet with the inauspicious birth of his child, his beliefs will come to be tested. Across town, a young Dr. Miller returns to Wilmington to lead a newly established hospital on the old Poindexter estate. Seeking to fulfill the growing need for medical care in the black community of Wilmington, Dr. Miller established a hospital that further served as a school for nursing with future aspirations for it to become a medical school. While respected among his colleagues, the young generation of black community members, Dr. Miller faces the challenges of being a black doctor from an older generation, and the growing restrictions being established by Jim Crow laws across the state.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The White Feather

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Sheen is a quiet, unassuming student, whose standing in the school’s social hierarchy is irrevocably damaged when he commits a sin of cowardice: he flees from a fight between some of his schoolmates and a group of local boys. This decision leads him to be swiftly and severely ostracized by his school community. Facing this scorn, Sheen must find a way to restore his honor. Originally serialized in The Captain magazine from 1905 to 1906, The White Feather is one of the first of P. G. Wodehouse’s many novels. Wodehouse, renowned for his wit, humor, and engaging storytelling, went on to become one of the most beloved English authors of the 20th century.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mysteries of Udolpho

Author: Ann Radcliffe

Description: The Mysteries of Udolpho is Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel, first published in four volumes in 1794. It’s a typical gothic novel: set in a large castle which experiences supposedly supernatural events, a cruel and cunning villain is opposed by a young, virtuous heroine, who experiences great terror in the hands of her adversary. Emily St. Aubert, the novel’s protagonist, loses her parents and is placed in the care of her aunt, who unwittingly puts her in great danger. Emily must outwit the count Montoni, her late guardian’s husband and a cruel and manipulating man, who attempts to deceive and coerce her. The hope of returning to her home in France and being reunited with her suitor Valancourt gives her the strength she needs to oppose the count’s schemes. The novel was parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, where that novel’s protagonist draws parallels between Udolpho and the people around her.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Day at a Time

Author: Archibald Alexander

Description: A Day at a Time, authored by Rev. Archibald Alexander in 1916, is a Christian devotional work set against the backdrop of World War I. This collection of daily meditations, crafted by a pastor, delves into themes of faith, morality, and spiritual introspection. Notably dedicated to the Admiral of the Grand Fleet of Great Britain, the book reflects the wartime context of its creation. ith its focus on timeless spiritual insights and the challenges of World War I, the book addresses the moral complexities individuals faced during this period. A Day at a Time also stands as a historical document, providing readers with a glimpse into the moral and spiritual atmosphere of the World War I era, offering solace and reflection amid turbulent times.

Subjects: spirituality

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Title: The Greene Murder Case

Author: S. S. Van Dine

Description: Philo Vance, the snobbish art collector turned amateur detective, finds his curiosity piqued by the shootings of two members of the Greene family household. Initially judged to be a burglary gone wrong, careful examination reveals the murders must have been carefully planned, and the perpetrator remains wholly elusive. As Vance and the New York police struggle to bring order to the Greene mansion, the murder attempts continue relentlessly. The Green Murder Case is the third entry in the Philo Vance series, and hearkens back to the Gothic roots of the detective genre. The melodramatic cast of characters, trapped together in a gloomy mansion and slowly decreasing in number, is almost Victorian in mood. Nevertheless, the investigation follows S. S. Van Dine’s established trajectory, with plenty of clues for Philo Vance (and the reader) to sift through in order to uncover the truth.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Chivalry

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: Chivalry, a collection of romantic tales written by the supposed medieval poet Nicolas of Caen, is the fifth installment in James Branch Cabell’s Biography of the Life of Manuel. The stories take place in medieval France and England, and involve royal figures from history. The theme of courtly love, where a knight preserves honor and stays true to his mistress, is common thread throughout. Characters take on the role of troubadour, singing of their love and devotion. The subtitle “Dizain des Reines” refers to a type of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French poetry featuring ten-line stanzas. Here, it corresponds to the ten stories and their respective queens. Chivalry was written in 1909. Later, Cabell developed the idea of arranging some of his works into a biographical series that traces the life and legacy of the fictional Dom Manuel. He revised Chivalry in 1921 to work Manuel into the storyline and connect it to his other works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: On the Art of Reading

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

Description: On the Art of Reading is a collection of lectures delivered by Arthur Quiller-Couch, a literary critic and professor at Cambridge, between 1916 and 1918. In these lectures, Quiller-Couch argues for the study of the masterpieces of English literature—Shakespeare, Milton, and so on. He opines that the most effective way of appreciating literature is to experience it as “What Is,” which is to say feeling as if one has become part of the story. Much of the lectures is devoted to studying ways in which teachers can engender that feeling in pupils—with Quiller-Couch going so far as to say that even small children can be taught to appreciate seemingly complex literature like The Tempest or classical poetry like Homer. Quiller-Couch also spends time discussing his then-controversial opinion that the English translation of the Bible, as well as many Greek classics, are masterpieces of English literature that deserve careful study not just for their religions or philosophical importance, but for their beautiful prose style. These lectures form a companion to his earlier collection of lectures, On the Art of Writing, which explore similar themes of the place of writing and literature in the intellectual firmament.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Victory Odes

Author: Pindar

Description: The victory odes, or epinikia, are a series of poems composed by the ancient Greek poet Pindar to commemorate the triumphs of athletes who competed in various Panhellenic games like the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian Games. The poems are known for their intricate complexity, which combines praise for the athletes, mythological references, moral reflections, and philosophical musings. The victory odes are considered to be the most complete works by Pindar that have survived from antiquity, as the rest of his works only exist in papyrus fragments. These odes provide valuable insights into the ancient Greek world, as they reveal how the Greeks celebrated their athletic heroes, and the cultural significance of athletic competition in ancient Greece.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Behind That Curtain

Author: Earl Derr Biggers

Description: Behind That Curtain, published in 1928, finds Charlie Chan in San Francisco preparing to return to Honolulu after a working holiday. He meets a Sir Frederic Bruce from Scotland Yard, who is following the trail of a woman who disappeared fifteen years before. The two attend a dinner party together—where Sir Frederic is murdered. Chan is then pressed to delay his return to Hawaii to assist in the murder investigation. Before Charlie can find the murderer, he must find the missing woman. Because the previous Chan novel, The Chinese Parrot, was so well received, Earl Derr Biggers was paid an impressive $25,000 for a serialized version of Behind That Curtain by The Saturday Evening Post The novel was adapted for film in 1929.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Fernando Pessoa

Description: Fernando Pessoa is best known for his heteronyms, personas under which he wrote some of the most famous prose in Portuguese literature. Educated at an English-speaking school in Durban, South Africa, Pessoa developed a considerable command of English and continued to write privately in the language throughout his life. Presented here are Pessoa’s early collections 35 Sonnets and English Poems, as well as two poems published individually in periodicals before 1929. All were written and published in English under Pessoa’s own name, and compared to Pessoa’s later work in Portuguese, none of them are especially well-regarded by critics. Pessoa’s aim in 35 Sonnets is to scale the same heights that Shakespeare did with the form, but his efforts have been received less as an approximation of the latter’s achievement than a pastiche of it. Among the strains and contortions characterizing Pessoa’s imitation of Elizabethan English, there are nevertheless flashes of linguistic and metrical felicity as he surveys themes of despair, unrequited love, the fraughtness of human connection, and the mystery of the universe. The sonnets stand in sharp thematic contrast to the poems in Pessoa’s second collection, English Poems. The first of them, “Antinous,” imagines the Roman emperor Hadrian’s perspective on his relationship with the Greek youth Antinous. Detailing Hadrian’s devotion to Antinous after the latter’s death, it has been called by Pessoa’s most recent biographer Richard Zenith “the most compelling love poem that Pessoa would ever write.” “Epithalamium” has been understood by critics as a response to Pessoa’s reading of Spenser’s ode “Epithalamion.” The sexual elements latent in Spenser’s poem are made aggressively explicit in Pessoa’s version. In his letters, Pessoa singled out the two longer poems in English Poems as “clearly obscene,” and claimed that they were the only works of his to qualify as such. He explained to his first biographer that composing them was a way of eliminating the ideas they contained from his mind. Of biographical interest is that the poems that Pessoa himself regarded as obscene are among the only works whose publication he took the trouble to self-finance during his lifetime; further, he was content to publish them under his own name. Despite failing to achieve critical acclaim, the poems in this compilation provide insight into Pessoa’s early literary concerns and establish that the beginning of his poetic career was marked by intense ambition and audacious self-assurance.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: On the Art of Writing

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

Description: Arthur Quiller-Couch had a distinguished career as a writer and literary critic before being appointed the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. Shortly afterwards, he delivered this series of lectures on the history, and tasteful composition of, English prose. His core advice is that the effective writer writes with accuracy, perspicuity, persuasion, and appropriateness. He implores writers to avoid jargon, and along the way he drops that famous line that modern writers love to quote: “Murder your darlings.” Though ostensibly focused on the craft of writing, these lectures cover much more than just that; because Quiller-Couch insists that great writers must first read the giants of English literature, he spends a good deal of time covering the history of English prose and literature, going as far back as the Greeks and Beowulf, before taking the opportunity to criticize the way English has been taught in schools and universities. Less of an instructional book and more of a survey of some of the finest—and some the worst—English prose, The Art of Writing is still frequently quoted today.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: At the Mountains of Madness

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Description: Dr. William Dyer of New England’s Miskatonic University recounts his experiences on an Antarctic expedition leading to strange, enormous mountains deep within the frozen continent, hiding prehuman horrors only spoken of in esoteric tomes. Reflecting H. P. Lovecraft’s interest in the Antarctic—a continent still very unknown in the 1930s—this story gives a detailed account of the geology and history of Lovecraft’s universe. The dry, scientific text gradually becomes more suspenseful as the expedition uncovers more and more of the cosmic horrors Lovecraft became famous for. Taking inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and geological discoveries in his time, as well as building on his world established in previous works, At the Mountains of Madness establishes a story following the natural sense of mystery evoked by the frozen and uninhabited southernmost continent.

Subjects: adventure, horror, science fiction

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Title: The Council of Justice

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: The Red Hundred, an anarchist organization led by a woman of unmatched oratorical skill known as the Woman of Gratz, has set its sight on the destruction of several British institutions. The Four Just Men, a band of wealthy gentlemen notorious for punishing those unreachable by conventional justice, appear to be the only group capable of opposing them. After thwarting The Red Hundred’s plans by successfully assassinating their prominent ringleaders, Manfred, a member of the Four Just Men, is betrayed, captured, and sentenced to death. As the date of Manfred’s execution draws near, his mood remains curiously upbeat. Does he know something the authorities don’t? This book was published in 1908, a low point in Edgar Wallace’s career. Finding his popularity waning, he sold this book for only seventy or eighty pounds to try to keep the creditors at bay. Luckily for him, shortly after The Council of Justice was published Wallace went on to write his very successful Sanders of the River series, making him one of the most widely read British authors of his time.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Hadrian the Seventh

Author: Frederick Rolfe

Description: George Arthur Rose aspired to the priesthood, but after being much abused and taken advantage of for many years by his Catholic brothers, he finds himself disillusioned with humanity. But just as the secret conclave in Rome is deadlocked in the election of the next Pope, he finds himself rediscovered. A compromise in the election results in Rose being chosen for the office, and he styles himself as Hadrian the Seventh. With his new authority, he implements church reforms and a program to bring Christian order to the nations of the world. Frederick Rolfe was considered an eccentric, as evidenced by his often-idiosyncratic spelling (“Xystine Chapel”) and made-up words like “contortuplications” and “occession.” Hadrian the Seventh, written under the pen name of “Baron Corvo,” is a novel of wish-fulfillment, reflecting Rolfe’s vision of how he wants to order the world given unlimited power. Written before the world wars and amid the increasing secularization of twentieth century society, it was perhaps almost-plausible to think that a religious figure could get everyone on the same program merely by moral persuasion.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Langston Hughes

Description: Langston Hughes was a leading poet in the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer in the form of jazz poetry. While working as a hotel busboy in Washington, D.C. in the early 1920s, he was “discovered” by fellow poet Vachel Lindsay, who helped publicize his work. In 1926 he published his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, which opens with one of his best-known poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Themes he explores in his poetry include the lives of the Black working class, jazz and blues music, and race consciousness. This Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of the publicly accessible poems by Langston Hughes known to be in the U.S. public domain, which is limited to about the first decade of his work.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Author: Mary Seacole

Description: Mary Seacole gained skills as a “doctress,” a practitioner of traditional medicine, in her younger days. This lively read is her account of her life and travels. Despite the fascinating story, it languished in obscurity—just another Victorian travelogue, perhaps. Some suggest that Seacole’s accomplishments in medicine have in part been overshadowed by her more famous contemporary Florence Nightingale, the Victorian nurse famous for pioneering the modern practice of nursing, and who is encountered at a couple points in Seacole’s book. After Seacole was widowed, she put her skills to use in this more entrepreneurial phase of her life in and around the Panama. As if her exploits there were not sufficiently eventful, she felt the tug to join in the war effort in the Crimea. Her experience of attempting to be recruited as a nurse gives some insight into the racism at work in the selection process. Undeterred, she made her own way to the Crimea, where her resourcefulness, medical knowledge, and simple compassion were put to good use. Her crisp account of her experiences was taken down by her amanuensis, known only as “W. J. S.,” who has never been identified. In more recent years, appreciation for Seacole and her accomplishments has grown. She topped a 2003 poll to identify and celebrate “100 Great Black Britons,” and appeared also in its 2020 (unranked) re-run. The historian Tom Holland cites Seacole when arguing for the preservation of the material archives of “ordinary people.” While some controversy continues to simmer—largely in connection with Florence Nightingale’s advocates—her place in the public imagination is assured.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Hunger

Author: Knut Hamsun

Description: Hunger recounts the physical and mental decline of an aspiring writer struggling to establish himself in late nineteenth-century Christiania. Initially hungry and weeks behind on his rent, the unnamed protagonist becomes increasingly destitute and, as his starvation progresses, increasingly irrational. He tries, often failing, to pawn as many of his remaining possessions as he can spare, down to his coat buttons and old blanket. When the protagonist leaves the cramped lodgings he cannot afford, he sleeps on benches and streets at night; during the day he tries desperately both to acquire any amount of money and to maintain a front of respectability. At the same time, he attempts to compose journalistic and literary works to sell and becomes infatuated with a woman he feels compelled to harass on the street, for whom he coins the nonsense name “Ylajali.” The book has been received as a proto-modernist portrait of urban alienation; it is also a study of a particular character, based on that of Hamsun himself, whose own experiences of severe hunger, financial hardship and literary ambition supplied the raw material for the work. Like the unnamed protagonist, Hamsun’s disheveled and emaciated appearance shocked the editor to whom he delivered the first part of his manuscript, impelling the latter to immediately give the author five kroner, just as the editor in Hunger sends money to the protagonist. Various other autobiographical details have been identified in the book, including one of Hamsun’s places of residence in Oslo, leading biographer Robert Ferguson to label Hunger “Hamsun’s self-portrait in fiction.” Often described as plotless, Hunger was Hamsun’s first published novel, which as he wrote to Danish literary critic Georg Brandes “must not be regarded as a novel.” To Hamsun, traditionally “novelistic” structures were incompatible with his own fascination, namely “the endless motion of [his] own mind.” Instead, as he wrote to his friend Erik Frydenlund, he viewed the book as “a series of analyses.” These analyses predominantly concern the protagonist’s psychology: the emotions and fantasies of his turbulent inner life are recorded in detail, periods of manic creativity giving way to violent, and at times self-punishing, despair. When through various strokes of luck he comes into small amounts of money, he tends to squander it immediately out of spite, pride or inappropriate generosity, only to be racked once again with shame over what he regards as the disgrace of his poverty. In this Hunger stands as a timeless description of the distinctive instability, irrationality, and desperation that accompany extreme starvation; Hamsun’s further aim, expressed to Georg Brandes, was to depict “the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” An extract from the book was published in November 1888 in the Danish periodical Ny Jord, as Hamsun needed the money. The anonymous excerpt was a sensation in the Danish-speaking world of letters and, once the identity of its author became known, drew Hamsun into the prestigious literary circles of Copenhagen. When the completed book was published nineteen months later, it brought its author international fame, bolstered by its rapid translation into German one month after its publication in Denmark and Norway. As with the rest of Hamsun’s oeuvre, Hunger’s popularity waned drastically after the Second World War due to the author’s support of Nazism, and this element of the author’s biography continues to constrain its readership today. However, the apolitical, inwardly focused Hunger has been recognized by critics as one of Hamsun’s best works, a classic of Norwegian literature and an important forerunner of twentieth-century modernism. This Standard Ebooks edition is the translation by George Egerton, pseudonym of writer and translator Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright. Originally censored in part, the 1921 edition reproduced here restores the missing sections.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Four Just Men

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: ith his determination to push through a controversial government bill that would allow the forced return of political refugees to their country of origin, the British Foreign Secretary has become the target of the “Four Just Men,” a vigilante group famous for executing those who cannot be reached by traditional law. hen the Four send warning letters threatening the Foreign Secretary with death if the government doesn’t withdraw the bill, the police are tasked with safeguarding his life. But despite numerous precautions and several clues leading to the identification of one of the Four, the nefarious group continues to move closer to achieving their goal as the deadline draws nearer. In an effort to boost sales, Wallace self-published The Four Just Men without a conclusion, and held a contest offering £500 to any reader who could guess how the mystery ends. Unfortunately for Wallace, he failed to include a limitations clause to the contest; so, when the bestselling book attracted a large number of correct responses to the contest, he was legally obligated to pay each respondent the prize money, driving him into bankruptcy. He was then forced to sell the rights to the book for a mere £75. This edition includes Wallace’s bank-breaking ending. The Four Just Men was adapted for film in 1921 and 1939 and for television in 1959.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: Oscar Wilde wrote in almost every form available to him, but he first gained fame and notoriety as a poet. It was as a poet that he became one of the leading lights of the Aesthetic movement, and he continued to write verse to the end of his life—in fact the only major work Wilde published between his release from prison and his death was the long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” originally published under the pseudonym “C.3.3,” representing the number of his prison cell. Those who only know Wilde as the witty author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray will see a different Wilde in these poems: by turns reflective, sensuous, romantic and devoutly religious, but always with Wilde’s unerring eye for a telling phrase and his commitment to the ideals of the aesthetic movement, to art and beauty for their own sake.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Roads to Freedom

Author: Bertrand Russell

Description: In Roads to Freedom, written at the close of World War I in 1918, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell compares and contrasts three tendencies of socialist thought: Marxism (which Russell refers to as “State Socialism” or simply “Socialism”), Anarchism, and Syndicalism. After giving a historical outline of each ideology, Russell goes on to examine whether the ideal societies proposed by these ideologies would be practicable in reality and how issues such as wages, crime, international relations, art, and science would be addressed by these societies. He comes to the conclusion that the best practicable society is a form of Guild Socialism incorporating some of the proposals of Anarchism, like universal provision of basic needs.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Leaves of Grass

Author: Walt Whitman

Description: Walt Whitman consciously set out to forge a personal path for himself as a poet. Inspired by contemporaries like Emerson who expressed a need for a new, uniquely American style of poetry, Whitman eschewed conventions he saw as outdated or undemocratic. Setting aside traditional rhyme, meter, and even brevity, Whitman favored a style that was declarative, direct, and maximalist. For subject matter he focused on the common individual, as democratic representative of all humanity, and the natural world of which humanity exists as an integral part. “Song of Myself” is perhaps the most well-known exemplar of this aesthetic. hitman’s poetic career took an abrupt turn during the American Civil War, and his poems from that time draw on his experiences volunteering at military hospitals. These, coupled with his elegy for President Lincoln after his assassination (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), helped to cement Whitman’s position as a particularly American voice. Among Whitman’s recurring themes are the embracing of sensual pleasures, including frank acknowledgments of homosexuality. This latter aspect drove several contemporary critics to reject his work as indecent. Threats of censorship and outright banning encouraged his supporters to speak more publicly in defense of his work, however, and Whitman is now considered to be one of America’s most important poets. Leaves of Grass was continually edited and extended over most of Whitman’s life. Months before his death, he announced that the next edition would be the complete and definitive one. Referred to now as the “deathbed edition,” it was published in 1892 by Whitman’s literary executors, and is the basis for this ebook.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Orlando

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: Originally published in 1928, Orlando, one of Virginia Woolf’s better-known novels, provides a splendid example of Modernist experimentation with genre and storytelling. Orlando is a young Elizabethan nobleman who loves writing poetry as much as he does hunting, wrestling with the household dogs, and indulging in a fine night’s carouse. After being favored by Queen Elizabeth herself, he falls tragically in love. But as he nurses a decades-long heartbreak, Orlando realizes that poetry provides little solace. Sometime in the eighteenth century he escapes England as an ambassador to Turkey, where after a mysterious illness he awakens as a woman—but still not a published author. While the arts of reading, writing, criticism expand, Orlando’s poetic aspirations remain frustrated until the twentieth century, when, having returned to England, she finds love, life, and her voice at last. On its surface the biography of a fantastic Elizabethan nobleman, the novel is frequently described as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, who had a lengthy affair with Woolf in the early 1920s and whose family history undergirds much of the detail of Orlando’s life and home. Orlando also features Woolf’s masterful stream of consciousness technique, employed metafictionally as Orlando and the narrator compose in tandem the novel’s intricate final chapter. Most importantly, Orlando’s absurd fantasy is underpinned by wit and humor: Orlando is a comic—sometimes satirical—text, revealing a side of Woolf rarely seen in her earlier work. A lighthearted romp of a book, Orlando remains resolutely literary and asks lingering questions about the construction of gender, the intersection between “the spirit of the age” and artistic creation, and what loving another person really means. Woolf was one of the most important Modernist writers, and Orlando reveals her at her playful, shimmering—dare we say sexy?—best.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Decline and Fall

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Description: Paul Pennyfeather is a second-year theology student who, as a result of mistaken identity, has his “education discontinued for personal reasons.” He ends up as a schoolmaster at a fourth-rate school, hired despite not meeting any of the qualifications in their advertisement. He there encounters a cornucopia of eccentric characters, including another master who has a wooden leg, a former clergyman with capital-D Doubts, and a servant who tells everyone he’s rich, but with a different tale for each about why he’s posing as a servant. Paul’s time at school leads to romance with a student’s mother, and that in turn leads to enormous complications in Paul’s life. Inspired in part by his own experiences in school and as a schoolmaster, Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, Decline and Fall, is a dark and occasionally farcical satire of British college life. It’s something of a perverse coming-of-age story, subverting the expected journey and ending that the archetype usually demands. Shining a devastating light on many of the societal struggles of post-WWI Britain, Waugh took his novel’s title from another work that revealed the ineluctable descent of a great society: Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. augh issued a new edition of Decline and Fall in 1960 that contained restored text that was removed by his publisher from the first edition. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, published in 1928, is the fourth novel by Dorothy L. Sayers in her series of mysteries featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. As the novel opens, Wimsey is at the exclusive Bellona Club prior to attending an Armistice Day dinner, when a very elderly man, General Fentiman, is discovered to have died quietly in his chair. Following the old man’s death—which appears to have been of natural causes—a question arises about the exact timing of his decease, because of a dispute over the will of Fentiman’s wealthy sister. Wimsey is assigned to try to determine this fact and his investigation soon leads to many puzzling complications. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club was regarded by at least one prominent critic to be the best of Sayers’ early work. It was made into a television mini-series in 1973 by the B.B.C.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Lord Peter Views the Body

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: Lord Peter Views the Body is the first collection of short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers featuring the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. The character of Wimsey had become so popular that Sayers started writing short stories about him, which were then published in magazines like Pearson’s. There are twelve stories in this collection about mysteries as varied as the consequences of several peculiar wills, to the hazardous breakup of a secret society.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The Mystery of the Blue Train

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: The Mystery of the Blue Train revolves around a set of fabulous rubies, said to have been worn by Catherine the Great, now purchased by an American millionaire as a gift to his daughter. When she takes them with her on a luxury train to the Riviera, she is unaware that among her fellow passengers are her unfaithful husband, his not-so-secret mistress, a quiet Englishwoman who believes that nothing exciting ever happens to her—and the famous retired detective Hercule Poirot. And, possibly, a murderer. Despite positive critical reception of this entry in the Poirot canon, Christie described this as the least favorite of her own novels. However, this is almost certainly due to the events in her personal life during that time: the death of her mother, followed closely by the discovery of her husband’s affair and his request for divorce. Suffering from what appears to have been a nervous breakdown, Christie famously disappeared for over a week in December 1926, triggering a nationwide search before she was discovered to have checked into a hotel under an assumed name. This novel was written in part during a three-month convalescence following those events. The book is dedicated to Christie’s secretary Charlotte Fisher and her pet terrier Peter, calling them “distinguished members of the O.F.D.” The “Order of Faithful Dogs” was Christie’s name for her circle of closest friends.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Midnight Guest

Author: Fred M. White

Description: Lord Ravenspur is a brilliant, beloved lord who lives a peaceful life with his nephew Walter and adopted daughter Vera, but when Mrs. Delahay comes to him with the news of her husband’s murder, his life takes a worse turn. Worrying for his uncle’s safety after numerous incidents, Walter secretly investigates the mystery in spite of his uncle’s warning. What Walter soon discovers is not only a shocking revelation about Vera’s origin, but also a rumor that his uncle is not who he seems to be. In The Midnight Guest, Fred M. White portrays a mystery where the focus is less on the murder itself, and more on the characters’ hidden agendas. Everyone firmly believes in their own story, but whose story is the truth? While White was more well known for his science fiction short stories, The Midnight Guest remains an excellent detective novel in its unusual take on the ratiocination motif that characterizes classic detective tales.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Indian Summer

Author: William Dean Howells

Description: In his forties and still a bachelor, Theodore Colville is at loose ends after selling his Indiana newspaper. He decides to go back to Florence, Italy, where two decades ago a love affair of his ended badly. Soon after returning, he runs into an old friend, Evalina Bowen, who knew the girl who jilted him and who is now a chaperone for Imogene Graham, a girl of about twenty. Imogene is exciting and fresh and very earnest, and soon Colville and she are seeing more of each other. But it’s unclear if they can overcome the difference in their ages and experience, what their relationship amounts to, and what they really mean to each other. Dean Howells wrote Indian Summer when he was in his forties himself, after a trip to Italy he took with his family. Because of its warmth and its generous ending, it remains one of his more well-loved novels. As John Updike put it, “A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy and more gracious acceptance of life’s irrevocability.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Plays

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Irish writer George Bernard Shaw began his career as a novelist. But he is most remembered as one of the greatest English-language playwrights of the modern era. Shaw’s best-known plays are his long-form, evening-length works like Man and Superman. But over his long career, he also wrote many shorter works. This edition collects Shaw’s short English-language plays published between 1901 and 1927. There are historical works like “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” which imagines a meeting between William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I, and “Great Catherine,” set in Imperial Russia. There are short farces like “How He Lied to Her Husband” and “The Fascinating Foundling,” and political pieces like “Press Cuttings” and “Augustus Does His Bit.” Then, too, there are serious works like the heartwrenching “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” and the existential drama “The Glimpse of Reality.” here Shaw wrote prefaces to these shorter plays, they are also included here.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Pudd’nhead Wilson

Author: Mark Twain

Description: Pudd’nhead Wilson is a thought-provoking novel set in the fictional town of Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. The story revolves around the peculiar character of David Wilson, known as “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a quirky and eccentric young lawyer with the unusual hobby of collecting fingerprints. As he experiments with this new forensic science, Wilson becomes entangled in the lives of two infants, Tom Driscoll, the son of a wealthy local family, and Chambers, a slave child. Due to a mix-up during infancy, the two boys’ lives take drastically different paths, with Tom growing up as the heir to a fortune, and Chambers living the life of a slave. The novel weaves a complex narrative that intertwines the lives of the two switched infants, the townspeople of Dawson’s Landing, and the enigmatic Wilson. Twain’s sharp wit and satirical prowess illustrates the story’s social commentary on race and the examination of the consequences of the switch. The characters face moral dilemmas, and as the story unfolds, the consequences of their actions come to a head in a dramatic and tragic climax. Pudd’nhead Wilson serves as a thought-provoking exploration of societal norms and the impact of identity on the human experience. It was first serialized in The Century Magazine in 1893–1894, then published as a book by Charles L. Webster Co. in 1894.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Georgics

Author: Virgil

Description: Virgil’s Georgics is a didactic poem consisting of four books, originally written in Latin. The title is derived from the Greek word geōrgiká, meaning “agricultural things.” The poem is an exploration of rural life, providing practical advice on agriculture, arboriculture, viticulture, animal husbandry, and beekeeping. Roman Emperor Augustus commissioned the work to address the social, moral, and cultural challenges facing Rome in the aftermath of civil conflict. The writing was intended to promote agricultural virtues, revive traditional Roman values, and contribute to the broader narrative of Augustan rule and the cultural renewal of the Roman state. Virgil frequently incorporates myths and legends into the narrative, drawing on classical Greek and Roman mythology. For example, in the first book, he refers to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to illustrate the power of music and the consequences of not heeding divine warnings. The poem frequently portrays mystical intervention and the influence of gods on earthly affairs. The appeal to divine forces underscores the importance of piety and the acknowledgment of the gods in agricultural practices. The first book of the Georgics is dedicated to agriculture, the seasons, and labor. Virgil begins by invoking the muse to guide him in celebrating the work of farmers. He discusses the choice of land for farming, proper plowing techniques, and the effects of climate and astronomical bodies on agriculture. He then elaborates on the importance of observing the seasons and planetary movements for successful farming. The book also includes a vivid description of the catastrophic effects of the eruption of Mount Etna. Virgil underscores the value of hard work and labor in agriculture, stating that success in farming requires diligence and commitment.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Lolly Willowes

Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Description: Laura Willowes endures a lonely and mostly isolated childhood in her family’s Somerset mansion. Her mother dies when she is a teenager. To the disappointment of her relatives, she shows no interest in marriage as she nears adulthood, preferring instead to read from her parents’ library and to pursue her interest in plants. When her father also dies, she moves into the London home of her brother and his family, where she’s to help with household tasks and the care of her nieces and nephews. Her life consists of this for many years, interrupted only by the First World War. One day after the war, the middle-aged Laura is suddenly inspired to move away on her own, buying a guidebook and settling upon a small village in the Chiltern Hills called Great Mop. Her decision shocks and outrages most of her relatives, especially her brother, who has until this point controlled Laura’s yearly inheritance income. In Great Mop Laura finally experiences the freedom and independence that she could never find among her family, but she also quickly realizes that all is not what it seems in the quiet village. Moreover, escaping her condescending relatives and their narrow conception of her as “Aunt Lolly” won’t prove as simple as she had hoped. Lolly Willowes was well received on its publication in 1926, especially in France and North America. In depicting an unmarried and childless woman who seeks independence in middle age, it was unusual in its time and anticipated feminist concerns of later decades, well encapsulated by Laura’s passionately stated ambition “to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.” The notion that a middle-aged spinster who abjures a life of service is likely to be a witch indentured to Satan may strike modern readers as a derisive joke. However, Townsend Warner’s satire can also be interpreted as raising serious questions about the stereotypes and social norms, perhaps especially those influenced by religion, that curtail women’s freedom.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Essays

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Description: The titles of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays consist of a range of general concepts such as character, experience, friendship, history, intellect, love, nature, politics, prudence and, most famously, self-reliance. However, in no case is the content of an essay limited to considerations relevant to its title concept. Emerson’s style is digressive and aphoristic, his lengthy paragraphs strewn with terse, dogmatic assertions. The pieces record the diffuse preconceptions and opinions of the author, typically without arguing for them. “Nature,” Emerson’s first published essay, was published independently five years before his first collection of essays. It became a foundational text for transcendentalism, the New England intellectual movement that upheld the divine character of the natural world and the importance of spiritual connection with it. In its emphasis on reason, individual conscience, and innate human goodness, transcendentalism was related to Unitarianism, where Emerson began his career as a minister. While Emerson resigned from this post after only a few years, he retained a lifelong concern with religion and theology that is frequently manifest in his essays. Even in the earlier essays Emerson expresses in passing a general opposition to slavery, but he has sometimes been criticized for remaining aloof from the social issues of his day, and especially from abolition. Emerson’s growing willingness to think and speak about slavery as he aged is visible in the collection; its final essay is a lecture given before the American Anti-Slavery Society. In “Politics,” he includes “emancipat[ing] the slave” alongside befriending the poor, building schools and cherishing the arts in a list of causes that he takes to represent “real good.” Emerson’s essays were especially influential among the members of the Transcendental Club that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which included Henry Thoreau among its members. Reading the essays was also instrumental in the literary development of Emerson’s later correspondent Walt Whitman, who in Leaves of Grass aimed to attain the ideal of the American poet described in “The Poet.” In German translation, the essays were read and appreciated by Nietzsche, who chose a quotation from “History” as the epigraph for the first edition of his 1882 book The Gay Science and in the same book named Emerson among the few men he judged to be “masters of prose.” The essays collected here were originally released in two volumes, or “series,” the first in 1841 and the second in 1844. In the original editions, each essay was prefaced by a poem of Emerson’s own authorship. While some of these poems were omitted in later editions, all have been included here.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Albert Savarus

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Besançon has no use for strangers, at least until the lawyer Albert Savaron shows up. Before anyone realizes it, he’s won several cases—including a prominent one for the local diocese—and started a newspaper. Suddenly his name is on everyone’s lips, and much of the discussion revolves around why this mysterious lawyer has come to their small town. After reading a novella serialized in his newspaper and intuiting that it’s perhaps at least somewhat autobiographical, the daughter of the most prominent woman in Besançon determines that she must penetrate Albert’s mystery. What follows is vintage Balzac, where the best-laid plans rarely work out as intended.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Phoebe, Junior

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: As Salem Chapel concludes, a new minister has arrived, quickly paired off with his leading deacon’s daughter, the pink and plump Phoebe Tozer. She has her own ambitions, and as Phoebe, Junior begins, twenty years have passed since the family left Carlingford. They have risen in the “connection,” and in London society. Her daughter, Phoebe Beecher, is a clever and accomplished young woman, wise beyond her years. Young Phoebe’s ailing Grandmother Tozer needs care, however, so she returns to the dubious small-town social life of Carlingford to nurse “grandmamma.” Circumstances throw her together with another attractive young woman whom Phoebe has, in fact, met in London: Ursula May, eldest daughter of the present incumbent of St. Roque’s, an Anglican church in the town. Although both are “daughters of the manse,” their social standing is completely different: Phoebe is lady-like and well off, yet as granddaughter of shopkeeper, she has no social standing next to the impoverished Ursula, whose father, even as a Perpetual Curate, has at least some distinction as a clergyman of the Church of England. here there are two amiable young women in a Victorian novel, thoughts of matrimony cannot long be kept at bay. But Margaret Oliphant has a distinctive social and moral vision; although this strand of the narrative has an important place, conventional romance is in short supply. But there is more yet to this ambitious novel. As in other books in this series, the politics of gender plays a significant role. Also, Oliphant seems often to have had her contemporary novelists in her sights, and Phoebe, Junior takes aim at both Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Yonge. For Oliphant, neither of her peers had sufficiently grappled with the moral ambiguities of the established church, or the corrosive power of money and its lack. (Phoebe, Junior was reaching completion as The Way We Live Now appeared.) Her own handling of these themes here attempts to add required nuance. After the artistic triumph of Miss Marjoribanks, Margaret Oliphant abandoned the Chronicles of Carlingford to pursue other writing projects. She wrote prodigiously to support her difficult family, and at least fifteen novels had been published in the interim when Phoebe, Junior appeared. However, Oliphant had taken four years to complete this work—an unusually long period of composition for so swift a writer. In 1872 she wrote to her old publisher, William Blackwood, “I have begun, partly to amuse myself, and on a sudden impulse, a new series of the ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’ to be called ‘Phoebe Junior,’ and to embody the history of the highly intellectual and much-advanced family of the late Miss Phoebe Tozer. I don’t know whether you will have any interest in this or not, but you have a right to be told of it at least.” In the event, Blackwood was not interested, but Oliphant found another publisher readily enough. On its publication, it was not widely reviewed, although those who did appreciated its fine qualities. Perhaps Oliphant had simply provided too much prose for her public. More recent readers have found this compelling and complex narrative to have aged well. It was serialized as a four-part drama by BBC Radio in 1993, and has often been reprinted.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Trilby

Author: George du Maurier

Description: Three men, working as artists in Paris, enjoy their days and evenings together in artistic and musical activities. A mysterious character named Svengali often visits their workshop and plays the piano. He is talented and thinks very highly of himself. Soon enough a young woman named Trilby O’Ferrall, an artist’s model, joins the group when she hears music coming from the workshop. She is unconventional but charming, and captures the hearts of all the men around her. But before long, the villainous Svengali starts to exercise a mysterious power over her. George du Maurier tells the story mostly from the point of view of the three men: Little Billee, the Laird, and Taffy. His portrayal of Svengali later received criticism for being antisemitic, and the word “Svengali” has since come to mean someone who manipulates another, often for evil purposes. Trilby was a very popular work in its day, as Gothic horror was undergoing a revival. It was first published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1894.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis

Description: Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis was a black abolitionist poet active in the 1830s. Daughter of the wealthy abolitionist and businessman James Forten, she was one of the cofounders of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society with her mother and sisters. She contributed several poems as a correspondent to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, under the pen names “Ada” and “Magawisca.” Forten Purvis’s poems, though few in number, have been the subject of considerable academic analysis for their depiction of the intersectional relationship between blackness and femininity. For instance, her poem “An Appeal to Women” was read to attendees of an antislavery convention for women and appealed to white women through their shared experience of femininity to join black women in the struggle against slavery. Because some of Forten Purvis’s poems were written under the pen name “Ada,” which was also used by another abolitionist, Eliza Earle Hacker, there has been some confusion over which poems written by “Ada” should be attributed to Forten Purvis and which should be attributed to Hacker. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the bibliographic research of Todd S. Gernes, as published in his 1998 article in The New England Quarterly, “Poetic Justice: Sarah Forten, Eliza Earle, and the Paradox of Intellectual Property.”

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Bolshevik Myth

Author: Alexander Berkman

Description: After being imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his role in opposing mandatory conscription following the U.S. entry into World War I, Alexander Berkman became one of 246 left-wing radicals (including his fellow anarchist and lover Emma Goldman) deported to Russia in December 1919 aboard the U.S.S. Buford. While initially an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime, Berkman’s travels throughout Russia and Ukraine led to increasing discomfort with the authoritarianism and corruption characteristic of Bolshevik rule. Eventually, the violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion completely broke his support for the Bolshevik regime, leading to his emigration from Russia. Berkman recorded his experiences in the years from 1920 to 1922 in a diary, which he reworked into The Bolshevik Myth. (While the book is presented as the original diary, archival research has shown that much of the original material from Berkman’s diary was rewritten.) Readers of The Bolshevik Myth may note considerable structural and topical similarities with Goldman’s more famous memoir on the Russian Revolution, My Disillusionment in Russia. Since Goldman and Berkman were deported from the U.S. together and traveled throughout Russia and Ukraine as part of the same committees and delegations, the two memoirs represent two different perspectives on effectively the same journey. This Standard Ebooks edition includes the final chapter of Berkman’s original manuscript, which was rejected by the publisher Boni Liveright as a literary “anti-climax.” Berkman later published the final chapter, which provides a theoretical analysis on the Bolshevik regime from an anarchist perspective, separately under the title of “The Anti-Climax.”

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: The Eclogues

Author: Virgil

Description: Virgil’s Eclogues, also known as the Bucolics, is a collection of ten pastoral poems written in Latin during the first century BC. It’s among the most famous cycles of poetry in Latin literature. The Eclogues were written at a time of political and social upheaval in Rome, and they reflect Virgil’s concerns about the state of the Roman Republic under Augustus’s rule. The poems are set in an idealized, rural landscape and feature shepherds engaging in conversations about love, politics, and the natural world. The characters and themes are often allegorical, representing contemporary political figures and events in a veiled manner. The poems also draw on the pastoral tradition established by earlier Greek poets like Theocritus. The first eclogue introduces two shepherds, Tityrus and Meliboeus, who discuss the impact of recent land expropriations on their lives. Other eclogues explore themes such as unrequited love, the idyllic rural life, and the effects of political turmoil on the countryside.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Metropolis

Author: Thea von Harbou

Description: Set in a futuristic dystopian city, Metropolis revolves around the stark divide between the affluent ruling class, who reside in luxurious skyscrapers above ground, and the oppressed working class laboring in dismal conditions below. The city is run by the powerful Joh Fredersen, who oversees the vast industrial complex that sustains the city. The plot takes a dramatic turn when Joh Fredersen’s son, Freder, discovers the harsh reality of the workers’ plight and becomes determined to bridge the gap between the two classes. As Freder delves deeper into the city’s secrets, he encounters Maria, a compassionate woman advocating for workers’ rights. The plot thickens as the city faces the impending threat of rebellion from the oppressed laborers. Joh Fredersen, driven by his desire to maintain control, enlists the help of the brilliant scientist Rotwang to develop a humanoid robot with Maria’s likeness. The robot is intended to manipulate and control the workers, escalating tensions and leading to a dramatic climax that explores themes of class struggle, technology, and the consequences of unchecked industrialization. Metropolis was first serialized in the German magazine Das illustrierte Blatt in 1926 and published as a book by August Scherl Verlag that same year. Von Harbau also wrote the screenplay for the groundbreaking film of the same name directed by her husband, Fritz Lang. Both the novel and the film were developed simultaneously, with the screenplay closely following the narrative of the novel.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Backwater

Author: Dorothy M. Richardson

Description: Backwater is the second installment in Dorothy M. Richardson’s pioneering sequence of autobiographical novels, Pilgrimage. Returning from Germany after the events of the first novel, Pointed Roofs, Miriam Henderson, now eighteen years old, takes a position as a teacher in a North London suburban school. While there she must manage her doubts and fears about her own future, while negotiating changes and difficulties in her own family.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The House of the Wolfings

Author: William Morris

Description: The House of the Wolfings tells the tale of a band of German Goths living in a wood they call the Mark. Their lives are idyllic until the long shadow of the Roman Empire threatens the peace in their land. Thiodolf, the leader of the Wolfings and a descendant of the ancient gods, must rally the surrounding tribes to defend their home and way of life. Like much of Morris’s work, The House of the Wolfings is written in a purposefully archaic prose style, with significant portions of the dialog presented in verse. His goal was to explore the language and atmosphere of the medieval ages that so fascinated him, and the result is a uniquely rich and evocative narrative. Morris also uses the contrast of the content and agrarian Goths with the violent and rapacious city-dwelling Romans to invoke one of his favorite themes: socialism. Our heroes are happy to live in an egalitarian society, with men and women valued equally, and close to the land and tradition. Meanwhile, the Roman invaders, unhappy in their modern lifestyle, seek personal glory and ever more booty, leading to nothing but destruction. The novel, as a work grounded in reality but with an aspect of the magical or supernatural, is one of the forefathers of modern fantasy fiction. Indeed, The House of the Wolfings was a direct inspiration to J. R. R. Tolkien, who, acknowledging such in a 1960s letter, drew from it concepts as diverse as mysterious dwarves who are talented armorers, to tribes of Goths reminiscent of Tolkien’s Rohan, to a deep forest named Mirkwood.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Miss Marjoribanks

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: When Dr. Marjoribanks’s wife dies, his teenage daughter makes it her purpose in life “to be a comfort to dear papa.” At least, Lucilla thinks, ten years of such devotion might suffice, by which time she might have begun to “go off.” But beneath this grand intention lies a yet more ambitious plan: to revolutionize the moribund and constricted social life of Carlingford. She is remarkably well-endowed for such an aspiration, being of able mind and otherwise ample proportions. As Lucilla’s plans unfold, her Thursday evenings become a great success, and draw into her sphere characters whose lives now become deeply entwined with her own. Naturally, complications of various kinds arise leading to a crisis which taxes Lucilla’s gifts and genius to the utmost. The novel falls into two distinct parts, for after this first phase of Lucilla’s career reaches its denouement, Oliphant skips over ten years, to that very point at which Lucilla feared she would be “going off.” Events in these more mature years of Miss Marjoribanks’s life are set in the time corresponding roughly to that of Salem Chapel, an earlier work in the Chronicles of Carlingford. Modern appreciation of the novel rose with Q. D. Leavis’s introduction to a 1969 reprint, in which she suggested that Oliphant is the “missing link” between Jane Austen and George Eliot. There is something about Lucilla that reminds the reader of Emma, and which informs the character of Dorothea who was to appear a few years after Miss Marjoribanks in Eliot’s classic, Middlemarch. ith its fine observations, fully realized characters, and sharp but dry humor, Miss Marjoribanks remains something of a neglected masterpiece of nineteenth century fiction. Yet as R. C. Terry writes in his book Victorian Popular Fiction, it is “the most sophisticated and charming of the series, and a novel that can stand comparison with the best contemporary novels of its kind.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mucker

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Billy Byrne, a rough and unpolished young man, finds himself entangled in a series of unexpected events that lead him from the urban jungle of early 20th century Chicago to the high seas and, eventually, to revolutionary Mexico. hen he and a wealthy heiress named Barbara Harding become shipwrecked on a remote island, the harsh realities of survival force Billy to reevaluate his values and confront his own identity. He undergoes a profound transformation, discovering hidden depths of courage, compassion, and integrity within himself. As Billy’s character evolves, so does the dynamic between him and Barbara, creating a captivating narrative that explores themes of identity, redemption, and the impact of one’s past choices. Edgar Rice Burroughs weaves a compelling narrative that keeps readers on the edge of their seats, blending elements of action, suspense, and introspection. Billy’s internal conflict adds depth to the story, making it more than just a typical adventure tale. “The Mucker” was first serialized in 1914 in All-Story Cavalier Weekly 1914; “Return of The Mucker” appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1916. The two stories were combined into a book by A. C. McClurg Co. in 1921.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Wrong Letter

Author: Walter S. Masterman

Description: hile in his office, Superintendent Sinclair receives a phone call from an unknown caller, who claims that they murdered the Home Secretary in his home. Together with Sylvester Collins, an eccentric sleuth, Sinclair goes to the Home Secretary’s house to investigate the truth of the call, only to discover the body of the victim in a locked room. Is this a bizarre suicide, or is it a skillfully executed murder? This is the question the duo have in mind as their investigation digs deeper into the victim’s relationship with his daughter and estranged son. ritten in 1926, the peak of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Walter S. Masterman’s The Wrong Letter follows a typical whodunit structure centered around a locked-room mystery, yet the novel stands out with its intricate clue-puzzle and its fresh take on the classical detective-and-assistant dynamic. While Collins and Sinclair’s relationship initially resembles Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s, it soon evolves beyond a mere archetype.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Head of Kay’s

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: The Head of Kay’s is a chronicle of the adventures of two boys, Fenn and Kennedy, who conspire to replace their ill-mannered headmaster, Mr. Kay. On the way, the gregarious boys are involved in cricket and rugby matches between the houses, a music concert gone wrong, and other adventures in this exciting story exploring the lives and relationships of boarding school boys. The book was first serialized in The Captain from October 1904 to March 1905 before being published as a book in 1905. Released in the early part of his prolific career, it is the fifth book by P. G. Wodehouse.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Theodore Savage

Author: Cicely Hamilton

Description: Theodore Savage opens with the title character, an office worker enjoying a comfortable life, anticipating his wedding. There are rumors of impending war; the people are excited, sure of their cause. When the war finally begins, Savage is called away to manage food distribution. But disaster soon follows as total war is unleashed on the country. As he adapts to a hard new life of man against man, fighting for ever-more-scarce resources, Savage wonders if he’ll ever return to his old life again. Cicely Hamilton wrote Theodore Savage shortly after the First World War, mindful of the terrifying destruction wrought with its poison gas and mechanized weaponry. She asserts that mankind is destined to become a slave to the things it creates, and advancement of knowledge will be its downfall. One reviewer found the story lacking in detail and credibility, and thought it too far-fetched that the whole world would collapse to a primitive state with no one to carry on the torch of knowledge. Another reviewer questioned the assertion that disaster follows inevitably from scientific knowledge in a never-ending cycle. But from an artistic point of view, the novel was regarded as imaginative and clever, despite its subject matter, which was rather dreary for a world still recovering from the Great War.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Perpetual Curate

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: Frank Wentworth is the Perpetual Curate; the daughters of the Wodehouse family are his special friends; and his church clerk, Mr. Elsworthy, runs the local shop. And each family, it appears, has its “skeleton in the cupboard.” Mr. Wentworth is familiar to readers of the Chronicles of Carlingford: he is among the first characters introduced in the series, and has been a constant presence as a prominent member of society in the small town. But there is a new Rector in Carlingford, and this circumstance brings with it the first cloud in the otherwise clear skies of Mr. Wentworth’s station in life. To be sure, a “perpetual curate”—an Anglican clergyman serving a church without any accompanying parish—does not enjoy a lofty position. But his mission to the working-class poor near his church brings him satisfaction, fulfillment, and a more intimate relationship with the younger Miss Wodehouse, who joins in the work. All this is threatened by the new Rector, who is adamant that only a mission authorized by him should be carried out in his parish. That is only the beginning of the Perpetual Curate’s troubles, however. Those “skeletons” in the three families prove to be very much active, and involve Frank in affairs that not only disturb his working life, but threaten to bring it to an end altogether. Once again Margaret Oliphant brings her particular skills to bear on some of the female characters in the novel. The elder Miss Wodehouse, each of Frank’s maiden aunts, and especially Mrs. Morgan, the newly married and middle-aged wife of the new Rector, are deftly portrayed. Oliphant also weaves in some salient features of Victorian church life, from low church Anglican evangelicalism, to high church Anglo-Catholicism, to the lure of conversion to Rome itself—each without the degree prejudice and caricature that sometimes emerges even in the work of Anthony Trollope, whose work bears comparison with Oliphant’s. The high drama of this carefully plotted novel attests to Oliphant’s affection for her creation of Frank Wentworth: “I mean to bestow the very greatest care upon him,” she wrote to her publisher. As a result, The Perpetual Curate remains one of Oliphant’s most popular works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Principia Ethica

Author: G. E. Moore

Description: Principia Ethica is a foundational text in the analytic tradition of ethical theory and G. E. Moore’s most influential book. In it, he defines the subject of ethics as the general enquiry into the question “what is good?” and famously contends that the predicate “good” is indefinable. Moore claims that whatever definition is offered of the predicate, “it may be always asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good,” an argument that would later come to be known as the “open question” argument. To fail to accept its conclusion and instead to identify “good” with some other quality or list of qualities is, according to Moore, to commit the error that he names the “naturalistic fallacy.” The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing ethical theories that Moore finds defective. First he addresses “naturalistic” theories, which define good in terms of properties that exist in time and can be experienced; among these theories his primary foci are the “evolutionary” ethics of Herbert Spencer and the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Moore then criticizes the “non-naturalistic” strand of ethics that defines “good” in terms of a supersensible reality and whose representatives include Kant, Spinoza and the Stoics. While identifying different errors in each of the theories he considers, Moore holds all of them to commit the naturalistic fallacy. The final two chapters of the book develop Moore’s positive ethical vision, discussing respectively the conditions under which conduct is to be considered good or bad, and the notion of the “highest good” or the “Ideal.” He supports the standard consequentialist thesis that the right action is that which results in the most good. However, in his view “the most good” ought to be determined by reference to a set of intrinsic goods in which aesthetic experiences and personal affections are foregrounded, in contrast to hedonistic theories that recognize value only in pleasure or the absence of pain. Moore’s declarations concerning what has intrinsic value influenced members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. In her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf has her character Helen Ambrose read Principia Ethica, while Strachey wrote to Moore that he considered the publication date of Principia Ethica to be the “beginning of the Age of Reason.” Although Moore would later disown many of its main contentions and argumentative strategies as confused, Principia Ethica continues to be acknowledged as a pioneering work of ethics and of analytic philosophy. In affirming the importance of understanding the meaning of ethical judgments before progressing to investigations of their truth, the treatise also laid the groundwork for the mid-century linguistic turn in ethics and the contemporary distinction between normative ethics and meta-ethics.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Water-Babies

Author: Charles Kingsley

Description: Uneducated and regularly mistreated by his master, his filth only matched by his moral and spiritual baseness, Tom is a typical Victorian chimney sweep. While on a special job at a noble’s estate, prejudice pins a crime on him and he flees in fear of retaliation. The chase eventually takes him to a stream in which he bathes for the first time and, doing so, finds himself reborn as a water-baby. Now a denizen of the fairy world, so close yet so alien to ours, Tom begins a journey of moral and spiritual growth. Through the teachings of the fairies, he is made aware of the consequences of his own cruelty and ignorance, for which he learns to own up to, and ultimately understands the importance of doing as he would be done by. This is the premise of The Water-Babies, a children’s book written by Charles Kingsley in 1863. As a man of the cloth who wrote children’s fiction with a taste for science, Kingsley bears similarities to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice’ Adventures in Wonderland would be published two years after The Water-Babies. But while Carroll eschewed didacticism, Kingsley embraced it. Kingsley had a clear moral purpose in writing his book. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed in the importance of providing children with a moral education—the nature thereof being often in contention. In particular, Kingsley clashed with the American author Samuel Goodrich, who was contemptuous of fantasy and insisted that children be given only facts and taught to reach objective truth through empirical means. Kingsley, in opposition, held that children need a balanced manner of apprehension: limiting them to mere facts would not automatically provide them with the insight and critical thinking needed to produce anything useful. Fantasy adds an element of wonder to education, allowing children to engage and play with ideas, and opening their minds to various, sometimes unconventional, inferences. Goodrich is lampooned in the book as Cousin Cramchild; the consequences of his methods are shown through vegetable children who are “all heads and no bodies”: full of information yet lacking in wisdom and unable to do anything at all. Kingsley also had a scientific interest in writing his book. A well-rounded moral education, he thought, required an alliance of faith and science, something he understood as a clergyman. In The Water-Babies, he explores the harmony between faith and science, using fantasy and humor to illustrate his views and introduce children to the scientific method as well as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. But The Water-Babies is not just a work of whimsy for children. Like Carroll, Kingsley imparts darkness into his work. While he is careful not to shock his intended audience, adults can easily pick up that the water-babies were once children who died from abuse or neglect. Tom leaves his dirty husk behind so his true self can finally be free to wander and wonder, to learn and grow, to find in the afterlife as a fairy what he had been denied in life as a human—a fulfillment of the Christian promise. Under the playfulness of the tale lie the horrors of the Industrial Revolution that forced so many into child labor. Kingsley’s outrage, however, didn’t go unheard: The Water-Babies became a bestseller, echoing the sentiment of other reformers. The Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, which aimed to improve the conditions of chimney sweeps, passed a year after the book’s publication. It is no exaggeration to say that Kingsley, through his book, helped to make a difference for many children and young men.

Subjects: children’s

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Title: News from Nowhere

Author: William Morris

Description: William Guest wakes up to find himself transported to a future utopian society. This bucolic society functions despite the absence of private property, marriage, prisons, courts, schools, and central government. The people are happy, healthy, and hard working. As he travels through this revitalized England, he discovers how this society works and how it came to be. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward describes a very different future utopian society, where machines have reduced the need to work, and strong government redistributive policies have eliminated inequality. Morris, in reviewing that book, disagreed with its conclusions, and News from Nowhere presents his competing utopian vision. In Morris’ ideal society, work isn’t something to be eliminated by machines, but rather a way to exercise creativity and to grow closer both to nature and to others. Work is performed not through coercion but through genuine appreciation. Morris emphasizes the need to change not only the material aspects of capitalism, but also the way society views work, the environment, and the purpose of life. News from Nowhere is considered a landmark novel in anarchism and influenced many early twentieth century socialists. The first edition was serialized in the Commonweal in 1890, before being published as a book, with some editorial changes, in 1891. In 1892, Morris published a final edition as one of the first books printed by his soon-to-be-legendary publishing company, the Kelmscott Press. It was printed by hand at his own home, and decorated and typeset by him using a typeface he designed.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Through the Brazilian Wilderness

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Description: After failing to win a third term in the elections of 1912, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt planned a speaking trip to Argentina and Brazil and a cruise up the Amazon. The government of Brazil suggested that Roosevelt join the famous Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon in an expedition down the recently discovered River of Doubt. Roosevelt accepted the invitation and, accompanied by his son Kermit, reached the river with Rondon on February 27, 1914. From the beginning, the expedition was fraught with difficulties, including disease, lack of supplies, and hostility from the local tribes. Roosevelt nearly died from an infected wound. This book is his account of the expedition, which, despite its problems, managed to map parts of the river and to discover several previously unknown species of animals and plants. The River of Doubt is now called Rio Roosevelt.

Subjects: nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Blazing World

Author: Margaret Cavendish

Description: A young lady is abducted by sea and finds herself transported into a new world where the blazing stars make night as bright as day. She marries the world’s Emperor, becoming Empress, and through consultation with many creatures and immaterial spirits she elaborates on contemporary scientific and philosophical topics. The story presents the view that a society with a unified language and religion can be made orderly under the rule of a benevolent monarch. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, plays her own part in the story by providing advice and showing the Empress around her own world. The Blazing World was written in 1666, a few years after the restoration of the British monarchy. With its fantastic setting, the book is considered an early forerunner of the science fiction genre.

Subjects: fantasy, philosophy

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Title: Salammbô

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Description: Carthage’s struggle–or rather, the struggle of its hired mercenaries–against its enemies in the First Punic War has ended in success. But now the mercenaries are expecting their fee, and Carthage isn’t willing or able to cover its debts. Incensed, the mercenaries are easily lead into rebellion by a pair of their own, each of whom have their own reasons to launch an attack. Spendius has escaped from slavery in Carthage and wants nothing more than to land a damaging blow on the mighty city-state, while Matho is besotted with the enigmatic and otherworldly priestess Salammbô. Flaubert’s vision of the Mercenary War is broadly compatible with historical sources, but never allows accuracy to get in the way of a good story. While characters such as Matho, Spendius and Hamilcar existed and are well-documented in sources such as Polybius’ Histories, Salammbô as a character, along with her surroundings, allow Flaubert to paint a more sensual view of Carthagian ritual and excess. He also didn’t hold back with his descriptions of the intense violence of both the battles and the sacrifices required by the gods. Salammbô followed the success of Madame Bovary, and marked a departure in style for Flaubert. It was, however, another commercial success, and led to a new appreciation in French society for the novel’s setting. The story has been reworked for different media many times over the intervening years, and the character of Salammbô even makes a memorable appearance in the classic film Citizen Kane.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The House on the Cliff

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: On holiday with friends, the Hardy boys check out the local haunted house. Deterred by screams and the dilapidated house, the group turn towards home. However, a nearly fatal motor boat chase in the nearby bay causes the Hardy boys to wonder: is the house really haunted, or is there foul play afoot? This is the second book of the Hardy boys series, first published in 1927. It was rewritten in 1959; this Standard Ebook contains the original 1927 text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: Festus

Author: Philip James Bailey

Description: Festus is a dramatic narrative poem written by Philip James Bailey, first published in 1839. Instead of adhering to a traditional linear plot structure, the work presents a series of loosely connected episodes, dialogues, and encounters that collectively form the spiritual and philosophical journey of its central character, Festus. Festus embarks on a metaphysical journey through various realms and encounters a wide array of allegorical and mythological figures, representing different facets of human experience, morality, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. Through his interactions with these characters, Festus engages in discussions on topics such as love, death, faith, and the nature of reality. Lucifer is a constant presence on the protagonist’s journey. His interactions with Festus serve as a means of exploring the conflict between good and evil, as well as the challenges and choices that individuals face in their pursuit of enlightenment; he represents the adversarial force that seeks to divert Festus from his path, tempting him with worldly pleasures, doubts, and distractions. Festus was extremely popular in its day, and greatly admired by contemporary poets like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It went through various editions over the years as Bailey continued appending verbatim extracts from his later, less popular poems, until the final edition of 1889 ran over 40,000 lines. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 1845 first American edition, which is the last edition to contain material wholly original to Festus.

Subjects: drama, poetry, spirituality

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Title: The Rector and The Doctor’s Family

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: hen the stories that became the Chronicles of Carlingford series first appeared anonymously, speculation had it that they were the work of George Eliot. The connection was a natural one. Only a few years earlier, Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life had appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. The Carlingford stories, too, were originally published in Blackwood’s, and they had much to do with ecclesiastical affairs in the town. Eliot did not feel flattered by the attribution, although her own work and that of Margaret Oliphant continued to have fascinating connections. The two novellas joined in this ebook (as they were in their signed publication of 1863) introduce readers to the sleepy town of Carlingford with its intricate and layered social life. The Rector tells the story of an Oxford scholar in holy orders, embarking on parish ministry only in middle age. The demands of the role expose his personal inadequacies, and provoke his attempts to come to terms with them. The central character of The Doctor’s Family is Dr. Rider, an unexceptional young medical man. His dissolute older brother, Fred, has once before ruined his nascent career, and Fred’s arrival in Carlingford from Australia threatens to do so again—all the moreso when his family, until then unknown to Dr. Rider, shows up in town as well. Particularly Fred’s waif-like but efficient sister-in-law, really a “little autocrat,” claims Dr. Rider’s attention in unexpected ways. The hopes and conflicts of these ordinary men provide the details for the portraits which Oliphant paints on the canvas of Carlingford life. She took some inspiration for these chronicles from the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope, which had by this time become great successes. While the debt is obvious, Oliphant’s vision—both socially and artistically—differs significantly from Trollope’s. Not only does Oliphant attend to aspects of society in which Trollope had little interest, but she also writes with a woman’s insight, and a flair arising out of her experience as the competent manager of her own troubled family.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Salem Chapel

Author: Margaret Oliphant

Description: The sleepy town of Carlingford includes two Anglican churches and one dissenting chapel. They draw their congregations from very different strata of society, even in as small a town as theirs. Arthur Vincent has just been called as pastor to his first charge, Salem Chapel. He’s a young man of ability, but he’s also prideful and ambitious. As his ministry settles, he finds himself both repulsed by his crude and claustrophobic flock, and attracted by the brighter members of the town’s society. Vincent’s social entanglements complicate his ministry in predictable ways. What could not be predicted, however, are the crises into which his wider family is plunged as their lives intertwine with those of strangers. This second Chronicle of Carlingford brings readers into a realm of society which is seldom glimpsed in Victorian fiction: the lives of shopkeepers, dissenting thought and culture, the distinctive piety and “tea meetings” of the Chapel—all of which finds its closest parallels in the later fiction of Mark Rutherford. While Salem Chapel may not yet be the artistic high point of the series, still, as one critic puts it, with it “Mrs. Oliphant gave the surest sign of genius.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Typee

Author: Herman Melville

Description: Tom and fellow sailor Toby escape from their duties onboard a whaling ship and fall in with savages on Nukuheva (Nuku Hiva) of the Marquesas Islands. The islanders welcome them to their tropical paradise, but the two runaways must remain on guard to find out if these savages are truly friends or foes. Typee was Melville’s first novel, written after his own voyages and experiences on a whaling ship to the Marquesas and beyond. Tom was a stand-in for the author himself, whose in-depth reports on the islanders and their way of life in this novel caused it to be an invaluable guide for travelers visiting the Marquesas. This seafaring adventure was immediately well-received, and, followed by other novels of his continuing voyages, helped launch Melville’s writing career. Presented here is the 1892 edition, which includes passages cut from earlier editions that were critical of aspects of Christian missions to the Polynesian islands, and were not well-regarded by contemporary audiences.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Genealogy of Morals

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Description: First published in German in 1887, The Genealogy of Morals was intended by Nietzsche as a clarification and supplement to his 1882 treatise Beyond Good and Evil. In his last published work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described the essays constituting The Genealogy of Morals as “three decisive overtures on the part of a psychologist to a revaluation of all values” and claimed that they were “as regards expression, aspiration, and the art of the unexpected, perhaps the most curious things that have ever been written.” hile this self-assessment is probably an overstatement, The Genealogy of Morals is widely acknowledged to be a unique contribution to philosophy in both content and style. The style is intentionally difficult, contrived by turns to embolden, to repel, and to mislead. “In each case,” he wrote, “the beginning is calculated to mystify; it is cool, scientific, even ironical, intentionally thrust to the fore, intentionally reticent. … At the end, in each case, amid fearful thunderclaps, a new truth shines out between thick clouds.” In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the idea of ressentiment, the source and basis (he contends) of the Christian and Jewish religions and the fundamental psychological mechanism of the associated “slave revolt” in morality, an evaluative inversion performed by the oppressed to compensate for, and to enable themselves to endure, their powerlessness and its attendant frustration. Nietzsche contrasts “noble” values, the central opposition of which is that of “good” and “bad” as applied to human beings themselves, with “slavish” values, the central opposition of which is “good” and “evil” as applied to actions. The vaunting of the latter opposition in Christianity represents, according to Nietzsche, “the great insurrection against the dominion of noble values” common to pagan Rome and ancient Greece. The second essay begins with a discussion of promising and the value of forgetfulness, then traces the origins of guilt and bad conscience to self-directed cruelty, the inward application of a naturally brutal animal instinct that has been prevented from finding outward expression. Nietzsche goes on to supply an analysis of the origin and purpose of punishment in human societies. “Cruelty,” Nietzsche asserts controversially in Ecce Homo, “is here exposed, for the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in the foundation of culture.” “Ascetic ideals,” whose “three great pomp words are poverty, humility, and chastity,” are the subject of the third essay, the longest of the work and perhaps its rhetorical high point. Nietzsche here considers the ascetic ideal as instantiated by artists, scholars, and priests, noting differences between the three groups in the ideal’s expression and effects. He asks why ascetic ideals are so powerful, given that they are, as he believes, generally detrimental to human health and well-being, concluding that the ascetic ideal’s power arose from a historical dearth of competing ideals and that “man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.” Contending with the popular perception that a scientific outlook is in principle opposed to religiosity, the latter being the natural home of ascetic ideals, Nietzsche deduces from his analysis of the “will to truth” that the relation of science to ascetic ideals themselves is not at all antagonistic. In fact, “science represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal”; even further, “valuation of ascetic ideals inevitably entails valuation of science.” Nietzsche also interestingly implicates himself and his own Genealogy in the preservation of ascetic ideals, identifying the bond between such ideals and philosophy itself as very strong. The third essay is notable for having been singled out by Nietzsche as an exercise in exposition of an aphorism. Scholars, notably Christopher Janaway, have disputed whether the aphorism on which the essay is supposedly a commentary is the epigraph from his previous work Thus Spake Zarathustra, or instead the first of the essay’s numbered paragraphs. Nietzsche’s turbulent, haphazardly erudite style has contributed to his mixed reception in philosophy and the broader culture, and to the understanding that he was just as concerned with literary virtuosity as philosophical clarity. Nevertheless, despite the literary complexity of his work, it’s still possible to ask of its content—as Bertrand Russell did in his History of Western Philosophy—“What are we to think of Nietzsche’s doctrines? How far are they true? Are they in any degree useful? Is there in them anything objective, or are they the mere power-fantasies of an invalid?” “There is no escaping Nietzsche,” wrote H. L. Mencken in 1908. “You may hold him a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is in your ears and his blasphemies sink into your mind.” Whether its blasphemous sympathies attract or repel us, and whether its analysis ultimately unsettles or only reinforces our initial ethical presuppositions, the Genealogy of Morals remains an essential work in the history of ideas whose moral and political relevance shows little sign of diminishing.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Sylvie and Bruno

Author: Lewis Carroll

Description: In Sylvie and Bruno, the titular characters serve as the connection between the novel’s two settings: Outland, a fictional land in which the children’s father is the Warden, and the real world, Victorian England. After their father is betrayed by their uncle, the family leaves their home and travels to different places to meet interesting and unusual characters. The part of the story set in England is social commentary, with the characters discussing philosophy, religion, morals, and economics. The part set in Outland is a fairy tale akin to Carroll’s much more popular works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The novel is a combination of two previous published short stories, plus ideas Carroll had collected throughout the years. This pedigree results in a fairly scattered plot, and the book was not well received by contemporary critics or audiences.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Consolation of Philosophy

Author: Boethius

Description: The Consolation of Philosophy is the best-known work of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman statesman and scholar who lived at the intersection of the classical and medieval periods. Identified by fifteenth-century humanist Lorenzo Valla as “the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics,” and by Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman,” Boethius was born in Rome around 476 to an aristocratic family, received a thorough education in Greek and rose rapidly to the ranks of senator, master of offices, and sole consul. He combined public life with scholarly projects, aiming to bring Greek learning to the Latin-speaking world through his translations of and commentaries on major logical and philosophical texts, especially those of Aristotle. In 523, having publicly expressed support for a senator who had been accused of treason, Boethius was stripped of all honors and exiled to Pavia, where he composed the work translated into English as The Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius himself is one of the work’s two main characters. At its beginning, he sits in prison composing a song of lament at his unjust detention, surrounded by the Muses of Poetry. The figure of Philosophy then appears to him, a woman of supernatural appearance who banishes the Muses from Boethius’ cell and begins a dialogue with the prisoner. Diagnosing his condition as the dire result of forgetting the nature of the universe and of himself, Philosophy intends to palliate Boethius’ distress by returning his attention to the rational order and government of the universe. To this end she leads him through disquisitions on the nature of fortune, true and false happiness, fate and providence, and the relationship between free will and divine foreknowledge. ith sections alternating between prose and verse, The Consolation of Philosophy serves as one of Western literature’s foremost examples of prosimetrical composition. It contains in total thirty-nine poems—or songs, as they are called in the present edition’s translation by H. R. James—leading scholar Joel Relihan to describe it as “the most prosimetric text of antiquity.” Prosimetrical form is associated with the tradition of Menippean satire, in which pretensions to wisdom and authority are ironized. Boethius’ use of this general form, as well as the variety of literary genres he incorporates into it, contributes to the complexity of the work’s interpretation; to what extent did he intend Philosophy’s arguments, and with them the authority of philosophy as a discipline, to be taken at face value? Relihan has interpreted the work as expressing a rejection of the possibility that philosophy might genuinely provide consolation to suffering human beings. In this view, the unsatisfactory quality of Philosophy’s arguments is a rhetorical strategy, in line with the author’s unstated Christian commitments, to shore up the idea that only faith in the Christian god can provide true consolation to the broken. In contrast, scholar John Marenbon writes that Boethius does not reject the aspirations of Philosophy to console, “as if its title had to be pronounced with ironic emphasis: ‘that’s the consolation you gain from philosophy!’,” but rather explores the limits of its power to do so in a lightly satirical style, an exploration that presupposes rather than questions the discipline’s real value. In this connection, T. F. Curley views the form of the Consolation as suggestive of the ancient antagonism between poetry and philosophy, with Boethius attempting neither to endorse one over the other nor to reject both in favor of the cross, but to reconcile them. The importance of Christianity to the work, as to Boethius’ life, is disputed: central sections of the text concern God, the “Divine,” and “Providence,” but seemingly only as represented in the Greek philosophical tradition; the dialogue proceeds without ever mentioning the Catholic faith of Boethius’s upbringing or his apparent adult conviction. Nevertheless, the work was interpreted in roundly Christian terms in the Middle Ages, and almost eight centuries after its composition Dante would refer to Boethius in the Divine Comedy as “the sainted soul, which the fallacious world / Makes manifest to him who listeneth well.” Unlike Boethius’ theological tractates and logical commentaries, the Consolation was immensely popular for many centuries, often described as a best-seller of its time. The popularity of the work is also attested in its translation history, having been rendered in English by King Alfred, Queen Elizabeth I, and Chaucer. Its popularity has waned with the secularization of the West, but The Consolation of Philosophy remains of interest today due to the enduring questions it raises concerning the nature of true happiness, the right attitude to suffering, the rational order of the universe, the relationship between poetry and philosophy, and the limits of philosophy itself. Gibbon is often quoted as having judged it to be “a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully,” consonant with historian H. M. Barrett’s more recent assessment that “in [Boethius’] last book, there is a certain timeless quality that will protect it from ever going out of date.”

Subjects: philosophy, poetry

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Title: He Knew He Was Right

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: While on travels in the Mandarin Islands, Louis Trevelyan meets and then, on return to England, marries Emily Rowley, the eldest daughter of the governor of the Islands. They seem ideally suited, but Emily’s mother spots a potential sore spot: they both like to have their “own way.” For two years, and with the birth of their child, all goes well. But when the philandering Colonel Osborne—a lifelong friend of Emily’s father—comes calling in the Trevelyan home, their equilibrium is disastrously unsettled. The young husband imperiously insists on the older man’s exclusion; the proud and insulted wife insists she has every right to see her father’s old friend in all innocence. This conflict sets in motion Anthony Trollope’s epic study of pride, forgiveness and its lack, and pathological jealousy. Louis Trevelyan is the “he” of the book’s title, and his monomaniacal journey into a psychological abyss is the novel’s central story. Equally, however, the book could have been titled She Knew She Was Right, as that captures Emily’s core conviction equally well. In his autobiography, Trollope made the frank confession: “I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad.” He felt he had failed to create some sense of sympathy for the main protagonist that he had in mind at the story’s inception. Later critics haven’t agreed with Trollope’s judgment. His handling of Trevelyan’s mental claustrophobia and burgeoning paranoia is considered to be one of his finest achievements of psychological depiction in literature. Trollope also considered the novel’s rich and complex subplots to be more successful than its central story—another failing, in his estimation. Yet these subplots aren’t random tales bolted on to the main action: rather, each of the strands depicts characters who are headstrong, preferring their “own way,” and yet without the tragic consequences of Trevelyan’s story. They even hint at the possibility of redemption. Artistically, they also display a lightness of touch that counterbalances the darker main thread. Trollope includes a number of direct quotations from, and allusions to, Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, another story of destructive and misplaced sexual jealousy. Trollope’s transformations of the older work demonstrate both his fine imagination and his assured technical skill in this extraordinary novel. Frank Kermode is certainly justified in calling He Knew He Was Right “in some respects [Trollope’s] most striking achievement.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Voyage of the Beagle

Author: Charles Darwin

Description: In 1831, the twenty-two-year old Charles Darwin embarked on the Royal Navy ship H.M.S. Beagle as it set off on what was to be a five-year-long surveying expedition around South America and across the Pacific. Darwin was employed officially as a naturalist and geologist to assist in the survey, but unofficially as a companion to the captain, Robert Fitz Roy. Darwin was a keen and intelligent observer, and made a number of discoveries on the journey, including the observations at the Galapagos Archipelago which eventually led him to his theory of evolution (later outlined in The Origin of Species). His voyage across the Pacific also led him to propose a now largely accepted theory of the formation of coral atolls. Darwin submitted his journal and notes as part of the official report of the expedition, but in 1839 he published a more readable account of his experiences in this book, initially titled Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N.. The book quickly became very popular, and the publisher had to release a second edition later the same year. The revised and much simpler title The Voyage of the Beagle was only given to the work in 1905. Adding to the interest of Darwin’s detailed and thorough observations of nature and geology are his deeply critical remarks on the institution of slavery, which he witnessed during his time in Brazil. This of course was three decades before the Civil War in the United States which was fought over that issue.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Short Plays

Author: J. M. Synge

Description: J. M. Synge first gained fame as a playwright with two plays inspired by his time in the Aran Islands, “In the Shadow of the Glen” and “Riders to the Sea.” The first is set in County Wicklow, where a tramp arrives at an isolated cottage late at night as a dissatisfied woman is waking her dead husband. The second is set on the Aran Islands, where a woman waits for news of her son, who is missing at sea. This collection also includes “The Tinker’s Wedding,” a short comedy written about the time of the other two plays but not performed until much later for fear that its treatment of a rural Irish priest would scandalize Dublin’s pious audiences.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Secret Glory

Author: Arthur Machen

Description: Ambrose Meyrick has high expectations of the world, and is disappointed in the mundane factory town around him. He finds that others fail to see or even try to appreciate what he thinks is beautiful and excellent, but he gets along by pretending to conform, while the English public school tries to beat any individualism or imagination out of him. hile Ambrose has trouble meeting the school’s expectations, he reaches back in his memory to a time with his father and their visit to an old Welsh farmer who had an ancient holy cup. This cup opens up a mystical world of beauty and splendor to Ambrose, which provides an escape from his troubled life. This book is considered a fantasy leaning on the theme of a holy grail. It’s one of Machen’s later works, and is sometimes compared to his earlier and more significant work, The Hill of Dreams.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Erewhon Revisited

Author: Samuel Butler

Description: Higgs has made his fortune with sales of his original travelogue Erewhon. When his wife dies, his long-held desire to return to the country overwhelms him, and even his friends agree that a change of scenery would be a good idea. Soon after his departure he returns back home to England unexpectedly early and deeply unwell, and so it’s down to his son John to piece together what happened during his fleeting visit to Erewhon. ritten nearly thirty years after the first book, Erewhon Revisited is Samuel Butler’s attempt to reason about the ongoing effect Higgs’ first visit—and dramatic exit—would have had on the closed society of Erewhon. The playful satire of the first book remains, but this time focused on a new target: religion. This focus did the book no favors among the establishment of the day, but after partnering with George Bernard Shaw’s imprint it was finally published in 1901. While never as critically or commercially successful as the first book, it remains a fascinating read.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Heartbreak House

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Published in 1919, Heartbreak House is an examination of the failings of the European leisure classes before World War I—failings that author George Bernard Shaw blamed for the war, and that he predicted would quickly lead to another, longer war. The play is set in an English country house, where representatives of every type of English society have gathered at the home of the seemingly mad Captain Shotover. Hidebound aristocrats and cultured bohemians, wealthy capitalists and radical idealists, prim moralists and idle libertines, are all laid bare in one of Shaw’s bleakest and yet most absurd plays.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Pragmatism

Author: William James

Description: Over the course of eight lectures originally delivered during the winter of 1906 and 1907 William James describes and defends the theory of pragmatism. Expanding on the earlier works of John Dewey and F. C. S. Schiller, James begins by presenting two competing views of the universe. The “rational” view treats everything as being derived from an absolute truth. Typically this view is based on religious grounds, and the theories need not bear any relation to the imperfect world in which we live. James contends that this is not a useful world view, as it is not applicable to our everyday lives. On the other hand, the “empirical” view considers as admissible only facts that have been materially verified. This view, while practical and useful, neglects anything that cannot be measured. It is fatalistic, and often pessimistic, reducing mankind to nothing more than an advanced animal. James describes pragmatism as a middle-ground between these two views. Under a pragmatic approach, statements are evaluated based on their practical effects. Based on this criterion, empirical facts are valuable, as they have obvious connections to everyday concerns. However, religion, or other more abstract principles, can also be useful, as they can be applied to guide decision-making in the common case where material evidence or direct knowledge is lacking. After defining pragmatism, James applies it to metaphysical problems, including the concepts of truth, common sense, and free will versus determinism. Pragmatism was and remains an important philosophy. In addition to Schiller and Dewey, who applied a pragmatic approach to education and participatory democracy, many prominent thinkers have been influenced by pragmatism, including the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Modeste Mignon

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Modeste Mignon is a young woman living with her blind mother and watched over by her absent father’s majordomo and wife. They’re determined to keep her from men until her father returns from his long sea voyage. She’s by all appearances the perfect daughter, but her mother believes Modeste has a secret: she’s in love! The attempts to determine whether this is true, and the aftermath, is Balzac at his wittiest. But even though she may seem like the ideal daughter, Modeste is somewhat subversive, at odds with the prevailing ideas of the time of how an ingénue should behave. Modeste Mignon, written in 1844, is one of Balzac’s last additions to the Human Comedy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lorna Doone

Author: R. D. Blackmore

Description: John Ridd, a young yeoman farmer, chances upon a beautiful girl in an injudicious visit to a secret valley. It’s a brief but life-defining moment, for John falls in love at first sight. Yet there are complications. That valley was the stronghold of the outlaw Doone family, and the young beauty was the prize of the clan. Beyond that, one of the Doones had, years earlier, killed John Ridd’s father. This simple encounter sets up a complex story, as there are yet more obstacles than these on the couple’s path of love. John Ridd himself narrates the book in his simple fashion. Apologizing for his many digressions even while indulging them, and protesting his honesty throughout, he tells the story of how he attempted to win the hand of Lorna Doone as his bride. The tale of romance is embedded in his many other adventures. The chronological setting is late 17th century, which saw the uprising of the Duke of Monmouth against James II. This connects with the book’s geographical setting: Exmoor, on the border of the counties of Devon and Somerset, and the heartland of support for the Monmouth rebellion. In some ways, the landscape—not solely confined to Exmoor—serves as another character in the novel. It was the setting of Blackmore’s own youth, and he knew it well. The rhythms of nature, dangerous ravines, the harsh winter of 1683–4, violent rivers, cultivated fields—all are described by the narrator with a graceful simplicity that won the admiration of Thomas Hardy, also known for his evocative prose. The literary critic Northrop Frye even perceived in these aspects of the natural world something of a mythic undertone in Blackmore’s work. The novel is generally regarded more as “historical romance” than “historical fiction,” and perhaps critically undervalued for its melodrama. It gained popularity only slowly after its first publication, but in time became a firm favorite. Its enduring appeal is attested to by its various film and television adaptations between 1912 and 2000.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Tarzan the Terrible

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The iconic Tarzan, a man raised by apes in the African jungle, finds himself in the treacherous land of Pal-ul-don while searching for his abducted wife Jane. There Tarzan faces new challenges and dangers, including savage dinosaurs and powerful prehistoric creatures. As he navigates through this perilous world, Tarzan becomes embroiled in the conflicts between different tribal factions, as well as the intrigues of the cities that dot the landscape. As Tarzan battles against hostile forces and navigates these intricate power dynamics, readers are taken on a roller-coaster ride of suspense and discovery. Continuing on from the events of Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan the Terrible was first published as a seven-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1921 before being published as a book by A. C. McClurg Co.. Standing as a testament to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ imaginative storytelling with its mix of adventure, romance, and primal conflicts, the novel is considered by some to be the best entry in the Tarzan series.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Dick Sands, the Boy Captain

Author: Jules Verne

Description: After an accident on board a whaling ship the captain is lost at sea, making the fifteen-year-old apprentice Dick Sands the acting captain. Through traitorous scheming by the ship’s cook, and bad weather, the ship is blown from the South Pacific around Cape Horn and onto the west coast of Africa. Dick continues to lead the survivors through various trials among the slave traders of Angola. As in many of his other books, Verne touches on scientific topics like entomology, flora, and fauna. He also recounts the adventures of the notable white explorers of Africa. Dick Sands can be read both as an adventure story, and as a condemnation of the horrible cruelties of slavery. When it was written, many countries had already banned the slave trade, but it was still active in Africa. Only when colonial explorers and missionaries started to penetrate the continent did the practice really come under pressure.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Castle Rackrent

Author: Maria Edgeworth

Description: In eighteenth-century Ireland, a privileged class of Anglo-Irish landowners known as the “Protestant Ascendancy” lived on great estates, with the mostly Catholic Irish as their tenants and servants. Maria Edgeworth was part of this Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Castle Rackrent, her best known novel, satirizes the failures and follies of her Anglo-Irish peers, their mismanagement of their estates, and their abuse of their Irish tenants. The narrator of Castle Rackrent is Thady Quirk, whose family has served on the Rackrent estate for generations. Thady relates the life stories of four successive lords of Castle Rackrent and how their individual character and personality affect the lives and families that depend on them. Castle Rackrent was one of the first historical novels written in English, and Walter Scott later cited it as inspiration for his own Scottish historical novels. Edgeworth included two sets of explanatory notes on aspects of Irish life and culture for her English readers, footnotes in the main text and a “glossary” added in the second edition. These have been merged into a single set of endnotes in this Standard Ebooks edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mary, Mary

Author: James Stephens

Description: Sixteen-year-old Mary Makebelieve shares a small room with her mother, a charwoman, in the tenements of early twentieth-century Dublin. While Mrs. Makebelieve is at work cleaning the houses of the wealthy, Mary wanders around the city and its parks absorbed in daydreams. Her encounter with a policeman who appears to signal romantic interest in her is the beginning of Mary’s coming-of-age story, which combines elements of folk- or fairytale with a complex vision of human psychology and the relations between various social groups: mothers and daughters, men and women, the rich and the poor, the young and the old. ritten in 1910 and first published the following year as a serial in the short-lived Irish Review (a periodical co-founded by Stephens himself), Mary, Mary was his first published work of prose fiction. According to critic Augustine Martin, it’s the first novel written about Dublin’s slums, the squalor and despair of which Stephens had experienced first-hand in his youth. Martin suggests in his critical study of Stephens that it’s this novel, of all Stephens’ works, that most clearly articulates the driving idea of his literary career: the gap between the hard reality that human beings must endure, and the aspirations of reverie whose realization we seek through imagination.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Claverings

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Harry Clavering is an able, ambitious, and attractive young man, son of a country vicar and cousin to a baronet. His love for the baronet’s beautiful sister-in-law is at first reciprocated, but then rebuffed as her own ambitions incline her towards marrying a wealthy but personally repellent earl. Harry licks his wounds, and seeks to make his own fortune by training for a career as a civil engineer. hile in the home of his new patrons, he meets the daughter of the head of his firm, a new love flourishes, and they become engaged. But the earl dies, and the widow, Harry’s first love, is now free—and also wealthy. Unaware of his new attachment, she seeks help from Harry, wondering whether the spark between them can be rekindled. It now transpires that Harry is also “fickle, vain, easily led, and almost as easily led to evil as to good.” Like Trollope’s Phineas Finn, The Claverings includes strong and fully realized female characters. Lady Julia Ongar is the outstanding example here, the seemingly mercenary femme fatale whose conflicting choices, hopes, and spiritual struggles are so acutely portrayed that they prevent her from simply being a stereotypical predator. ritten between the last two Barchester books, The Claverings is among the very few other of Trollope’s works set in Barsetshire. The setting remains a subtle touch here: Harry’s clergyman father is annoyed by Bishop Proudie, the notorious prelate of the later Barchester series. The Trollope scholar Michael Sadleir grouped The Claverings, along with Doctor Thorne and Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, as Trollope’s “three faultless books.” Of The Claverings itself, he found it “as surely conceived as any book [Trollope] ever wrote,” marked by “qualities of sure-footed subtlety,” especially in the many and varied acute social observations it contains—from the most intimate and intense private dramas, to more awkward and even amusing public encounters. Like many of Trollope’s books, The Claverings is “not only readable, but perpetually re-readable.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Letters of Two Brides

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Letters of Two Brides is an epistolary novel, largely consisting of letters between two women who become friends in a convent in their teenage years. They begin their correspondence when they depart the order as young women and embark on their lives in different areas of France. Louise is a woman of passion, a lover of love, who must have a great romance in order to be fulfilled. Renée is measured, a women of sense, desiring a love that will last a lifetime rather than (in her way of thinking) flame out like a comet. In several of their epistles, each takes the other to task over her approach to life and love. As their ages and respective marriages progress, it becomes obvious where Balzac’s sympathies lie. One of the later additions to The Human Comedy, Letters of Two Brides was originally serialized (and heavily bowdlerized) in the French journal La Presse in 1841, in three parts rather than two. It was not until the second edition of the novel that it was repartitioned into its present form.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tarzan the Untamed

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Tarzan the Untamed continues the adventures of Tarzan, the orphaned child raised by apes in the African jungle. It is the seventh book in the Tarzan series and was first published as a six-part serial in The Red Book Magazine from March through August, 1919, with the story continued as “Tarzan and the Valley of Luna” in a five-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in March and April, 1920. The novel was later compiled and published as a complete book in 1920 by A. C. McClurg Co. After his estate in British East Africa is attacked by German soldiers during World War I, Tarzan embarks on a relentless quest to exact revenge upon those responsible. During his journey, Tarzan faces not only the German soldiers, but also other dangers such as wild animals, hostile tribes, and treacherous landscapes. He uses his exceptional strength, agility, and survival skills to overcome them. He also comes across a British pilot and a beautiful German spy, unexpectedly finding himself becoming both a protector and ally.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Moon Maid

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Not content with having hollowed out the center of the Earth in his earlier novels At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar, in The Moon Maid Edgar Rice Burroughs has his hero voyage to the Moon, which also turns out to be hollow and inhabited on the inside by human-like creatures. The hero and his companion have a series of adventures there, and discover both the sophisticated Va-gas and the malevolent Kalkars. Time passes, and we turn to following the hero’s descendants as they fight against an invasion of the Earth by the Kalkars. In these episodes, the American flag has become a holy totem, uniting the human rebels. The Moon Maid was published in Argosy magazine between 1923 and 1925 as a series of three short novels, which were eventually combined into a single book edition in 1926. It was well-received by readers, and a number of critics consider it to be Burroughs’ best work of science fiction. Today it’s not as well-known as his Barsoom or Tarzan novels.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Early Autumn

Author: Louis Bromfield

Description: The Pentlands are a very conservative, old money family in a small town near Boston, who claim ancestry going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the fall of an unspecified year in the 1920’s, their world is invaded by several “outsiders,” including Sybil, the patriarch’s granddaughter back from a Paris education, Sabine, a prodigal niece who has returned after being gone for twenty years, together with her daughter Thérèse, and O’Hare, an Irish Catholic politician who is at odds with the deeply ingrained Protestant background of the community. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear to Olivia, Sybil’s mother, that all is not well in the Pentlands’ world; beneath the apparent calm there are secrets bubbling to the surface that have been hidden for years. It also becomes clear that with the changes taking place in the world at large and in their world in particular, the future of the Pentland family could be in peril. Before Louis Bromfield became a well-known agriculturist, he was a writer of several successful novels. This family study, which is said to be based on his wife’s Puritan upbringing, won him a Pulitzer.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Shorts from Scenes from Private Life

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: The short stories and novellas from the Scenes from Private Life portion of Balzac’s The Human Comedy represent a cross-section of French culture from the first half of the nineteenth century. There are drawing room intrigues of the rich (“Domestic Peace”), unrequited love (“The Imaginary Mistress”), a romance among the residents of a boarding house (“The Purse”), and even a Corsican vendetta (“The Vendetta”). Each of these, as well as the remaining stories in the collection, are marked by Balzac’s renowned talent for fully realized characters, by his rich and detailed descriptions of places and people, and especially of the emotions that drive them. As a progenitor of the modern novel, he wanted to write about not only the romantic and beautiful, but also the hurtful and disturbing; in short, he wanted to write about daily French life, however good or bad it might be. Many of the characters so richly described here will be seen again and again throughout the rest of The Human Comedy.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Rise of Silas Lapham

Author: William Dean Howells

Description: Silas Lapham’s long-lasting paint, made with minerals found on his family’s farm in Vermont, has helped make him a millionaire—as has hard work, ambition, and tough business sense. Now that he’s reached late middle age, he’s a success. A newspaper is writing him up in its “Solid Men of Boston” series, his family goes to seaside resorts in the summer, the scion of the aristocratic Covey family has joined his firm, his daughters have made inroads into 1880s society, and he’s even having a lavish house built in the newly fashionable Back Bay. But it’s all too good to last. Soon the Laphams must deal with long-simmering temptations that exist because of a ruthless decision made when his company was getting off the ground. Will they avoid a fall? In 1885, when The Rise of Silas Lapham was published, William Dean Howells was in the middle of his own career. The novel remains his best-known work, enduring in no small part because of its portrayal of the self-made man and the problems that success and competition bring.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: North and South

Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

Description: By the mid-nineteenth century, the transition of textile production in England from a cottage craft to mechanized factories was complete. Still, the effects of the industrial revolution remain distant from the idyllic rural parish in the New Forest where Margaret Hale grows up. But with her father’s crisis of conscience in ministry, the country lanes of Hampshire give way to the crowded urban streets of the industrial North of England. Mr. Hale’s new role as a private tutor brings Margaret into contact not only with her father’s favorite student—one of the “masters” of a factory—but also leads to her meeting, and caring for, the poor families of factory workers. Margaret finds her sympathies torn as she grows to understand the differing outlooks and interests of “masters and men,” especially as an industrial dispute brings the lives of both classes into crisis. But there is much more to Margaret’s life than politics and economics. An accomplished and beautiful young woman, she finds her abilities stretched by personal family tragedies, and her affections tested by differing claims on her life, both from intimate family members, and from suitors smitten by her unstudied charms. North and South would have been titled Margaret Hale, if Elizabeth Gaskell had had her way. She was overruled by Charles Dickens in whose magazine Gaskell’s novel was first serialized, and who insisted on the present title. Dynamics between the leading characters have often reminded readers of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, although in the case of Gaskell’s protagonists, these qualities are more evenly distributed. Contemporary critics were less than enthusiastic about the “women’s perspective” in the book, but appreciation has grown steadily and significantly for Gaskell’s writing and insights in North and South. Her sensitive handling of Mr. Hale’s religious scruples, her unsentimental portrayal of the urban working poor, and her prescient depiction of shifting social and gender roles all find a contemporary appeal. Although once neglected among Gaskell’s works, successive adaptations for television—the latest in 2004—have won for the book a higher profile and wider readership.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Terror Keep

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Mr. J. G. Reeder, employed by the Department of Public Prosecutions, has developed a reputation for solving difficult criminal cases using his unique understanding of human nature, which he calls his “criminal mind.” After a notorious bank robber and murderer escapes from prison, Mr. Reeder must match wits with Crazy John Flack, the “cleverest crook in the world,” who previously vowed to kill the famous detective in revenge for his imprisonment. Reeder’s love interest Margaret Belman receives a lucrative job offer at an exclusive country hotel located at the famous Larmes Keep. As Reeder pursues several leads on Flack’s whereabouts, he discovers that Margaret’s new position is part of Flack’s plan for revenge. When Reeder rushes to Larmes Keep in an effort to keep Margaret safe, he’s surprised to find that Crazy John is one step ahead of him. Published in 1927, Terror Keep was the third book to feature Edgar Wallace’s answer to Sherlock Holmes.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Gold Bat

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Trevor, the captain of the Wrykyn football team, finds his schoolboy honor in jeopardy when a miniature gold bat known to be in his keeping is misplaced in the course of a prank executed by O’Hara, the irrepressible Irishman. Trevor, O’Hara, and others must find the bat to preserve Trevor’s honor, while also ensuring Wrykyn’s victory in football over their arch-rival Ripton, and suffering increasingly audacious attacks from the sinister and anonymous League. The Gold Bat is one of P. G. Wodehouse’s earliest works, and the first of several set at the fictional boys’ public school Wrykyn. It was originally serialized in The Captain magazine and later published by A C Black, London.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Search the Sky

Author: Frederik Pohl

Description: After noticing that interstellar spaceships are bypassing their destination planets because they’re not able to contact the inhabitants on arrival, a man is sent out to investigate what is happening to humanity. Traveling faster than light, he visits several worlds in his attempt to find the answer, including a world where age determines rank, a world where women are dominant and men are jailed for life for even suggesting the genders should be equal, a world where everyone has converted to a cult dedicated to the world’s original settler, and Earth itself. Originally published in 1954, Search the Sky is the second collaboration between Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. The story is a satirical cautionary tale, exaggerating trends the authors saw in our own world. The pair would ultimately publish six novels and several short stories before Kornbluth’s death in 1958. Contemporary critics gave the book a positive reception, though they generally found the pair’s first collaboration, The Space Merchants, to be the stronger book. Search the Sky was reprinted in 1977, at which point Spider Robinson, writing in Galaxy magazine in September 1977, credited Pohl and Kornbluth with inspiring an “explosion” of satirical science fiction, adding that Pohl and Kornbluth “didn’t invent the notion of extrapolating-beyond-the-point-of-absurdity—but they gave it a quantum jump in sophistication, in relevance, hooked it into an enormously more subtle social consciousness—and gave it a bite like an angry chainsaw.”

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: To Cuba and Back

Author: Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Description: In 1859, as the United States was contemplating the annexation of Cuba, Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast, booked passage on the steamer Cahawba to visit the island and see for himself what conditions were like there. In this immersive narrative, Dana paints a vivid picture of his experiences exploring the heart of Cuba. He skillfully captures the essence of Cuban culture, recounting encounters with its vibrant cities, picturesque landscapes, and the warmth of its people. Beyond simply being a travel memoir, the work delves into the deeper social and political aspects of Cuba during the time of his travels, including the impact of colonization, slavery, and the rise of nationalism, offering readers a deeper understanding of the country’s complexities. It reflects Dana’s keen interest in understanding the local customs, traditions, and the challenges faced by the Cuban people. Through his encounters with various individuals, Dana shares insightful anecdotes that provide valuable insights into the island’s history and society. The book stands as a bridge between cultures, inviting readers to explore the wonders of Cuba while also contemplating the intricacies and complexities of its past and present. Dana’s journey also serves as a personal voyage of self-discovery, as he confronts his own biases and preconceptions, leading to a greater appreciation for the beauty and diversity of Cuban society. His engaging storytelling and keen observations make this memoir a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Cuba and the transformative power of travel.

Subjects: travel

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Frederik Pohl

Description: This selection of Frederik Pohl’s science fiction short stories covers topics ranging from out-of-body experiences, to alien visits, to the psychological effects of space travel, and more. The stories were published between 1942 and 1962, with some of them set in what feels like the same era in which they were written. Pohl’s work is very human-centered, often with only minimal futuristic or speculative elements. Pohl used pseudonyms for some of these short stories, including James MacCreigh, Paul Flehr, and Dirk Wylie.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Mr. J. G. Reeder, mild-mannered, slightly shabby, and a throw-back with his mutton-chops and silk hat, is often mistaken for an office clerk. But his superiors have recognized his special gift: Reeder has a criminal mind. As an employee of the Department of Public Prosecutions, he’s frequently called upon to exercise his unusual talent to solve crimes that have confounded the local police. In this collection of eight stories, Mr. Reeder solves robberies, burglaries, and murders, often at great risk to his personal health and well-being, and frequently employing his great insight into human nature and the criminal mind. Published under the title The Murder Book of Mr. J. G. Reeder in the United States, these stories were adapted for British television between 1969 and 1971 and also for BBC Radio in 2007.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Author: Elizabeth von Arnim

Description: Told in a series of diary entries, Elizabeth and Her German Garden recounts one year in the life of an Englishwoman determined to revitalize the neglected garden of their German estate. It is in the process of laying out flower beds, ordering rose varietals, and supervising the planting that she finds peace and escape from her three young children (referred to simply as the April, May, and June babies) and husband, a German aristocrat who she satirically calls the “Man of Wrath.” For Elizabeth, each season brings delightful and unexpected changes to her garden—and less delightful visits from unwanted houseguests who fail to appreciate the beauty and calm that she strives to create. Elizabeth and Her German Garden was published anonymously in 1898 due to its semi-autobiographical nature: like the Elizabeth of the novel, Arnim lived in a manor in Pomerania with her first husband, a German Count, with whom she shared several children. This novel, her first, was an instant bestseller. It was reprinted numerous times in its first few years and rereleased in 1900 as an expanded edition with new diary entries added. There was much speculation about the author’s identity (with at least one publisher incorrectly crediting the novel to Princess Henry von Pless), and thanks to its runaway success, her following works were simply attributed to “the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden” or even just “Elizabeth.” Today, it continues to be loved by readers drawn in by Elizabeth’s witty, sarcastic observations about life, family, and nineteenth century German society intertwined with idyllic descriptions of nature and solitude.

Subjects: autobiography, fiction

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Title: The History of Henry Esmond

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Description: Henry Esmond is the modest but appealing hero of his own story. Set, for the most part, in the early years of the eighteenth century, Esmond is regarded as a bastard member of his noble family. He gains some ability in arms, exercises his capable brain, and finds that the tumultuous events of those years give him ample opportunity to make his way as a military man. But as political intrigues and love interests come in to play, Esmond discovers there is more to his past than his present circumstances would suggest. The History of Henry Esmond had a mixed reception. George Eliot was put off by it, finding aspects of the plot “uncomfortable.” Anthony Trollope, on the other hand, admired the work and thought it “the greatest novel in the language”—as, indeed, did Mrs. Trollope, who so wore out her copy with repeated re-readings that it needed to be replaced. Modern assessments recognize Thackeray’s fine technical achievement in the effective first-person voice, and his deft handling of the complex plot which, in the words of one modern literary critic, “won Henry Esmond the fame of Thackeray’s best executed work.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Pan Tadeusz

Author: Adam Mickiewicz

Description: Tadeusz Soplica is a young nobleman who returns to his family estate after completing his studies. As he reconnects with his homeland, Tadeusz becomes enamored with Zosia Horeszko, the daughter of a rival family, despite the longstanding feud between their households. ithin the framework of this romantic storyline, Mickiewicz delves into the complex political and social dynamics of the era. He depicts the tensions between the Polish nobility and the occupying Russian authorities, as well as the internal conflicts among the noble families themselves. Through vivid description and engaging dialogue, Mickiewicz showcases the customs, traditions, and aspirations of the Polish gentry, making for a rich portrayal of Polish society during this turbulent time. Pan Tadeusz has become a cherished masterpiece of Polish literature and a symbol of national identity. It was included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme in 2014.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Marius the Epicurean

Author: Walter Pater

Description: Marius is born in the second-century Roman Empire to a patrician family. In his youth he takes in the rituals, religion, and surroundings of his native land, and when his parents die, he’s sent away to a boarding school. As young Marius develops into manhood, he explores various schools of philosophy and ways of life, until he lands into the position of amanuensis to the emperor Marcus Aurelius—who of course is not just the head of the largest empire the world had yet seen, but also a respected thinker and philosopher of Stoicism. Marius dips into Stoicism himself, until a fledgling new religion catches his attention: Christianity. Marius’s search for meaning gives Pater a broad canvas on which to expound on some of the central theses he would return to often in his career: how childhood experiences are essential to the personality of the adult, and how a carefully curated, aesthetic life—but not one of pure hedonic abandon—is one of the most satisfying ways to live. Indeed, Pater is careful to distinguish Epicureanism and its emphasis on modest sensory pleasures and limiting desire, from hedonism and the ruin a life of pure consumption can bring. Despite this focus on philosophical searching, Pater also puts the conflict Marius feels over religion at the story’s forefront. Like Pater himself, who yearned for the simpler atmosphere of religion he had experienced in youth, Marius finds himself bouncing from paganism, to philosophy, to the new religion of Christianity, in search of the comfort of the lost rituals of his youth. In the end, a satisfactory peace seems elusive. Marius the Epicurean remains an important milestone in 19th century investigations of religion and philosophy, while also being a rich example of a text brought alive with allusion and experiments in form. The story isn’t a straightforward narrative, but rather features frame narratives, epistolary fragments, orations, and dialogues. This structure looks forward to the modernism that would emerge in 20th century literature. Literary critic Harold Bloom called it “one of the more remarkable fictional experiments of the late nineteenth century.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Big Bow Mystery

Author: Israel Zangwill

Description: On a foggy morning in the Bow district of London, a popular labor organizer is found in his bed with his throat cut. It seems impossible for the wound to be self-inflicted, but it seems equally impossible that anyone could have entered his room during the night. The crime and its bizarre circumstances become the talk of the town, as retired Scotland Yard detective George Grodman finds himself pitted against his younger successor, not only to identify the perpetrator but also to explain how the murder was committed. Israel Zangwill was best known for his political novels and plays, in particular 1908’s The Melting Pot, and this inclination is evident in the politically active setting of this much less serious novel. Unlike murder mysteries of later decades, in which everyone’s stories mainly serve to provide clues to the “whodunit,” The Big Bow Mystery paints a picture in which life continues on, even as the investigation becomes a matter of constant public debate. Moving from the gently satirical to the darkly comic, the novel stands apart from the genre, even while it is acknowledged as laying the groundwork for the “locked room mystery” novel.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Author: R. H. Tawney

Description: The development of religious thought, and specifically how it relates to business concerns, is discussed in this classic work by R. H. Tawney. During the Middle Ages the church doctrine, notwithstanding numerous examples of inconsistencies and outright hypocrisy, viewed material wealth as a potential sign of greed, and therefore with heavy skepticism. This view permeated into discussions of economic affairs. In particular, gains coming from payment for production were viewed as acceptable, and gains from trade necessary, but gains coming from purely financial transactions (for example the charging of interest) were explicitly equated with greed, and therefore not ethically permissible and potentially punishable by excommunication. Tawney contends that this view began evolving around the time of the Reformation. He shows how the religious movements expounded by Luther and Calvin began by recognizing the legitimacy of charging interest in a limited set of circumstances. The reformed churches still initially maintained their right to comment on and criticize business practices. Charging of usurious amounts of interest, especially to people who could not afford it, was still considered a sin and something squarely within the ecclesiastical domain. With the rise of Puritanism in England, however, this view gradually faded away. Puritanism encouraged a greater reliance on individualism in spiritualism, and was less interested in policing economic transactions. This in turn led eventually to new system of values, “in which the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed,” helping to pave the way for the rise of financial capitalism and an ethical justification for extreme wealth inequality and perpetual material, instead of spiritual, growth. Even though Tawney ends his analysis at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it isn’t difficult to see the relevance to the modern world. Much of the language today surrounding wealth (and poverty) in particular hold an unmistakable, if not explicit, debt to Christian thought.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: The Mule-Bone

Author: Langston Hughes

Description: The only collaboration between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, The Mule-Bone is a three-act comedy depicting the romantic rivalry between two lifelong friends, Jim Weston and Dave Carter, as they both try to woo the same woman, Daisy Taylor. Set in the town of Eatonville, Florida (Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown and the setting of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God), the play humorously explores the interpersonal and religious conflicts in an early 20th-century African-American community while incorporating themes from folklore. Hughes and Hurston’s collaboration on The Mule-Bone was a troubled one, since it ended in an authorship dispute between the two, and the play was never properly finished. Hughes even noted on his personal copy, “This play was never done because the authors fell out.” The play was not produced until 1991, over sixty years after it was written, when it was performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to lukewarm reviews. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the manuscript deposited by Zora Neale Hurston with the United States Copyright Office in 1931, the only version of The Mule-Bone known to be out of copyright.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Blue Hand

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Jim Steele, a clerk for a prominent London attorney, has the distasteful task of assisting a notorious client, Digby Groat, who stands to inherit the Jonathan Danton fortune. Danton’s infant daughter and closest heir, Dorothy, was thought to have died in a boating accident twenty years ago. Adding to the mystery, Dorothy’s mother, Lady Mary Danton, also disappeared around the same time. Jim receives alarming news that his new love interest, Eunice, has accepted a new job as live-in secretary to Digby’s mother. Soon after, Eunice receives a message from a mysterious intruder that her life is in danger and that she should leave the Digby house. As time passes, it becomes apparent that Digby, ruthless in his pursuit of wealth and women, has set his sights on Eunice. Eunice’s parents have passed away, but something in her history doesn’t sit well with Jim’s inquiring mind. As he investigates he’s surprised to learn that his neighbor, a beautiful invalid, has also been making inquiries about Eunice’s past, and has more than a casual interest in both Eunice and Jim. Blue Hand was published in 1925.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Door with Seven Locks

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: As a practical joke, Sub-Inspector Dick Martin, about to retire, is asked to find a stolen library book. Before long, Dick finds himself intrigued by the nature of the book—and the attractiveness of Sybil, the librarian. Now in private practice, Dick accepts a job that requires him to chase an elusive nobleman, Lord Selford, across the world and is subsequently surprised to find that his favorite librarian is Selford’s relative. Events take a turn when a safe-cracking expert is murdered after attempting to break into the Selford family crypt, and Dick investigates. The Door with Seven Locks contains the locked-room puzzle for which Edgar Wallace was famous, but it’s also notable for its exploration of the concept of nature versus nurture.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Cleopatra

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: A fantastical, fictionalized version of the death of Cleopatra, this eponymous story by H. Rider Haggard is told from the point of view of an Egyptian priest, Harmachis, who seeks her downfall to free his nation from the tyranny of the Macedonian Greek Dynasty. Told in Haggard’s usual adventuresome style, and with just the right amount of magic and fantasy, we follow Harmachis as he grows into the role of an underground leader of his people, as he’s placed into Cleopatra’s court, and as he recounts the various trials and tribulations that accompany his plots against Cleopatra, whom he calls “a Thing of Flame like unto which no woman has ever been or ever will be.” Several parts of the story were adapted for use in the 1917 silent film Cleopatra.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Mr. Mulliner Stories

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: The eccentric and entertaining Mr. Mulliner is always ready with a tale for his willing audience at the Anglers’ Rest pub. He’s a master storyteller, and, in the finest tradition of fishermen everywhere, his stories are absolute whoppers, each featuring his illustrious—and sometimes outlandish—relatives. The Mulliners are, to a person, witty, talented, and unflappable, and yet they continually find themselves in the sort of pickles that only P. G. Wodehouse could create. This collection contains all of the Mr. Mulliner stories that are in the U.S. public domain.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: The Melody of Death

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Gilbert Standerton learns that he has been disinherited by his cantankerous uncle, and is forced to find a way to provide for his newly wedded high-society wife. After quitting his appointment at the Foreign Office, he develops a new interest in the stock market, and takes an avid interest in the antics of a gang of safe-cracking burglars. His wife becomes concerned as he frequently begins staying out late at night, and shows an unusual interest in a particular musical melody despite having lost interest in all of his other music interests. What strange skills has Gilbert acquired, and will he find his fortune without resorting to crime? The Melody of Death was published in 1915 and adapted for film in 1922.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Enchanted April

Author: Elizabeth von Arnim

Description: Four strangers, each enchanted by an advertisement addressed “To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” impulsively pool their savings to lease a medieval Italian castle for the month of April. All are deeply dissatisfied with life and in need of escape: awkward Mrs. Wilkins, increasingly resentful of a husband who largely ignores her; proper Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose own marriage seems headed toward estrangement; beautiful and unmarried Lady Caroline Dester, tired of men constantly “grabbing” at her; and elderly Mrs. Fisher, widowed and walled off in memories of the past. As they come to know one another, each woman finds herself gradually transformed by the beauty of San Salvatore—a magical place where conflict just might turn to friendship, and even the most soured relationship has a chance of being salvaged. Later adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film, The Enchanted April was an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1922. It continues to enchant readers today as a lighthearted, often comedic exploration of friendship and romance that is steeped in vibrant, intoxicating descriptions of wisteria and sunshine.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Clue of the New Pin

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Tab Holland, newspaper reporter and a friend of a local police investigator, is surprised to discover that his roommate’s uncle Jesse Transmere, a wealthy miser, has been found murdered in a cellar vault locked from the inside. More surprising is the fact that Ursula Ardfern, a famous actress and new acquaintance of Tab’s, has had her plays backed by the murder victim in the past. Although he has been regularly reporting on the case for the newspaper, Tab’s interest in the case intensifies after both his own apartment and the murdered man’s house are ransacked. Although it’s yet another entry in Edgar Wallace’s locked-room mysteries, The Clue of the New Pin also explores the claim of various religions in having exclusive access to the truth, or the only path to spirituality.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Two Years Before the Mast

Author: Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Description: Richard Henry Dana Jr. entered Harvard in 1831 but was forced to abandon his studies after two years due to eye trouble caused by measles. Dana shipped out as a common seaman onboard the American merchant ship Pilgrim, convinced that time at sea would help cure his affliction. The ship left Boston on August 14, 1834, just two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, on a mission to then-Mexican California to collect animal hides. From the moment he steps on board, Dana is confronted with the grueling nature of life at sea. He describes in vivid detail the brutal working conditions, the treacherous storms, the heavy labor required to operate a sailing ship, and the oppressive hierarchy among the crew. As the Pilgrim embarks on its journey along the Pacific coast, Dana describes his encounters with various landscapes, including the bustling ports of California, the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean, and the rugged beauty of the California coastline. He also provides insight into the lives and cultures of the people he encounters, like the Californian rancheros and the indigenous peoples of the region. Dana’s writing often verges on the poetic, with evocative descriptions of the California coast as well as the icy wilderness surrounding Cape Horn. Two Years Before the Mast serves as an important historical document, shedding light on the often-overlooked experiences of common sailors and the realities of the merchant trade. Dana’s memoir continues to resonate with readers, captivating them with its authenticity, descriptive power, and the unique perspective it offers on 19th century maritime life. It transports readers to a bygone era filled with adventure, hardship, and the relentless beauty of the sea. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a 1916 reprint of the 1909 Macmillan Company publication, with the addition of an epilogue of sorts, “Twenty-Four Years After,” which chronicles Dana’s return to California in 1859 to revisit the places and people he wrote about in the original work. Also included are notes on the text by Homer Eaton Keyes, Assistant Professor of Art at Dartmouth College.

Subjects: travel

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Title: Ragged Dick

Author: Horatio Alger Jr.

Description: Dick Hunter is a shoeshiner working and living on the streets of New York City in the mid-19th century. Despite being dealt a bad hand, Dick attempts to extricate himself from his situation and become respectable. But it won’t be easy, thanks to the bullies, con men, and thieves that roam the city. Dick has to outmatch them with his wits, his work ethic, his honesty, and a bit of luck. Ragged Dick is Alger’s most well-known novel, and it sets the formula for the numerous subsequent rags-to-riches stories for which he became famous. It also introduces the “Alger hero,” a character archetype who rises out of poverty through cleverness and hard work, into the American literary canon.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Public and Its Problems

Author: John Dewey

Description: Written in 1927, The Public and Its Problems is John Dewey’s defense of the democratic society in the post World War I era. Written largely as a response to Walter Lippmann’s popular Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Dewey wished to set out his view of the numerous challenges facing the political aspect of democracy, as well as potential remedies. Regarding the problems, Dewey actually agrees with Lippmann. “The Public,” as defined by Dewey, has become confused to its purpose and is easily manipulated by political or corporate maneuvers. This presents a serious problem with respect to majority rule, as the majority opinion is loosely formed and can be molded to suit ends benefiting a small minority. Furthermore, by 1927 the world had become so connected that the actions of one group of people could have completely unforeseen consequences on another remote group of people. This leads both Dewey and Lippmann to conclude that even if the public had perfect access to information, that information would be simply too vast to be properly understood. here the authors differ, however, is in the remedy. For Lippmann a technocratic elite is best placed to solve problems that are too complex to be understood by the voting public. But Dewey contends that even in an ideal world, where such elites are not motivated purely by personal gain, they would still be inherently conservative and resistant to any large-scale changes. The alternative, according to Dewey, is to simplify the economic system to make it easier for individuals to directly predict and understand the consequences of their own actions. Ensuring absolute economic efficiency need not be a societal priority, and can run counter to the democratic spirit whereby communities can participate in and take charge of their own organization. This points towards the need of a movement away from centralization and back towards some form of localization, whereby smaller, visibly connected, groups organize themselves into participative communities. Expanding on his ideas in Democracy and Education, Dewey stresses that education is the only viable way to make these necessary changes a reality and ensure a truly democratic society. Modern readers will find many of the criticisms of the public very familiar, and may be forgiven for forgetting that the problems Dewey describes are the problems of his own time. Likewise, the debate of centralization versus localization, and even the appropriate form of a democratic state, continue to this day.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Canary Murder Case

Author: S. S. Van Dine

Description: Philo Vance, the snobbish art collector who happens to be the longtime friend of District Attorney John Markham, once more finds himself drawn into a criminal investigation. Margaret Odell, the beautiful and talented theatrical singer nicknamed “The Canary,” has been strangled during the night, and from the very beginning there are signs that nothing in the case is quite what it appears to be. Accompanied once more by Sergeant Heath, the unlikely trio struggle to make sense of the evidence. S. S. Van Dine found even more success with this novel, his sophomore outing as a mystery writer. Spending months on the bestseller lists, it was also the first of his books to be made into a movie, with William Powell starring as Philo Vance. At a time when a majority of successful mystery writers were English, Van Dine’s novels evoked an atmosphere that was distinctly American, with Vance’s cultured perspective colliding with Markham’s pragmatic sensibilities and Heath’s no-nonsense street smarts.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Winter’s Tale

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Leontes of Sicilia accuses his wife, Queen Hermione, of infidelity with his childhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. Consumed by irrational jealousy, Leontes becomes obsessed with proving Hermione’s supposed adultery and orders her imprisonment before putting her on trial, where she steadfastly maintains her innocence. Leontes’ baseless accusations lead to the destruction of his family: Hermione dies of grief, her newborn daughter is abandoned in a distant land, and her son, Mamillius, dies due to the distress caused by his father’s madness. Leontes’ abandoned daughter, Perdita, grows up as a shepherdess, unaware of her royal heritage. Sixteen years later, she returns to Sicilia. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Secret House

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: T. B. Smith, Assistant Commissioner of Police, suspects that the murder of two foreigners is connected to Montague Fallock, a notorious blackmailer of prominent British citizens. Suspicion points to a wealthy businessman, who subsequently disappears, leaving a suicide note and a vast fortune to his ward, Doris. The investigation leads to a small country village and a secret house built by a wealthy hermit who is not what he seems. Who is the blackmailer and who is the victim? Published in 1919, The Secret House explores the good and the evil that exist in human nature.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Square Emerald

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: Leslie Maughan, recognized for her keen mind, has unofficially been promoted to Scotland Yard’s first female investigator. Chancing upon a book of poetry once owned by a Peter Dawlish, convicted forger, Leslie delves into the details of the convict’s case and becomes convinced of Peter’s innocence. Befriending Peter after his release from prison, Leslie discovers a link between him, a lady of high society, and a princess, after the violent death of a butler who has his employer’s valuable emerald in his possession. The trail takes a twist when it’s discovered that Peter may have a child he knew nothing about, and that his landlady has been been using her home for more than room and board.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Oil!

Author: Upton Sinclair

Description: James Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed “Bunny,” is the son of a self-made oil millionaire. As he comes of age, Bunny’s sympathies for oilfield workers and socialists often clash with his father and his father’s business partners, forcing him to confront the ethical implications of his family’s wealth and power. As Bunny witnesses the devastating consequences of his father’s unethical business practices, including accidents and a worker strike, he finds himself torn between loyalty to his family and his burgeoning friendship with an oilfield worker, Paul Watkins. Paul, influenced by his experiences in post-World War I Siberia, becomes a fervent advocate for labor rights and embraces communism. The novel explores the complex dynamics of family, loyalty, and the pursuit of justice in a society driven by oil and power. Sinclair’s narrative satirically critiques the flaws and weaknesses of all the characters, shedding light on the human condition in the face of greed and inequality. The book offers a profound examination of societal issues, delving into themes of corruption, greed, and the struggle for workers’ rights. Oil! inspired the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. The novel’s enduring relevance lies in its exploration of the interplay between wealth and morality and its scathing commentary on the oil industry.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Fifth Queen

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: Katherine Howard, a young, devoutly Catholic, and impoverished noblewoman, arrives at the court of King Henry VIII as he has just married his fourth wife. The idealistic and beautiful girl is unprepared for the corruption and intrigue she finds there. Quite accidentally, she comes to the notice of the king and quickly becomes involved with the competing members of court. The first book in a trilogy about the doomed queen, Ford Madox Ford’s impressionistic novel of the Tudor court is rich with themes of power and fear.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Clue of the Twisted Candle

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: John Lexham, a famous mystery writer, finds himself with money problems after an investment goes poorly. His problems multiply when a confrontation leads to a dead creditor, and John quickly finds himself convicted of the crime and given a lengthy prison sentence. Kara, a rich friend with a shady past, helps John break out of prison and escape abroad. But Lexham soon finds out that sometimes friends can be enemies, and that freedom can be fleeting, as he is soon held captive again. After escaping a second time and being exonerated, John is called upon to help solve Kara’s brutal murder. The Clue of the Twisted Candle was published in 1918 and adapted for film in 1960.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: In Search of Lost Time

Author: Marcel Proust

Description: Through seven volumes, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time recounts his memories as they occur to him. An innocuous treat—say, a small cake paired with a cup of tea—may awaken memories buried deep within the narrator’s mind; memories cause more memories to surface. Like the cathedral builders of old, a whole life and the world around it are thus formed anew, slowly and methodically, by uniting pieces of the narrator’s life for the sake of the reader. This recollection takes us through the narrator’s childhood, weaving the social web his family finds itself entangled in, his first crush and coming of age, his gradual appreciation of art while finding his place into society, his hurtful obsession over a young woman, and, ultimately, the consolation that what had been lost in his youth can be regained. Firmly grounded in Modernism, In Search of Lost Time is not a work about memories but memory. By leading the reader in circles, sometimes on a glorious wild goose chase, Proust holds a mirror in front of the reader, sending us back to our own memories and experiences, no matter how pleasant or uncomfortable. By its very nature, it’s a difficult exercise about one of the defining features of humanity: our ability to manipulate time by recalling and, often, recreating it. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translation is as highly regarded as the novel itself. Moncrieff used Remembrance of Things Past as the title, which was not a translation of the French title but a quote from a Shakespearean sonnet; this edition uses the translated title that the work is best known by in English. Just as Proust passed away before finalizing the last three volumes, so Moncrieff passed away before completing his translation; the final volume was translated by his (and Proust’s) friend Sydney Schiff, under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson. Only the first six translated volumes are currently available in the public domain. The remaining one will be added to this edition after its copyright expires next year.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Prince Otto

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Otto likes to hunt and enjoy life, while leaving the rule of his small kingdom in the hands of his wife and her trusted advisor. He hears talk of socialist revolution in his land, and when he tries to take charge, he finds that it’s not so easy to resume his rule. With intrigue and betrayal at every corner, all the players must figure out where they really stand. Prince Otto was one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earlier works. It didn’t have the success of Treasure Island, but it was, according to Stevenson, his hardest effort of any work, before or after.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Blue Bird

Author: Maurice Maeterlinck

Description: Mytyl and Tyltyl, the children of Mummy and Daddy Tyl, are spending their Christmas Eve gazing at the extravagant party of their rich neighbors, when suddenly the door flies open to reveal an old fairy. She explains that she’s looking for the Blue Bird—the only thing that will save her sick daughter—and enlists the children to help her in her quest. The children, with the aid of the family cat and dog whom the fairy has given the power of speech, readily agree to the undertaking. Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian author whose work was highly regarded; indeed, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 with special recognition given to his dramatic works. His play The Blue Bird premiered in 1908, and the prose version for children presented here was written by his lover Georgette Leblanc five years later. The story has been further adapted to film, television and radio many times, including a role for Shirley Temple as Mytyl. This production was translated to English by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, notable for also translating many Arsène Lupin novels for Maurice Leblanc: Georgette Leblanc’s brother.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Man Who Knew

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: John Minute, formerly an unscrupulous African mining magnate, has flown to England, but can’t escape his past. Constantly threatened by blackmailers, he fears death and financial ruin. At the suggestion of the commissioner of police, “The Man Who Knows” is hired to assist in determining the source of these threats. But after John is murdered, suspicion is cast on his nephew, who calls on The Man Who Knows to help clear his name and cast suspicion on Jasper Cole, John’s loyal secretary. The trail to the real murderer presents a formidable challenge—even to The Man Who Knows. Published in 1918, The Man Who Knew was adapted for film in 1961.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Lais

Author: Marie de France

Description: Marie de France is regarded as the first female poet writing in French. Most of the details of her life are lost to history, and even though she was thought to have lived and composed mostly in England—perhaps at the court of King Henry II—she herself says she is of France. The Lais were likely composed in the 1170s in the Anglo-Norman language, the language of the Norman conquerors of England. The lais, or lays, are a collection of twelve medieval poems attributed to Marie, telling tales of chivalry, knights, ladies, and love lost and found. A streak of the fantastical runs through them: ships sail themselves without a crew, animals speak, and knights shapeshift to werewolves or hawks—the better to fly into ladies’ towers.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Benson Murder Case

Author: S. S. Van Dine

Description: Philo Vance is a snobbish art collector who happens to be the longtime friend of John Markham, the New York County District Attorney. When a wealthy Wall Street broker is found shot in his own home, Vance finds himself drawn into the case. Seeing both Markham and the police content to accept the superficial evidence of the crime scene, Vance must intervene, and elucidate an entirely different approach to solving the mystery. S. S. Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright, an art critic who became interested in murder mystery stories after reading dozens of them during an extended convalescence. The Benson Murder Case introduced his character Philo Vance, a wealthy dilettante who brings the eye of an art connoisseur to his newfound calling of amateur detective.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Poetry

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Description: Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most celebrated of American poets. His early work is firmly rooted in the Romanticist tradition, but he quickly found fertile ground in Gothic horror, leading to such renowned poems as “The Raven,” “Lenore,” “Tamerlane,” “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” and many more. Poe started his literary career with an underappreciated collection of poetry entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The volume sold a mere fifty copies, and his critical success wasn’t assured until the publication of “The Raven,” which made Poe a cross-Atlantic household name. Despite Poe’s prolific output of short stories, and even a well-regarded novel in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, poetry remained at the core of his writing all the way up until his untimely death at the age of forty. Collected here is all of Poe’s completed poetry in the public domain, in chronological order of writing. Where poems were originally collected into a single volume and individual writing dates are not available, volume ordering has been preserved.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Avenger

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: hen a severed head is discovered, Mike Brixan of the Foreign Office is asked to return from Europe and assist in apprehending the murderer, known as “The Headhunter.” The trail leads to Chichester and the set of a motion picture crew located on an English manor. Brixan discovers that the scriptwriter has a connection with both The Headhunter and an unscrupulous neighbor with a history of misadventure, a love of exotic pets, and an enthusiasm for young ladies. Published in 1926, The Avenger was adapted for film in 1960.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Demi-Gods

Author: James Stephens

Description: Patsy Mac Cann spends his days wandering rural Ireland with his daughter Mary Mac Cann and their donkey. They set up camp for the night and are surprised by the appearance of three demi-gods. The demi-gods, strangers to humanity and in need of guidance, decide to follow the Mac Canns. The group begins their adventure on the winding Irish roads, encountering locals—each with their own story to tell. In The Demi-Gods James Stephen takes us on a journey of storytelling, weaving in otherworldly and everyday stories about love, harmony, and materialism. Several of his stories draw inspiration from Irish folklore and mythology. The novel was published in 1914, following the 1912 release of Stephen’s most commercially successful work, The Crock of Gold.

Subjects: fantasy, philosophy

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Title: Room 13

Author: Edgar Wallace

Description: After having spent almost three years in prison Johnny Gray is released, only to be dismayed to find that his ladylove has been pressured by her father, an old friend of his, into marrying another man. Soon after, Johnny discovers that the bridegroom is actually a suspected counterfeiter and the son of a notorious criminal plotting to ruin his friend by exposing his nefarious past. Johnny is determined to foil the plot and bring the counterfeiter and his father to justice—but first he needs to rescue the new bride. Surprisingly, the trail brings Johnny back to prison. Published in 1924, Room 13 was adapted for film in 1938 and 1964.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Old Curiosity Shop

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Nell and her grandfather eke out a life of near-poverty in a small curiosity shop in London. Despite their narrow circumstances, their lives are happy ones, in which each takes care of the other. But Nell’s grandfather is hiding a secret, one which threatens their very survival. When his secret is uncovered by the moneylender Daniel Quilp, their lives are turned upside-down, and they must make their way through unfamiliar places, among unfamiliar people. Charles Dickens originally conceived of the characters of Little Nell and her grandfather for a tale of only a few chapters. But when his new weekly periodical failed to sell well due to its lack of ongoing storyline, he wound up extending those few chapters into a sprawling narrative that ultimately took ten months to complete. Despite the intense pressure of ongoing weekly deadlines, the final story became his second-most-popular novel during his lifetime. Dickens is famous for his ability to sketch memorable characters, and The Old Curiosity Shop in particular is brimming with quirky figures across the social strata of Victorian England. Kit Nubbles, Richard Swiveller, Mrs. Jarley, Sally Brass, and of course the endlessly cruel Quilp all play their part in the story of Little Nell and her grandfather.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Pair of Blue Eyes

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Young Elfride falls in love for the first time with an architect who is sent to make plans to renovate the local church. She supposes Stephen to be a professional man from London, but finds he comes from more humble origins. Stephen must go away and make something of himself before he can claim her. Circumstances change in his absence, and Elfride must decide if she will keep her pledge to marry Stephen. A Pair of Blue Eyes is Thomas Hardy’s third novel, and the first one to bear his real name when it was first published. The novel was first published as a serial, and the “cliffhanger” is supposed to have been named after a scene in which a character is left hanging over the edge of a cliff—while readers are left waiting for the next chapter to be serialized.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Ameen Rihani

Description: Born in Lebanon and brought to the United States by his father as a teenager, Ameen Rihani was a pioneer in the literary movement of Mahjar (Arab diaspora) literature. During his lifetime, he published two volumes of original English-language poetry, titled Myrtle and Myrrh (1905) and A Chant of Mystics and Other Poems (1921). Major themes explored in Rihani’s poetry include Orientalism, mysticism, and cultural encounters between East and West. This Standard Ebooks edition presents both of Rihani’s poetry collections in one volume.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Revolt of the Angels

Author: Anatole France

Description: Arcade is a guardian angel assigned to Maurice d’Esparvieu, a man so honest that he seems to be sinless. Bored by this lack of work, Arcade begins reading the books in d’Esparvieu’s library—but he reads too widely and too deeply. Soon, he finds himself losing his faith in God, who he realizes is really just a minor deity named Ialdabaoth with delusions of grandeur. Disillusioned with his existence, he moves to Paris, loses his wings, and meets other fallen angels. Together they begin to plot a new revolt against God to rescue Satan and install him to the throne of heaven. Told in Anatole France’s characteristic light and ironic style, The Revolt of the Angels is a work of philosophy as much as it is a work of fiction. Through Arcade’s evolving perspective on faith and human affairs, France probes not just religion, but the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of revolutions. His conclusion on the cyclical nature of human suffering and governance is a grim foreshadowing of the Russian Revolution, which occurred just a few years after Revolt of the Angels was published—and of which France was an outspoken supporter.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Chinese Parrot

Author: Earl Derr Biggers

Description: Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department makes his second appearance when a Honolulu widow is forced to sell her pearl necklace. She persuades Charlie to convey the necklace to its new owner, a famous businessman. Chan teams up with the son of a prominent jeweler handling the sale. But before they can safely deliver the necklace into the proper hands, the pair need throw criminals off their trail and solve a murder mystery. The novel, published in 1926, was adapted for film in 1927 and 1934.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Dewy Morn

Author: Richard Jefferies

Description: Felise is an independent young woman living on her uncle’s farm. She is in love with Martial, the proprietor of the neighboring farm. She tries to win him over, though he has been hurt from a previous relationship and resists her bold advances. Their courtship intertwines with the stories of the other folk working the nearby farms. Like much of the work of Richard Jefferies, The Dewy Morn is really not about the plot, and more about the feeling of the characters and the depictions of country life. This story has much in common with Jefferies’ later novel Amaryllis at the Fair, though The Dewy Morn has a slightly greater emphasis on plot, and has fewer digressions. While not one of his more well-known books, The Dewy Morn represents a further lean into the nature oriented style he would eventually come to be known for.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The House Without a Key

Author: Earl Derr Biggers

Description: Published in 1925, The House Without a Key introduces the kindly detective Charlie Chan, conceived by Earl Derr Biggers as a counter to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes common in the era’s society. John Quincy Winterslip, having been sent by his family to convince his aunt to return to Boston, arrives in Honolulu to find that a rich family member with a shady past has been murdered. Detective Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department recruits John to aid in the investigation. As he works to uncover the murderer, John learns about Chinese culture—and true love.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Old Man in the Corner

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: Polly Burton, a journalist, sits at the same table as an old man over tea. He has an interest in the sensational local crimes that have left the police baffled. Over the course her visit, the old man explains his crime-solving methods, which are based primarily on reading newspaper accounts, crime scene visits, courtroom observation, and logical deduction. He frequently takes the side of the criminals and declines to report his findings to police, leading the reader to speculate about his past. The novel was published in the U.S. as The Man in the Corner, and is based on short stories previously serialized in magazines.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, the fifth work in the Tarzan series, was published in 1918 and features a return to the city of Opar and its priestess, La. After having lost his fortune, Tarzan sets out to loot some of the riches of the ancient city of Opar. This results in his wife, Jane, falling into the hands of slavers and a renegade Belgian officer, which leads Tarzan into further conflict with both man and beast.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: King Coal

Author: Upton Sinclair

Description: King Coal explores the lives of coal miners in early 20th century America. The story follows a privileged student who takes a job as a miner to gain firsthand experience of harsh conditions and mistreatment of workers. The protagonist is shocked by what he discovers and becomes an advocate for the miners, leading them in their fight against the mine owners and the political system that supports them. Sinclair’s writing style is known for its vivid descriptions and its ability to bring to life the characters and their struggles. Like much of his work, King Coal is a fictitious account of real issues. The novel is based on the author’s research in Colorado during the coal strikes of 1913–14, and is considered a classic of the muckraking genre that exposed the social and economic problems of the time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Canterbury Tales

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Description: The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer. The tales are presented as a storytelling contest by a group of pilgrims on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Each pilgrim tells a story to pass the time, and their tales range from bawdy and humorous to serious and moralistic. The stories provide valuable insights into medieval English society as they explore social class, religion, and morality. The pilgrims represent a cross-section of medieval English society: they include a knight, a prioress, a miller, a cook, a merchant, a monk, a nun, a pardoner, a friar, and a host, among others. Religion and morals play an important part of these stories, as the characters are often judged according to their actions and adherence to moral principles. Chaucer also contributed significantly to the development of the English language by introducing new vocabulary and expressions, and by helping to establish English as a literary language. Before the Tales, most literary works were written in Latin or French, languages which were considered more prestigious than English. But by writing the widely read and admired Tales in Middle English, Chaucer helped establish English as a legitimate literary language. He drew on a wide range of sources for his lexicon, including Latin, French, and Italian, as well as regional dialects and slang. In doing so he created new words and phrases by combining existing words in new ways. All told, the Canterbury Tales paved the way for future writers to write serious literary works in English, and contributed to the language’s development into a language of literature. This edition of The Canterbury Tales is based on an edition edited by David Laing Purves, which preserves the original Middle English language and provides historical context for editorial decisions. By maintaining the language of the original text, Purves allows readers to experience the work as it was intended to be read by Chaucer’s contemporaries, providing insight into the language and culture of the time. Other editions may differ significantly in their presentation of the language; since the Tales were transcribed, re-transcribed, printed, and re-printed over hundreds of years and across many changes in the language, there are many different ways of presenting the uniqueness of Chaucer’s English. This edition includes extensive notes on the language, historical context, and literary sources, providing readers with a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical context in which the work was written. Scholars have used Purves’ edition as a basis for further study and analysis of Chaucer’s work, making it an important resource for anyone interested in the study of medieval literature.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Trent’s Last Case

Author: E. C. Bentley

Description: hen the Wall Street giant Sigsbee Manderson is found dead, the local newspaper sends in Philip Trent, its favorite contract journalist/amateur detective, to investigate and report on the case. Trent encounters a paucity of facts on the ground, but the ones he does find leads him to a conclusion he’s unsure of how to handle. E. C. Bentley was a close friend of G. K. Chesterton, to whom he dedicated this book (in response to Chesterton’s dedicating The Man Who Was Thursday to him). The book is said to have been one of the first “modern” mysteries, and included Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie among its fans.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Huntingtower

Author: John Buchan

Description: Published in 1922, Huntingtower is the first of John Buchan’s novels to feature Dickson McCunn. McCunn, recently retired, embarks upon a walking tour of southwestern Scotland and encounters a poet and former soldier on his travels. They spend the evening in a small village, and when they investigate a large empty house nearby, they hear a woman singing from within. McCann’s companion recognizes the woman’s voice as belonging to a Russian princess he had worshiped from afar when he was stationed in Europe. A gang of street-urchins inform the pair that the princess and her companion are held prisoner, and all agree to join forces and effect a rescue. The book was made into a silent movie in 1928, and has also been adapted for radio.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Greene Ferne Farm

Author: Richard Jefferies

Description: The story of Greene Ferne Farm centers around Margaret Estecourt and her two suitors: Geoffrey and Valentine. The trio, as well as their friends, travel the countryside, have adventures on the farm, and stir up rumors in the surrounding towns. In many ways the farm and its surroundings are characters in the story, and their history and social complications quickly absorb the main narrative in favor of painting a picture of the land, the customs, and the joys and sorrows of youth and farm life. Greene Ferne Farm was the first novel by Richard Jefferies to feature what was to become his trademark literary style: a fusion of his agricultural essays, for which he was well known at the time, and narrative based storytelling. He would go on to develop this style further in a number of other novels, but never so simply and directly as in Greene Ferne Farm.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Author: William Craft

Description: Ellen Craft, the child of her enslaver, poses as the owner of her husband William as they make their way north to freedom. They meet and overcome many obstacles and dangers before they reach Philadelphia. Once there, despite help from many, they find that prejudice continues to block the freedom they crave. As they make their way to their final destination in England, they continue to face racism and societal challenges. Originally published in 1860 in England, this brief memoir is a frank depiction of the fears and dangers enslaved people faced when they decided to run away and assert their freedom.

Subjects: adventure, autobiography, memoir, nonfiction

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Title: The Three Hostages

Author: John Buchan

Description: Published in 1924, The Three Hostages is the fourth of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay. Following the conclusion of the Great War, Hannay has retired from British intelligence. He is coaxed from retirement to aid in the rescue of three prominent hostages held by an international criminal organization bent on controlling the disturbed minds of those affected by the Great War. Hannay pretends to succumb to hypnotic mind control and secretly travels to a remote farm in Norway to continue the hostage search.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Discourses on Livy

Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

Description: A very different work from his well-known The Prince, and posthumously published a year prior to it, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is one of his most debated works. Some critics see it as presenting a counterpoint or refutation of The Prince, calling it a key founding document of modern liberal republicanism. Others maintain that it is complementary, arguing that leaders of republics must act in the manner Machiavelli prescribes in The Prince if they are to maintain their state’s freedom. In any case, it is a deep and complex work of political philosophy. Both complementary and critical of contemporary Italian Renaissance politics, culture, and religion, Discourses on Livy uses Roman history, as described in the first ten books of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, to explain Machiavelli’s views across a broad range of subjects. The 142 discourses discuss political violence, military strategy, political corruption and reform, conspiracy, public opinion, the role of religion in public life, and much more.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Black Arrow

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Richard “Dick” Shelton fights in the service of Sir Daniel, an unprincipled knight who continually changes sides in the War of the Roses. Dick helps a young lady, dressed as a man, who is escaping Sir Daniel’s attempt to marry her off. In the meantime, Dick suspects that the man he serves had a hand in killing his father, and must figure out who his real friends are. Robert Louis Stevenson first wrote this adventure and romance story in 1883, as a serial in a children’s literary magazine. It was published as a single volume in 1888.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Before Adam

Author: Jack London

Description: In Before Adam, an unnamed narrator describes the life of one of his ancestors, who lived during the transition from ape to human being. ritten and published in the early 20th Century, the novel presents ideas that were common for the period, like scientific racism and racial memory, and has elements of eugenic thought. This makes the work outdated both scientifically and socially. Today, the novel is obscured by Jack London’s more successful works, like Call of the Wild and Martin Eden.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sea Hawk

Author: Rafael Sabatini

Description: Sir Oliver Tressilian, a retired seafarer, lives in Cornwall with his half-brother Lionel. After Lionel kills the brother of Oliver’s beloved Rosamund, Oliver protects him by letting it be assumed that he himself did the deed. Lionel, becoming paranoid that Oliver will one day expose him, has Oliver kidnapped and sold into slavery. After Oliver’s ship is attacked by Muslim corsairs, Oliver regains his freedom by joining them and embracing Islam. He eventually rises to the position of the leader’s right hand man and earns the title of Sakr-El-Bahr—“The Hawk of the Sea” for his daring. Despite his success with the corsairs, Oliver never forgets the wrongs that were inflicted on him and, when the opportunity arises, he maneuvers to seek vengeance on Lionel and to reclaim the heart of Rosamund. What follows is a grand, swashbuckling adventure as only Sabatini can write. The Sea Hawk inspired two movies, the most recent of which premiered in 1940 and starred Errol Flynn.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Jewels of Aptor

Author: Samuel R. Delany

Description: At the command of the goddess Argo, the poet Geo and his companions Urson, Snake, and Iimmi travel to the island of Aptor to steal a powerful jewel from the god Hama. They contend with monsters, mystery, and the ruins of an earlier age—but their quest is not what it seems. The Jewels of Aptor is Samuel R. Delany’s first published novel, written when he was a teenager. In it we see many of the concerns that occupied him in later work: language, poetry, myth, perception, and tensions between worldviews, wrapped in gorgeously poetic prose.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Truth About Tristrem Varick

Author: Edgar Saltus

Description: After missing out on an inheritance of seven million dollars and recovering it through legal means, who would give the money away? Tristrem Varick would. This righteous and idealistic young New Yorker is the epitome of goodness. hen he returns home after traveling Europe in his adolescent years, Tristrem falls head over heels in love with Viola Raritan, an aspiring singer who is stunning but jaded and indifferent. Viola initially rejects his advances, but then suddenly changes her mind, only to break off the engagement just as suddenly before disappearing. Convinced that a misunderstanding lies at the heart of her disappearance, Tristrem sets out to find her.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Transformation of Philip Jettan

Author: Georgette Heyer

Description: The Transformation of Philip Jettan is set in England and France in the 1750s. The titular Philip Jettan is an unpolished young country gentleman in love with Cleone. Cleone is also in love with him, but wishes he were more sophisticated. Due to poor communication and insecurity on both their parts, she rejects him, and he sets off to attempt to transform himself into the fashionable gentleman she desires. Transformation is an example of an early romance novel. It was the only novel Heyer published under a pseudonym (as “Stella Martin”), and, according to one source, it was written in just three weeks. In 1930 it was republished as Powder and Patch, but without the last chapter.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane

Author: Mark Rutherford

Description: The year is 1814, and the newly married Zachariah Coleman is restless. An ardent Dissenter, the tensions in his deeply held religious convictions are coming to the surface. A convinced Republican, his political commitments are leading him into conflict. And while he longs to love his young wife, he begins to fear he cannot. In due course, Zachariah becomes involved with the march of Blanketeers that left Manchester for London in 1817, but which quickly ended in disaster. Zachariah himself flees, his life changed forever. Once this story plays itself out, the narrative moves on twenty years to the next generation, and to the sleepy town of Cowfold where, again, the winds of political and religious change are blowing. Zachariah, now resident in London, has friends in the village. Their story begins to echo Zachariah’s own, albeit on a different scale, and with different contours and consequences. The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane is the third novel by Mark Rutherford, the pen name of William Hale White. His writing career developed relatively late in his life: he published his first novel at the age of fifty while working as a parliamentary reporter. He published his novels in such secret that his own family was not aware of them—which was his intention, as the novels were deeply autobiographical, and he wished to avoid associating his fiction with his family.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Pilgrim Kamanita

Author: Karl Gjellerup

Description: Late one night, as he seeks shelter in a potter’s entrance hall, Kamanita meets an old ascetic. Encouraged by the monk, he relates the story of his life so far: how, born the son of an Indian merchant, he follows in his father’s footsteps; how, on his first trading trip, he meets and loses his great love Vasitthi; how he builds up a fortune and raises a family; and how one day he leaves everything behind to set on a pilgrimage. But the old monk is not who he seems, and when Kamanita refuses to accept his teachings, the consequences are startling and irreversible. What follows is a colorful, bewildering, revelation-filled journey through the past, present, and the Paradise of the West. Sixteen years before Hermann Hesse published Siddharta, there was another European writer who used Buddhism as a source of inspiration for a novel. After earlier naturalistic works such as Minna and Germanernes Lærling (The German Apprentice), The Pilgrim Kamanita was a stylistic turning point for the Dane Karl Gjellerup. It became a worldwide success, and his subsequent novels would touch on Buddhism as well.

Subjects: fiction, spirituality

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Title: The Pursuit of God

Author: A. W. Tozer

Description: Written in a single night on a train and first published in 1948, A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God is a classic Christian devotional book that explores the nature of the believer’s relationship with God. In it, Tozer emphasizes the importance of pursuing a deep and intimate relationship with God, rather than simply seeking religious knowledge or following a set of rules. Tozer argues that the pursuit of God requires a complete surrender of oneself to Him, as well as a willingness to embrace the mysteries and paradoxes of faith. He also stresses the importance of cultivating a life of prayer and meditation, and of seeking to experience the presence of God in every aspect of one’s life. Throughout The Pursuit of God, Tozer offers practical advice for those who desire to grow in their relationship with God. He encourages readers to seek God with a whole heart, to trust in His goodness and love, and to allow the Holy Spirit to transform their hearts and minds. Ultimately, Tozer’s message is one of hope and encouragement, reminding believers that the pursuit of God is not a burdensome duty, but a joyful and fulfilling journey that leads to abundant life and spiritual growth. In 2000, The Pursuit of God was named to Christianity Today’s list of 100 “Books of the Century.”

Subjects: spirituality

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Most of the many novels by Anthony Trollope share a common feature: they are long books. Trollope was an energetic and productive writer in an energetic and productive age, and that in addition to his regular job as a highly placed civil servant in the postal service. The appearance of his first published short story coincided with his rise to prominence as a novelist with the popularity of Framley Parsonage. In spite of this prodigious output, Trollope could struggle with the short story form. He was more at home in his novels, living in his imagination with his characters who were then patiently brought to life on the page. Still, as one of his modern editors notes, only rarely in his short stories does he seem to be “deliberately cramping his hand to work on a smaller canvas.” In his autobiography, Trollope identifies a moment of encouragement to produce short stories. It came in a letter from William Makepeace Thackeray who was at the time editor of the Cornhill magazine. “You must have tossed a good deal about the world,” Thackeray wrote to Trollope, “and have countless sketches in your memory and your portfolio. Please to think if you can furbish up any of these besides a novel. When events occur, and you have a good lively tale, bear us in mind.” In fact, Trollope travelled the world negotiating postal treaties, and he used these exotic locations and odd experiences as the source of many of his shorter tales. The range in this collection is remarkable. Some of the stories bear on current events, from the American Civil War, to inflation with the growing establishment of the gold standard. Some stories are bawdy, even burlesque in their humor; some dark with pathos and tragedy. A good number follow the trials of courtship, a theme familiar from his larger works. His “editor’s tales” have an autobiographical cast, depicting the travails of the aspiring writer. And among the very last of the short stories he wrote was one final return to the setting of Barsetshire, long since left behind after completing The Last Chronicle of Barset. In all, Trollope published forty-three short stories, of which all but six appeared also in various anthologies during his lifetime. Of those six, two are not available in the public domain. The remaining forty-one are included in this collection, ordered by date of their first publication.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Toilers of the Sea

Author: Victor Hugo

Description: Gilliat is an accomplished sailor, but due to a mysterious mother and a home locally regarded as haunted, his acceptance into Guernsey society is limited. That isolation doesn’t stop him from falling for Déruchette, the “neat and delicate and pretty” niece of local ferry-owner Mess Lethierry. When the ship is involved in a catastrophic incident, Déruchette announces that she will marry the man who can salvage it; Gilliat immediately steps forwards to take on, alone, the impossible task. Victor Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea while living on Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. It followed his extremely successful novel Les Misérables, both written there after exile from France for criticizing Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état. The themes of individual struggle and triumph over the wild forces of nature are easily seen as a corollary for the industrialization happening in the society of the time, but the novel also records the contemporary life, language, and superstitions of the Channel Islands. The edition is based on the authorized translation of 1877 by William Moy Thomas.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: When the World Shook

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: When the World Shook tells the story of Humphrey Arbuthnot, a writer of adventure stories, and the deathbed promise of his wife that the two would meet again. Arbuthnot, along with his friends Bickley and Bastin, set sail for the Pacific where they promptly encounter a storm and abandon ship. When they awaken they find themselves on the island of Orofena, where they anger the island natives and are soon forced to flee after making an astounding discovery.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Mystery of the Yellow Room

Author: Gaston Leroux

Description: Mademoiselle Stangerson is attacked by an unknown assailant, who then escapes from her locked bedroom without being seen. Joseph Rouletabille, a bright young reporter, is drawn to investigate the mystery, trying to understand what really happened (and how!) before another attempt on her life is made. The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an early “locked-room mystery” novel, and helped define it as a genre. Agatha Christie, in her novel The Clocks, had her fictional detective Hercule Poirot describe it as a masterpiece. John Dickson Carr, frequently cited as the best mystery writer specializing in locked-room mysteries, named it as his own personal favorite example of the genre.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Uncalled

Author: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Description: The Uncalled tells the story of Frederick Brent, a man abandoned by his father and orphaned at an young age, who sees himself thrust into religious life by his devout guardian despite his lack of vocation for it. The Uncalled was Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first novel. It was neither a critical nor a commercial success, as it was overshadowed by his more successful novel The Sport of the Gods.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Blithedale Romance

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Description: Miles Coverdale is a young poet who goes to work on a communal farm in New England. He joins other idealists who seek to leave behind what they see as a corrupt society, and to live off the land by honest work. They will escape the world, and at the same time improve it by their example. However, this vision of a new utopia comes into conflict with the romantic desires, past attachments, and private plans of Coverdale’s companions. Critics noted a strong connection between the fictional story and the events in Hawthorne’s real life, even though in the preface Hawthorne insists that any such similarities are coincidental and don’t reflect real persons or events. This is one of several “romances” written by Hawthorne, in which he allows more room for imagination and examination of the human heart. There is a sharp contrast between Puritan practicality and morals, and Coverdale’s dreamlike narration.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A General History of the Pirates

Author: Captain Charles Johnson

Description: During the Golden Age of Piracy, a writer calling himself “Captain” Charles Johnson introduced London readers to the denizens of a savage world just beyond their shores. These pirates took up residence in readers’ imaginations, where they’ve been a mainstay of popular culture ever since. Pirate history especially resonates for American readers, as what would become the wild frontier of the American west began in the piratical eastern seaboard of Colonial times. When revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to found a continental republic, it was with a memory of the Pirate Republic founded eighty years earlier in Nassau and its attempt at self-government, ship-board democracy, and defiance of empire. When Grant arrived in Virginia to restore thirteen breakaway states to that republic, he came with a memory of Woodes Rogers’ arrival in the Bahamas to reclaim those islands for the Empire. The legacy of triangular trade, on which these pirates preyed and depended, has continued to play out across the nation’s history. For its contemporary readers piracy was serious business, and this book describes their exploits with a journalistic spirit. Johnson writes history, but history in the present tense. He editorializes, shares his personal knowledge of seamanship, and offers practical advice both to maritime merchants and to powerful policymakers. He draws stories from interviews with living pirates, draws from public and legal records, and develops historical context, bringing his own social analysis to bear. In some parts, he presents human interest stories as tabloid journalism with “a little the air of a novel,” recounted mostly because they’re interesting. And they are interesting: the bored gentleman and inept pirate Stede Bonnet as he arrives unarmed to a battle of wits with the experienced, savage, and polygamous Edward Teach; Teach, who said of this crew that “if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was”; the scandalous pirate-thruple of Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and “Calico” Jack Rackham. To the present day, in countless works, across media, Johnson’s pirates and the world they inhabit live on.

Subjects: biography, nonfiction

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Title: Metamorphoses

Author: Ovid

Description: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem written in Latin, composed of fifteen books, which explores the theme of transformation and change. The narrative follows a chronological order, beginning with the world’s creation and ending with the reign of Julius Caesar. Ovid retells traditional Greek and Roman myths, focusing on the transformations of gods, heroes, and mortals as they undergo physical, emotional, and psychological changes that reflect the complexities of the human experience. Some of the most famous stories in the Metamorphoses include the tales of Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus and Echo, and the fall of Icarus. hile modern scholars consider this epic poem to be Ovid’s magnum opus, the work was not well received by its contemporaries; the Roman emperor Augustus went so far as to exile Ovid and ban his books from Rome’s libraries. Today, this work is considered one of the most influential works in Western culture and has inspired countless authors like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: A Hazard of New Fortunes

Author: William Dean Howells

Description: Basil March jumps at the chance to leave his boring job to become the founding editor of a new magazine. But this also means that he must leave comfortable Boston for the confusion and chaos of 1890s New York. As March and his wife try to find a decent place to live, he also struggles to find contributors and readers. The Marches are quickly drawn into the tangled lives of their fellow New Yorkers: a bitter German socialist who lost his hand fighting for the Union in the Civil War, a colonel nostalgic for slavery, Bohemian artists, increasingly desperate workers on strike, a slick publicist, a starchy society family, and a wealthy farmer-turned-speculator who hurts those he loves most. Born in Ohio, William Dean Howells was a highly successful magazine editor before he became a full-time writer. He believed that this midlife novel, which draws on his own family’s experiences moving from Boston to New York, was his “most vital work.” Mark Twain, whom Howells helped early in his career, called A Hazard of New Fortunes “the exactest truest portrayal of New York and New York life ever written … a great book.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Tower Treasure

Author: Franklin W. Dixon

Description: While riding their motorcycles into town, Frank and Joe Hardy are nearly run off the road by a roadster that they later realize belongs to their friend Chet. As they set out to solve the mystery of the stolen car, the tower mansion is broken into and robbed. Are the crimes related? The Hardy boys will do their best to figure it out. This book is the first in the Hardy boys series of novels, first published in 1927. It was updated and rewritten in 1959, but this Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition text.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction, mystery

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Title: The Devil’s Pool

Author: George Sand

Description: Germain, a late-twenties widower, still lives with his late wife’s family. Germain’s father-in-law Maurice decides that two years is long enough to grieve; Germain needs a wife, and his children need a mother. Maurice has investigated, and found what he believes is a suitable match in a neighboring village. He sends Germain off to meet the woman, and on the way drops off a teenage girl at the farm where she has been newly employed. The rest of the novel demonstrates the old aphorism of “the best-laid plans... often go awry.” The Devil’s Pool is the first of four pastoral novels that George Sand originally intended to release together. They were inspired by the community in which she was raised.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Middle Five

Author: Francis La Flesche

Description: The Middle Five, written by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche, is a series of vignettes portraying La Flesche’s childhood growing up on the Omaha Reservation and attending a Presbyterian mission school. Published in 1909, the book portrays both the cultural conflicts arising from the assimilatory nature of the mission school and the youthful escapades of Frank (La Flesche’s younger self), Brush, Edwin, Warren, and Lester, who together make up the titular gang of schoolboys called the “Middle Five.” Like Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The School Days of an Indian Girl” from American Indian Stories, The Middle Five depicts life in an American Indian residential school, but takes place much closer to the reservation and thus portrays the interactions between the mission school and reservation life. It is regarded as a classic work of Native American literature and is often assigned in classrooms as a vivid firsthand account of 19th-century indigenous life.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927, collects the final set of Sherlock Holmes stories authored by Arthur Conan Doyle. All of the included stories appeared previously in The Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. As usual, the mysteries generally purport to be accounts written by Holmes’s friend Dr. John Watson. Uniquely, however, three stories in the Casebook are presented from alternative points of view: “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” is narrated in the third person, since it was adapted from a stage play in which Watson hardly appeared; and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” are both narrated by Holmes himself, the latter being set after his retirement as a detective.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: At the Back of the North Wind

Author: George MacDonald

Description: As a poor cabbie and his wife eke out a meager existence in Victorian London, their little boy, Diamond—named after his father’s horse—is befriended by the North Wind. While Diamond learns much about life through his travels with North Wind, his visit to the country at her “back” proves to be transformative. As life in London grows especially hard, that moment provides Diamond with the resources to touch those around him with beauty and truth. Although At the Back of the North Wind was written for children, in it MacDonald deals with deep themes, especially the potential for suffering to be redemptive, and the meaning of death.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: A Little Princess

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Description: Sara Crewe, the daughter of a widowed officer stationed in India, has come to London to attend a boarding school. A thoughtful and serious child, she is blessed with both an abundance of kindness and imagination, and her father’s wealth. But not everyone in her new life appreciates Sara for who she is, as she discovers when her circumstances abruptly change. “Sara Crewe” was originally a short story, serialized in a children’s magazine. Its popularity led the author to expand it into an equally successful stage play, and from there it became this full-length novel. Much like Burnett’s later children’s book The Secret Garden, dramatic events and sharply defined characters give A Little Princess the qualities of a modern fairy tale.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Four Men

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Description: A “Farrago” is a “confused mixture,” an apt subtitle for this 1911 semi-fictional travelogue and love song to Hilaire Belloc’s home County of Sussex. It is full to bursting with humor, songs (often including scores), speeches, drawings, fables, digressions, poetry, and legends, often partially or wholly invented, but all in service of Belloc’s deep belief in “the character of enduring things.” During a period of five days in 1902, including All-Halloween, All-Hallows’ Day, and ending on the Day of the Dead, Belloc walks from the east end of the County of Sussex to the west, finally arriving at his boyhood home. “Four Men,” each an aspect of Belloc’s personality, travel together on this walk: Myself, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, and the Poet. They tell tales, sermonize, versify, feast, and sing as they go, holding forth on subjects such as: St. Dunstan pulling the Devil by the nose; how all animals’ hides are covered in hair (and why Myself is glad that he is not); the Pelagian Heresy (as related in song); all the inns of the world and their ale (and how Alexander fought his way to Indus to seek a certain one); tales of each man’s first love (the Sailor has a bit of trouble with his); and finally ending in a fine piece of verse on “the way in which our land and we mix up together and are part of the same thing.”

Subjects: comedy, fiction, spirituality, travel

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Title: Amaryllis at the Fair

Author: Richard Jefferies

Description: Amaryllis at the Fair is a work of fiction largely based on Richard Jefferies’ childhood in rural England. The author tenderly shows the difficulties and beauties of rural life in a family struggling to make ends meet. The narrative, such as there is one, focuses on young Amaryllis and her observations and interactions with her family and people from the surrounding towns. The novel is written in a style that does not place much emphasis on story, and instead goes into great detail on topics as varied as country life, strong ale, the construction of a good fence, the disappointments of age, the joys and troubles of family, and poverty. These topics are often commented on by the narrator, who acts as a stand-in for Jefferies. Amaryllis at the Fair was the last novel written by Richard Jefferies before his death. “The book is not a novel,” or some variation, was a common response from critics. It follows its own paths and often eschews traditional plot, instead providing a fluid and clear view of the life of the family at the heart of the book.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: After London

Author: Richard Jefferies

Description: After London presents a version of England many generations after an apocalyptic event has drastically depopulated the country, leaving nature to take back the land and human survivors to scrape what they can from their surroundings. Petty kings and corrupt republics rule from the region around the lake that has formed in the middle of the country. Wild men hide in the woods. Society has regressed to a way of life similar to the medieval age. The novel is told in two parts. The first details what’s known of the fall of civilization, while the second part follows the son of a baron as he sets off to explore beyond the kingdom he was born into. Nature, civilization, violence, poverty, exploitation, and exploration are major themes. Richard Jefferies wrote the novel toward the end of his life. It combines the nature writing he is traditionally known for, with a fantastical science fiction setting, making it an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction. The surreal exploration of the former site of London bears a striking resemblance to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, decades before the atomic bomb was created. After London was an inspiration for William Morris, who said “absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it.” Morris would go on to reference the pastoralism present in After London in his utopian novel News From Nowhere.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: Darkwater

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Description: In The Souls of Black Folk the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the concept of the “veil,” a separation of the inner lives of black Americans from their white counterparts. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil is a collection of essays, poems, and short fiction that attempts to provide a nuanced look behind the veil at the lives of black Americans and to give voice to their often neglected concerns. ritten in the aftermath of the First World War, seventeen years after The Souls of Black Folk and during a time when racial tension had been codified into the infamous Jim Crow laws, Du Bois touches on a wide range of topics, from the philosophical to the concrete. His over-arching message is a desire for equality. He argues strongly against colonialism, excessive materialism, and Jim Crow, and discusses how only proper education and universal suffrage can provide the foundation for a more fair society. The unique combination of different writing styles on display vividly captures both his frustration and his belief in the possibility of a future shared on an equal basis between people of all colors.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Heidi

Author: Johanna Spyri

Description: Looking after Heidi, a five year old orphan, has proved too much for her aunt Deta, so when the opportunity for a new position in Frankfurt comes up, Heidi is summarily deposited in the care of her grandfather. His hut high up in the Swiss alps lacks conventional comforts, but Heidi is nevertheless entranced by the meadows and fir trees, the friendly goats and local goatherd, the sweet-smelling hay that makes up her new bed, and the large chunks of toasted cheese the grandfather regularly doles out. This idyllic life is disrupted, though, when Deta decides to collect Heidi to serve as a companion for an invalid girl in Frankfurt. Heidi, first published in two volumes, cemented Johanna Spyri’s reputation as a children’s novelist. Besides having been translated to many different languages, Heidi has been filmed, televised and produced for stage several times over. The Japanese translation led to additional fame as a well regarded and widely distributed animated series. Although Johanna Spyri only wrote this original Heidi story, her French translator continued the series posthumously for a further six books. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the Elisabeth P. Stork translation for both its fluid prose and its accuracy to the original source.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Talleyrand Maxim

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: The “Talleyrand Maxim” holds that “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf is turned into satin.” The adage has the character of guidance for life for an ambitious legal clerk, Linford Pratt. The moment comes when a “mulberry leaf” falls into Pratt’s hands in the form of the will of a wealthy local industrial magnate, undiscovered at the time of his death. Realizing that possession of it gives him leverage over the natural beneficiaries—the late man’s nephew and niece, and their mother—Pratt sets to work to transform it into his “satin.” As wily as he proves to be, his aspirations face complications, for it seems his possession of the will is not so secret as he supposed. J. S. Fletcher is best known for his detective fiction, but The Talleyrand Maxim is not a typical whodunit. Pratt’s culpability is never hidden from the reader, nor is there a traditional “sleuth.” The suspense lies, rather, in whether he will pull it off, as the suspicions of other interested parties deepen.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Secret History

Author: Procopius

Description: A military official and chronicler under the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian, Procopius is a key primary source for historians studying Justinian’s reign. In addition to writing a conventional history of Justinian’s wars titled History of the Wars and a panegyric to Justinian’s construction projects titled The Buildings, Procopius composed a Secret History supposedly consisting of the incidents he withheld from his previous books. In his Secret History, which was lost for centuries before it resurfaced at the Vatican Library in Rome in the 17th century, Procopius purports to unveil the celebrated Byzantine monarchs Justinian and Theodora for who they really are: corrupt, arbitrary, and literally demonic tyrants. Although considered an authentic text, its invective tone against Justinian and Theodora and its sometimes extravagant accusations (e.g. that Justinian was a demon in human form with a vanishing head) puts it in an unclear position between fiction and history. Nevertheless, the Secret History continues to be an object of study by classicists, and Procopius’s purpose for composing such a scathing text remains an object of speculation.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Portrait of a Lady

Author: Henry James

Description: The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James’s “early” period, and among the finest novels of his entire career. hen the eccentric Mrs. Touchett “takes up” her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristocratic neighbor, Lord Warburton. It is not long until a proposal of marriage comes from the English lord, but Isabel is not so quickly conquered. Besides, she has left a rejected suitor back in Boston, an archetypal American industrial magnate, Caspar Goodwood. Through a surprising bequest in Mr. Touchett’s will, Isabel becomes a wealthy heiress. As she travels with her aunt through Europe, Isabel encounters several remarkable figures in the American émigré communities in which Mrs. Touchett has her social circles. She also is led towards a third suitor in Florence, and this encounter proves decisive. The novel took shape as James travelled on the Continent, after having lived in London for some years. That sense of place and displacement suffuses the book, but it remains the backdrop to the main business of the story: the unfolding of relationships around the figure of Isabel Archer. James explains in an illuminating preface how his heroine and her attendant characters took hold of him. His artistic vision was to display Isabel’s character in action, embedded in this web of relations. The Portrait of a Lady is one of the supreme examples of James’s capacity to display how moral imagination and concrete action emerge in character. But along with this, the novel explores the perception and persistence of love, dissects the psychological gradations between magnanimity and malice, and contrasts the energy and ambition of the new world with the allure and ennui of the old. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the New York edition, which incorporates the revisions James made to his text in 1908, almost thirty years after he first wrote it.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Dombey and Son

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: The fictional Dombey and Son is a prominent mercantile “house” in England, and as Dombey and Son the novel opens, the third generation “and Son” has just been born. For Paul Dombey, the proud second “and Son” to graduate to “Dombey,” this moment has been the focus of his life to this point. So much so that he barely knows his six-year-old daughter Florence exists. The impact of that father’s overbearing disposition on the one hand and indifference (and worse) on the other is the subject of the rest of the novel. Paul’s only focus is on preparing the junior Paul to be “and Son,” and those preparations have no room for Florence. As she makes her way to adulthood, she encounters caregivers good and bad, and adventures large and small, all while striving to find a place in her father’s heart. Dombey and Son is a novel about the destructive nature of pride and arrogance, but it also has plenty to say about the essential qualities of motherhood and money. It would not be Dickens if there were not a plethora of characters of all stripes, stations, and personalities, each of whom leave an indelible impression on both the page and the mind.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Can Such Things Be?

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Description: Ambrose Bierce’s second major short story collection, Can Such Things Be? collected nearly all of Bierce’s supernatural horror stories. Bierce himself was a skeptic of the supernatural, having once written a satirical essay “The Clothing of Ghosts,” in which he insisted that “The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity—and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.” Despite his personal skepticism, Bierce was able to capture the essence of the supernatural horror story. “The Moonlit Road” is a strong example, providing three distinct vantage points of the same events, and both “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and “The Damned Thing” are frequently anthologized as pioneers in the genre. Not all stories in the collection are strictly “ghost stories”—“Moxon’s Master” is one of the first examples in English literature to describe a robotic thinking machine (and the fate of its master), and “Haïta the Shepherd” is a tale of a young man’s search for meaning in his life. Bierce also plays with the idea of holes in reality in the various “Mysterious Disappearances” stories, portals to horrifying locations in “The Spook House,” and parallel dimensions or altered states in “A Psychological Shipwreck” and “The Realm of the Unreal.” H.P. Lovecraft discusses Bierce in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” quoting Samuel Loveman: “In Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.” Like his other major published collection of short stories, Bierce updated and modified his stories for each new edition. This collection includes all stories as revised and published in his 1910 Collected Works, Volume III: Can Such Things Be?, as well as several stories from the “Bodies of the Dead” section in an earlier 1903 edition, which were not included in his Collected Works.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: The Master of Ballantrae

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Robert Louis Stevenson’s fascination with the mid-18th Century Jacobite rebellion in Scotland led to the production of his classic Kidnapped, along with its later sequel, Catriona. The Master of Ballantrae—written only a couple years after Kidnapped—shares the same evocative historical setting. The story revolves around the fractious relationship of the two sons of the Lord of Durrisdeer: the elder and duplicitous James, and Henry, the stolid younger brother. Split apart on opposing sides in the Jacobite rising of 1745, it appears that James has met his death on the battlefield of Culloden, while Henry not only wins as a bride the love of James’s life but looks set to inherit the title and the estate. James, however, proves both more hardy and more sinister than he appears, and the stage is set for anguish and tragedy. The narrator of the story is the loyal steward to the estate, Ephraim Mackellar, who employs the documentary evidence of other characters to relate events. Along with Stevenson’s preface offering an account of how he (putatively) came across the tale, the narration becomes pleasingly complex: who is telling the story, and how far can their account be trusted? Meanwhile, this tale of adventure, passion, and revenge carries its own timeless appeal, giving rise to several adaptations for radio, screen, and stage.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Niels Lyhne

Author: J. P. Jacobsen

Description: Niels Lyhne, an aspiring poet, is torn between the romanticism and faith of the old tradition, and modern notions of realism and reason. His relationship with different women, including his young aunt Edele, a free spirit of Copenhagen, and Mrs. Boye, a passionate artist, only lead him to further disillusionment as he searches for meaning in a rapidly changing world. Published in 1880, Niels Lyhne, Jacobsen’s second novel, was not as well received as his first, neither by reviewers nor the public. There wasn’t a second printing until after his death in 1885.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Secret of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Father Brown returns in his fourth collection of stories, and his sidekick Flambeau makes a return as well, although only in the two framing stories at the beginning and end of the collection. In the intervening ten stories, Father Brown is alone, and investigating mysteries involving objects as varied as mirrors, literal goldfish (made out of gold), and a suit of armor. As always, his investigations also provide him an opportunity to expound on the nature of evil, the differences between a charlatan’s representation of the supernatural and the real thing, and the opportunities for thieves and murderers to repent of their deeds.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The Land of Little Rain

Author: Mary Austin

Description: The Land of Little Rain is a loosely connected collection of essays detailing the land and inhabitants of the American Southwest. The individual works are connected via the waterways that connect the regions they describe. The stories and essays focus on themes that contrast the supremacy of nature with the effects of humans in natural spaces. Many stories follow the animals in their daily lives, the growth of plants, the seasons, and the various human inhabitants of the region. The author creates a lyrical view of the desert and lowlands at the base of the mountains, with a focus on animal and plant life. Humans are generally viewed as interlopers in an otherwise pristine and functional system. Mary Austin first published The Land of Little Rain in 1903. The work highlighted the life of the desert at a time when the popular imagination pictured the desert as empty and lifeless. At the time of writing there was much debate between those that wanted to anthropomorphize nature and present an idealistic view from animal perspectives, pejoratively referred to as “nature fakers,” and those that wanted to provide a clear and accurate view of the natural world. The Land of Little Rain takes a creative approach but resists the pull to make the flora and fauna of the region more human-like, and instead faithfully presents them in their environment as the author observed them.

Subjects: nonfiction, shorts

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Title: The Duke’s Children

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Almost since the first appearance of Plantagenet Palliser in the novels of Anthony Trollope, he has been accompanied by his effervescent wife, Lady Glencora. As the final installment of the Palliser series begins, she has been cruelly taken from him by a fatal illness, just at the moment when their three children are making their way in the world—and finding marriage partners of their own. But the younger generation does not seem to share the Duke’s values. The loves of both his eldest son and his only daughter in particular trouble him deeply, bringing into conflict his intellectual commitments and his emotional attachments. As with Phineas Finn, there are three notable female characters to add to Trollope’s roster of impressive women: Lady Mabel Grex, the American Isabel Boncassen, and the youngest of the Duke’s children, Lady Mary. The last in particular serves as a foil to the disappointments of Lady Laura Standish seen in the previous novels, and explores again the might-have-beens of choices gone awry. In other ways, too, The Duke’s Children gathers up themes from earlier Palliser novels: forgiveness, constancy, the maturing of youth, the constraints of nature, the disruptions of chance. Importantly, too, it displays complexities of political commitments from the vantage point of a younger generation coming of age. All this seems to have been deliberate. The manuscript for the novel shows Trollope made cuts—very rare in his corpus—of about 65,000 words at the request of the publisher. These often develop more explicitly the back-references to the earlier novels. Scholars have since restored those cuts and published a complete edition, but this Standard Ebooks edition follows the original. As the series concludes, Trollope finally gives vent to his own bitter experience of parliamentary elections: “Parliamentary canvassing is not a pleasant occupation. Perhaps nothing more disagreeable, more squalid, more revolting to the senses, more opposed to personal dignity, can be conceived.” This account is often to taken to arise out of Trollope’s own experience of campaigning in Beverly where he stood as a Liberal candidate in east Yorkshire. Despite Trollope’s disgust at the process, and disappointment at the outcome, The Duke’s Children ends with the Duke of Omnium returning to office, and an optimistic outlook for the political careers of the next generation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Story of the Treasure Seekers

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: This is the story of the six Bastable children: Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noël and little Horace Octavius, known as H. O. Due to their mother tragically passing away and their father’s business partner running away with the money, the ancient and most noble House of Bastable, as the children like to call it, has fallen. In order to restore their family fortune the resourceful siblings go on a hunt for treasure; but whether they dig for gold in the garden, or try to open up a sherry business, their treasure-hunting always ends up getting them in trouble. The Story of the Treasure Seekers was the first novel for children written by Edith Nesbit, and today it is one of her most well-known. The stories of the Bastable children were first published between 1894 and 1899 in a variety of periodicals. For the one-volume publication in 1899 the order of the stories was changed, and several of the stories underwent extensive rewriting. This and her later novels inspired several later writers of English children’s literature, amongst them C. S. Lewis, who references the Bastable children in The Magician’s Nephew. The Story of the Treasure Seekers spawned two sequels, The Wouldbegoods in 1901 and New Treasure Seekers in 1904.

Subjects: adventure, children’s

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Title: Democracy and Education

Author: John Dewey

Description: Life is growth. Education is therefore essential to human life as it fosters for individuals the capacity to perpetuate growth. This is the theory expressed by John Dewey in this critical review of the philosophy of education. Throughout this work Dewey traces the aims of education to their philosophic and historical bases, and explains how differing aims can lead students to gain not only differing levels of knowledge, but also different morals and values. The values taught to students may or may not be explicit, but they have an effect on society. Dewey argues that certain values are more conducive to a truly democratic society and that a good educational system should be designed to encourage precisely these values. Specifically, Dewey takes issue with schools that rely heavily on testing and memorization. He argues that this type of education is a result of a duality that regards practice as in opposition and inferior to theory. Education that is dependent on strict discipline and conformity breeds a society that is conformist, low in initiative, and acquiescent to authority. A better system would allow the students some level of freedom to define their own suitable projects that teachers could guide in ways to ensure the students learn core skills such as literacy, arithmetic, and the natural sciences through practical applications. Such an interactive education would also be a way for students from different backgrounds to interact with each other. This has the positive effect of breaking down class barriers and building a more empathetic society. Though it was written over one hundred years ago, many of the themes and concerns voiced by Dewey can be found in modern-day critiques of the educational system. In addition to lambasting an over-reliance on testing, Dewey questions over-specialization, teaching of abstractions over applications, and the lack of time spent on developing skills that can be used outside of school.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Mirèio

Author: Frédéric Mistral

Description: Published in 1859 to great fanfare from French literary society, Mirèio was the first of four long narrative poems written by the French author Frédéric Mistral. Composed in Occitan, a regional language spoken in southern France, Mirèio arose out of the milieu of the Félibrige, a cultural movement centered around Mistral and his compatriots who championed the use of the Occitan language. Rich with references to local Provençal culture and geography, Mirèio recounts the joys and sorrows of two young lovers: the titular Mirèio, daughter of a rich farmer, and Vincen, a poor basket weaver. Though the two fall madly in love, they find themselves separated by social class and the disapproving attitude of Mirèio’s parents. In part thanks to Mirèio, Mistral went on to win the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature, celebrated by the Nobel Committee for his poetry and his work as a Provençal philologist. Mirèio was widely translated, and was also adapted into the French-language opera Mireille by Charles Gounod. Mirèio remains a celebrated depiction of Provençal culture to this day. This Standard Ebooks edition of Mirèio augments Harriet Waters Preston’s unannotated 1890 translation with the annotations from her first translation published in 1872.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Figures of Earth

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: Figures of Earth is the second installment in James Branch Cabell’s Biography of the Life of Manuel, set in the imaginary province of Poictesme. Young Manuel is a simple, well-liked swineherd who is often seen continually reshaping a small figure he made from the marsh clay from the pool of Haranton. One day, a stranger appears and tells Manuel of an adventure to save the Count of Arnaye’s daughter from a wizard who carried her off to the gray mountain called Vraidex. Manuel accepts this adventure (and many more that follow)—and his life will never be the same. The book was originally published in 1921 and was dedicated to “six most gallant champions,” each of whom were real persons who came to Cabell’s defense during the legal battle over alleged obscenity in his previous novel, Jurgen.

Subjects: comedy, fantasy

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Title: The Prime Minister

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium, is a familiar character to the readers of the Barchester and Palliser series, but only now, at a moment of political crisis, does he take center stage. Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives can command a majority in Parliament; the Duke is called upon as the only figure capable of forming a coalition government. He does so, but only with deep misgivings about whether the role of Prime Minister suits his character. As he assumes the role, the irrepressible Duchess, still known as Lady Glencora to her friends as well as her enemies, forms an ambition of her own to bolster his administration with lavish social display, much to her husband’s consternation. The antitype to the virtuous Duke is the character of Ferdinand Lopez, whose story—along with that of his wife, and his rival—frames and intertwines with that of the Prime Minister’s coalition government. While the Duke is upright but thin-skinned, Lopez possesses the thickest of skins, but no morals to speak of. His vaulting ambition likewise contrasts with the Duke’s enervating self-doubt. Trollope commenced writing The Prime Minister only a few weeks after completing his masterpiece, The Way We Live Now. His caustic treatment of contemporary English society in the earlier novel spills over into the menace posed by Lopez in this one. Though contemporary critics were not impressed by The Prime Minister, C. P. Snow reports in his biography of Trollope that others were. Leo Tolstoy, for one, read it with appreciation while writing Anna Karenina, his secretary recording Tolstoy’s admiration: “Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence.” Meanwhile, Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, told Snow that Trollope’s studies of political process were “right both in tone and detail.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Phineas Redux

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: At the end of Phineas Finn, the second of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, Phineas has abandoned his parliamentary career, accepted a sinecure in the civil service in Dublin, and married his Irish sweetheart. As Phineas Redux begins, he is a widower and tired of Dublin life. Fortunately for him, his friends in London believe he might be enticed back to take a role as a member of Parliament in the face of the latest political crisis. Phineas answers the call—but all does not turn out as planned. His friends welcome him back, but even this involves serious social complications. And, it transpires, even the likable Phineas Finn has political enemies who wish to spoil his return to public life. Along the way, Phineas continues to deepen his understanding of both personal and public politics. As in The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope weaves high drama into his plot, but refuses to keep secrets from his readers. Far from having a dampening effect on the tension, the focus of Trollope’s art directs his readers’ attention to the psychological conflicts that arise. At this point in the series, something of Trollope’s own political disappointments begin to cast a shadow over the maneuvers and machinations of both local and parliamentary politics. There is still a nobility about public service, though, of which Trollope never loses sight, and which will play a larger role as the series moves towards its conclusion.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Beatrix Potter

Description: Beatrix Potter’s tales of the animal inhabitants of the Lake District countryside in which she lived started with the simple story of a naughty rabbit, written for a young friend. It was eventually published nine years later in 1902 as “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” accompanied by her watercolor illustrations. Its success led to the publishing of a further twenty-two books in the series over the next three decades. The creatures detailed lead period-correct lives, with many of them having jobs in the animal society that mimic the society Beatrix was living in. Her stories rarely shy away from showing the dangers of the wider world that the inhabitants find themselves in, and similarly they rarely end on a completely happy note. But despite this—or perhaps because of this—they have remained globally popular over the last century with both children and parents alike. The stories have been translated many times over, and continue to be presented in new formats including TV, film, theater, and even ballet. The success of her books and the associated licensing deals allowed Beatrix Potter to purchase large tracts of land in the Lake District, which later became part of the new British National Parks system. Her love of nature and the locality led her to fell farming and other local traditions, and she was even able to use her skills with watercolors to scientifically document the fungi of the area. This collection comprises the twenty-two “Tale” books in the U.S. public domain.

Subjects: children’s, fiction, shorts

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Title: Moll Flanders

Author: Daniel Defoe

Description: After the success of Robinson Crusoe and its follow-ups, Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722. It’s an episodic, picaresque novel that recounts Moll’s long life of misadventures. It has a journalistic, plain style, with unadorned, prosaic speech that flows naturally from story to story. The novel is written as a purported autobiography over the course of the narrator’s life. As a young orphan in poverty, Moll claims she wants to be a “gentlewoman” when she gets older, not fully understanding what the term means. What she desires is simply independence and a life free from servitude. In adulthood, she pursues this in two ways. She first attempts to find security by marrying a wealthy husband, and—after several failures and diminishing options—she turns to thievery. In her interactions, Moll proves streetsmart, deft, and quick on her feet. By traveling back and forth between England and the American colonies, the novel offers a lens into different societies through a variety of occupations. Moll is an enterprising female protagonist, a true individual. Though she receives some help, she is largely on her own in risky situations. She often relies on disguise and deceiving others, but she is always honest with the reader and tells us exactly what she is thinking, including her guilt and remorse.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Author: James Hogg

Description: The “sinner” in this engrossing and strange novel is Robert Wringham, the son of a Scottish laird and a much more religious mother, who quickly separates from her free-living husband under the encouragement of an influential minister. When it’s time to be baptized, Robert takes the preacher’s last name, and a bit later the reverend decides that Robert is also one of God’s chosen. Robert believes that as a member of the elect he can never be damned, no matter what he does. One day Robert becomes fast friends with a man with mysterious powers and a strange name. This Gil-Martin takes on the appearance of different people, and can even learn their “most secret thoughts.” He’s also good at arguing Scripture—and capitalizing on Robert’s pride, and other faults. Soon they’re scheming together to get the better of their enemies—and their plans include murder. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was a failure when it was first published anonymously in 1824, though it was ahead of its time in its blend of mystery, psychological horror, tall tales, comedy, metafiction, and social criticism. It was only in the twentieth century that it became more broadly known, gaining admirers that included the writers André Gide, Muriel Spark, Philip Pullman, and Ian Rankin.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: Key Out of Time

Author: Andre Norton

Description: The fourth novel in Andre Norton’s Time Traders series, Key Out of Time follows Ross Murdock, Gordon Ashe, Karara Trehern, and the rest of a Terran settlement team as they search the planet Hawaika for traces of a galactic civilization. All of the knowledge they had about Hawaika before embarking on their exploratory mission had been obtained from an ancient space-navigation guide. Yet, the world it described was nowhere in sight. Surrounded on all sides by shallow seas and archipelagos instead of the major landmasses they had expected to find, the Terrans must now try to reconcile the planet’s past with its present. What could have transformed the planet so dramatically and what happened to the intelligent beings who had once colonized the planet? The key to this mystery lies somewhere in time.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Ashenden

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: During World War I W. Somerset Maugham, already by then an established playwright and author, was recruited to be a British intelligence agent. These stories reflect his wartime experiences in intelligence gathering. Though fictionalized, they managed to retain enough authentic elements for Winston Churchill to advise Maugham that their publication might be a violation of the Official Secrets Act, resulting in the author burning an additional fourteen stories. Set in various locales across the continent, these remaining Ashenden stories are a precursor to the jet-setting spy novels of the 1950s and 1960s. Maugham is known as a master short story writer and these stories are no exception, combining wit and realism to create memorable characters in a unique and highly critical portrait of wartime espionage. Initially released to a mixed reception—with an early review by D. H. Lawrence being especially scathing—Ashenden has since been credited as an inspiration for numerous authors, including John Le Carré, Graham Greene, and Raymond Chandler. The latter in particular was especially impressed, writing in 1950, “There are no other great spy stories—none at all. I have been searching and I know.”

Subjects: adventure, shorts

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Title: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Author: Willa Cather

Description: Set in the 1850s, this short novel is about the struggles and triumphs of a bishop, Jean Marie Latour, and his loyal friend and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant. They have been sent to reawaken and spread the Roman Catholic faith in an area where it has grown weak: New Mexico, recently annexed by the United States. Desolate and remote, the territory is home to many diverse groups: Mexicans, including those on ranches established for hundreds of years; Indians, who have been there much longer and who are divided by language and customs into thirty nations; and newcomers—hunters, fur trappers, and those seeking gold. This book is as much their story as it is the story of the priests and the vast changes the land itself underwent in those years. Death Comes for the Archbishop was a departure for Willa Cather, who had already published eight novels before publishing this one in 1927. The novel doesn’t try to follow a single unified story the way many historical novels do; instead, its nine chapters are episodic, filled with stories, legends, histories, and descriptions of the Southwest, which Cather had been visiting for many years before she started writing it. Many of its main characters, including the bishop and his vicar, are thinly disguised versions of real-life historical figures, while other famous New Mexicans of the day, including the frontiersman Kit Carson and the “powerful old priest,” Antonio José Martínez, appear under their actual names.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tombstone

Author: Walter Noble Burns

Description: The second of three books by Walter Noble Burns covering the post-Civil War American West, Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest, first published in 1927, is one of the earliest popular semi-fictional histories of some of the West’s most famous lawmen and outlaws. Wyatt Earp (the “Lion of Tombstone”), his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday face off against rustlers and outlaws like Curly Bill, Billy and Ike Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Johnny Ringo, culminating in the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Throughout the narrative, Burns draws the reader into the life of the boomtown, from founding, to meteoric rise, and final collapse, with a focus on the personalities, conflicts, and myths that have cemented the town and its characters as a fixture in many aspects of American popular culture, including books, comics, radio dramas, films, and television. Burns’ Tombstone is the iconic frontier town of “The Old West.”

Subjects: biography, fiction

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Title: To the Lighthouse

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: Set on an island off the Scottish coast, To the Lighthouse minutely examines the fleeting impressions of a large cast of family, friends, lovers, and hangers-on. Who can we be, Virginia Woolf invites us to ask, if no one can ever know our hearts—if they’re unknowable even to ourselves? To the Lighthouse remains one of the most important Modernist novels, exquisitely composed by one of the most gifted writers of the Modernist movement. The opening section follows the passage of a day with a thwarted objective: to go to the nearby lighthouse. The concluding section revisits this expedition a decade later, when so much is irrevocably changed, as a chance to glimpse interpersonal understandings and connections. The novel provides a brilliant example of stream-of-consciousness writing, and raises questions that provoke us still: questions about whether children are the fullest realization of one’s posterity, how women artists are regarded socially, and how money and status enable—or close off—networks, relationships, and the dreams we hold most dear. As masterful as its technique is, however, the lasting value of this novel for twenty-first-century readers may be its sharp representation of the emotional labor that people—particularly women—perform in order to manage the needs and expectations of others. Woolf wrote in an age when women’s participation in society was tightly restricted by class norms and stultifying domesticity. Nearly a century later, scholars still have a great deal to say about Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and the tension between Mr. Ramsay and his son James. oolf’s fifth novel, and one of her most successful books both critically and commercially, To the Lighthouse was originally published in 1927, simultaneously in England and the United States. Due to a quirk in the management and correction of the proofs, according to scholar Hans Walter Gabler, the two editions were “not identical, since in a significant number of instances Virginia Woolf marked up the first proofs differently” for her two publishers. The Standard Ebooks edition is based primarily on the Hogarth UK edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Author: Thornton Wilder

Description: In Lima, Peru, an ancient Incan rope bridge breaks and plunges five people to their deaths. A Franciscan monk witnesses it and decides to investigate the lives of the five people, in order to prove that God is just, that He had a purpose in choosing those five to die, on that day, on that bridge. And so we learn of the lives of the Marquesa de Santamayor and young Pepita her companion; of Esteban, a young man of the city; and of Uncle Pio and Don Jaime, the mentor and son, respectively, of a famous actress in Lima. We see how many of their lives intersect, we learn of their dreams, their struggles, and the events that led to them being on the bridge that day. The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned Thornton Wilder the first of his three Pulitzers. The novel’s structure, in which a major event is presented followed by the backstory of the people involved, has been duplicated countless times in books, plays, and movies. It was the best-selling book the year of its release, and has never been out of print since.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Elmer Gantry

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Description: Elmer Gantry isn’t suited to be a lawyer, so he becomes a preacher instead. Although he experiences a variety of failures, and even more successes, Gantry ultimately finds this new career path suits him very well indeed—despite his drinking and womanizing. Throughout his time as a preacher Gantry progresses through the hierarchies of the Baptist and Methodist churches, dabbles in revivalism and “New Thought,” and even experiments with politics, all the while emerging from scandals relatively unscathed and ready to move onward and upward once again. Sinclair Lewis published the satirical Elmer Gantry in 1927 much to the dismay of the religious community. It was denounced from the pulpit, banned by many, and even engendered threats of violence. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—it went on to become a massive success and the best selling novel of that year. One of the most savage satirical assaults against institutionalized religion and its hypocrisy in American literature, Elmer Gantry continues to be a window into a particularly important aspect of American history.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Story of Ivy

Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes

Description: Published in the United Kingdom in 1927, The Story of Ivy is a melodramatic murder mystery centered on a young woman, Ivy Lexton, who is caught up in the lifestyle of fashionable London during the Roaring Twenties. Having run through her late husband’s fortune after only a few years, Ivy chances upon a millionaire whom she seems to be able to charm—at least at first, before he refuses her further advances. Meanwhile, Ivy must also untangle herself from her devoted lover, a poor but handsome doctor. Considered by The Spectator to be one of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s best stories, The Story of Ivy was also adapted to the screen as Ivy in 1947, starring Joan Fontaine in the lead role. Lowndes chronicles the significant changes in the culture of post-World War I Britain along with the sensationalism of a murder mystery.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Unnatural Death

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: Unnatural Death, published in 1927, is the third novel written by Dorothy L. Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The story begins with a conversation in a restaurant between Wimsey, his friend Detective Inspector Charles Parker, and a doctor who tells them about a situation he was involved in: an elderly lady, suffering from a slow-acting cancer, died suddenly and unexpectedly with no obvious immediate cause of death. She died intestate, but her great-niece, with whom she was living, was set to inherit the considerable estate. Suspecting something wrong, the doctor demanded an autopsy, which showed nothing unusual, but stirred up such local animosity that the he was forced to abandon his practice. Wimsey, sensing a mystery, decides to investigate—but his investigation triggers a series of deadly events. One of the delights of the book is the introduction of a new character in Miss Alexandra Climpson, a middle-aged spinster whom Wimsey employs as an investigative agent, and whose effusive reports of the gossip she picks up in the town are very amusing. Unnatural Death is notable for its inclusion of one clearly lesbian character—a decision unusual in detective fiction at the time—and the very sympathetic treatment by Wimsey of a black character (though offensively racist terms for him are used by others in the book). An adaptation of the book was made for BBC radio in 1975.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Clouds of Witness

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: Clouds of Witness, published by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1926, is the second of her novels starring Lord Peter Wimsey, a wealthy aristocrat who enjoys detective work as a hobby. In this book Wimsey’s skills have an immediate and personal interest when his brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver, is arrested on a charge of murder. He is accused of shooting his sister’s fiancé, Denis Cathcart, in a fit of rage after discovering that Cathcart was a man who made a living by cheating at cards. The Duke has no credible alibi for the time of Cathcart’s death and refuses to clarify where he was. Wimsey promptly sets to work to solve the case and exonerate his brother. One interesting feature of the story is that the Duke, as a peer of the realm, must be tried before his other peers in the House of Lords. Another is the flight across the Atlantic undertaken by Wimsey to obtain vital evidence—a year before Charles Lindbergh first made this voyage in reality. Clouds of Witness was made into a television mini-series for the BBC in 1972.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Sir Percy Hits Back

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: In the Dauphiné area of France, soldiers have come to arrest some local aristos as part of the French Revolution’s anger and revenge on anyone with money. A young woman rescues the family’s papers and money from their house after their arrests, and persuades a childhood friend to hide the valuables. The friend is soon arrested for the theft, so the young woman seeks to go to where he has been taken in order to defend him. She is herself subsequently denounced and arrested, and the Scarlet Pimpernel is soon involved in a rescue plan. But who is her father, what is his role in all of the events, and will he also be caught up in the “Law of the Suspect” that has sent so many to the guillotine?

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Big Four

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: “The American Soap King” has offered Hercule Poirot a ridiculous amount of money to investigate some dodgy business in South America. But right before he’s due to leave London, Poirot discovers that a man has broken into his apartment. The addled stranger, covered in dust and mud, can do little more than repeat Poirot’s address and draw the number 4 over and over. Could the Big Four, a shadowy and seemingly all-powerful organization, be behind these and other strange events? To stay ahead of supercriminals, Poirot needs the loyalty of his friend Captain Hastings almost as much as he needs his little grey cells. Soon they are rushing to country houses, a mysterious laboratory, the site of a deadly chess game, and a mountaintop hideaway in the Alps. The year before this book was published, personal turmoil made it impossible for Agatha Christie to write—but her publisher was anxious for another novel to follow the highly successful Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Her brother-in-law helped her turn a twelve-part serial she had written several years before into The Big Four, and it’s this origin as separate stories that helps explain its occasional choppiness. As much a thriller as a mystery novel, the novel has never been considered her finest work by either readers or Christie herself, but it remains a fascinating example of Poirot and Hastings at their most spy-like and adventurous.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: The Blue Castle

Author: L. M. Montgomery

Description: L. M. Montgomery is perhaps best known as an author of youth fiction, especially her Anne of Green Gables series. But of her novels intended for adult readers, The Blue Castle is the most famous. In Valancy Stirling’s rural Ontario town, marriage is thought to be a young woman’s vital accomplishment. Yet Valancy, now in her late 20s, has never had a flicker of interest from any suitor. Add to this the oppressive home life she endures with her mother, and Valancy’s misery is complete. In order to find some relief, she builds a fantasy world in her imagination—her “Blue Castle”—full of love and beauty. Even this, however, fails to support her when her chest pains prove to be the sign of a terminal condition. This traumatic discovery combines with Valancy’s inspirational reading to prompt her to take back her life—much to her relatives’ consternation. Undeterred, Valancy finds new worth and freedom in relationships she could never have imagined before, which bring their own surprising twists and turns.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Bulldog Drummond

Author: H. C. McNeile

Description: Captain Hugh Drummond, D.S.O., M.C., is back from the war, and is bored. Seeking adventure, he places a newspaper advert with services offered in exchange for excitement, and a reply from a woman needing help piques his interest. What follows is a back and forth engagement with a shadowy criminal cabal determined to cause mayhem for the British establishment—and to profit from it. Luckily for Britain, “Bulldog” Drummond is up for the fight. Bulldog Drummond was the first book of ten by H. C. McNeile (writing under the pen name of “Sapper”) to deal with the eponymous hero; a series that was later expanded to nineteen novels and many further plays, films and short stories by later authors. The novel was an immediate success, with its combination of gentlemanly daring and high melodrama striking a chord with the public of the time. Drummond’s appeal to the modern audience has faded: he’s a character of his time, with views that reflect the British Empire’s thinking of the 1920s. His influence, however, lives on in later men of adventure, including James Bond and Biggles.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Faerie Queene

Author: Edmund Spenser

Description: The Faerie Queene is Edmund Spenser’s magnum opus, composed for Queen Elizabeth I. The epic poem is incomplete, as only six of the intended twelve books were published before his death. Despite that, it stands as one of the longest poems in the English language. During its composition, Spenser invented a new type of verse form: the Spenserian stanza. The form consists of eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a line in iambic hexameter, with the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. He purposely included archaic language and spelling to make the work feel comparable to the Arthurian myths written during the Middle Ages. Spenser used Aristotle’s list of virtues as the foundation for his work. Each of the six books follows a different knight who symbolize a unique virtue: the Knight of the Redcross for Holiness, Guyon for Temperance, Britomartis for Chastity, Cambell and Telamond for Friendship, Artegall for Justice, and Calidore for Courtesy. Fragments of an unfinished seventh book—the “Cantos of Mutability”—would have centered on the virtue of Constancy. In a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser reveals that King Arthur represents the virtue of Magnificence, “the perfection of all the rest.” The first book opens with the Redcross Knight on a quest ordered by Queen Gloriana to defeat a horrible dragon. Traveling with him is Lady Una and her dwarf servant, who are leading the knight to the land where the dragon dwells. A terrible storm forces the travelers to shelter in the nearest cave—and a monster’s den.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Incredulity of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Father Brown, full-time Catholic priest and part-time amateur detective, returns in this third collection of short stories. Unlike the first two collections, this time Father Brown is investigating alone; his sidekick, the former criminal Flambeau, is nowhere to be seen. Father Brown has to solve a murder (including his own!) in each story, and since several also appear to involve the supernatural, he has ample opportunity to elaborate on his thoughts concerning it. As with the first two collections, Chesterton is often as concerned with the moral of the story as with the mystery itself. Most of the stories were previously published in The Pall Mall Magazine, though one appeared in Cassell’s Magazine and another was written specifically for this collection.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The Eustace Diamonds

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Lady Eustace—more familiarly known as Lizzie—is very beautiful, very clever, and very rich. On closer inspection, she turns out also to be a “nasty, low, scheming, ill-conducted, dishonest little wretch.” Her calculated marriage to a wealthy but sickly young baronet brought her the wealth she desired, including a spectacular diamond necklace which she wore in the days before her husband’s demise. Upon his death, the lawyer for the estate is determined to recover it as a family heirloom. The young widow is equally determined to keep it as her own. But just as Lizzie sought a life of ease by marrying money, so too there are those who see in Lady Eustace their opportunity to acquire riches along with the beautiful widow herself. Given the relentless, even fierce, legal forces she faces regarding the diamonds, Lizzie is also alert to the benefit she would enjoy from having a husband to support her. But which is it to be? The tedious Lord Fawn, who would bring a title? Her cousin and confidant, Frank Greystock, who is a member of Parliament but saddled with debt? Or the debonair but dubious Lord George de Bruce Carruthers? Or perhaps none of them! Lizzie’s life of lies and calculation has echoes and mirrors in the novel’s subplots. She falls in with an unsavory and scheming set which includes a desperately ill-suited couple being driven towards a potentially disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, the love life of her childhood friend, the plain, poor, and pure Lucy Morris, seems to be the antithesis to Lizzie’s own. Anthony Trollope felt real ambivalence about the growing interest in mystery novels, whose popularity was burgeoning as he sat down to write The Eustace Diamonds. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone had just been published to huge success, giving birth to the detective novel genre. Trollope would have none of it, and kept no secrets from his readers. That The Eustace Diamonds maintains a sense of drama and intrigue in spite of Trollope’s forthright narration is a testament to his skill as a storyteller. There are also signs of Trollope plotting a future course for his Palliser series, of which The Eustace Diamonds is the third. Political life is not absent, but it is wholly subservient to the events that swirl around Lizzie and her companions. As the novel closes, Trollope winks at his readers, informing us that we haven’t seen the last of Lizzie Eustace yet.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Phineas Finn

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: High politics are not always centrally in view in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, but parliamentary life comes to the fore throughout Phineas Finn, the second in the series. The hero of the tale is the young son of an Irish country doctor, now attaining manhood and striking out in life. Although training for the Bar, he feels the lure of Parliament and manages to secure a seat. Blessed with good fortune, “comely inside and out,” and pleasant company to both women and men, he begins to climb the ladder. Along with his undoubted triumphs there come also palpable failures—social as well as political. Leaving behind a sweetheart in Ireland, he encounters women of high status and fashion in London who place their own claims on his heart. hile Phineas is clearly the hero of the novel bearing his name, the lives of a number of remarkable women become intertwined with his own, each of whom he loves, after a fashion. The portrait of Lady Laura Standish—who serves as his political muse as well—is especially poignantly drawn, while Violet Effingham and the somewhat mysterious Madame Max Goesler each have an individuated strength and depth of character. Each, too, mirrors in different ways the dilemma faced by Phineas in his political career: whether it is better to be subservient and “succeed,” or maintain independence and risk being an outcast. The writing of Phineas Finn coincided with Trollope’s own political awakening and aspirations. While working on this novel, he was also composing a memoir of Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister who had died in office only a couple years previously. (The memoir remained unpublished until 1882.) By this point in his mid fifties, Trollope made his own attempt to secure a seat as a member of Parliament in 1868, failed, and was scarred by the experience. The literary critic Michael Sadleir characterized Trollope’s parliamentary fiction as showing a “preoccupation with political society [but] indifference to political theory,” perhaps unfairly. Especially in the character of Mr. Monk, Phineas’s chief political mentor, much wisdom for parliamentary life is imparted. Trollope’s political failure does not yet cast a shadow on the optimism which pervades Phineas Finn. The novelist’s own views would ripen along with those of his characters as the series took shape. Still, in his autobiography Trollope was able to declare, “Phineas Finn, I certainly think, was successful from first to last.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: An Autobiography

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Description: Theodore Roosevelt is often ranked among the greatest presidents in American history. His achievements as President include “trust-busting” many of the monopolistic corporations that dominated the economy and mistreated workers, settling a labor dispute to avert a national energy crisis, establishing the United States Forest Service and five National Parks, negotiating a treaty allowing the construction of the Panama Canal, and mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese war while winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process. But the presidency was only one of the many positions he held during his lifetime. He was also a cattle rancher in North Dakota, a colonel in the United States Army, the Minority Leader of the New York State Assembly, the New York City Police Commissioner, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the Governor of New York, and the Vice President of the United States. This autobiography provides insight into the unshakable beliefs and morals that made up the man who remains one of the most famous Americans in history.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Inspector French’s Greatest Case

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: Inspector French is called in by his Superintendent at Scotland Yard to investigate a late-night murder in the office of a Hatton Garden diamond merchants. When he gets there, he finds not just the corpse, but an open safe missing its contents of diamonds and money. Although the clues seem meager at first, French soon picks up a trail that leads him to mainland Europe and back, steadily bringing him closer to a solution to the case. This is the first in Freeman Wills Crofts’ long-running Inspector French series. French, a well mannered London detective, works through the crimes in front of him in a methodical way, peeling back the layers of intrigue and mystery to expose the core of the problem as much to the reader as to himself.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Germinie Lacerteux

Author: Edmond de Goncourt

Description: Germinie Lacerteux had a rough childhood in the French countryside, but when she finds employment as a maidservant in Paris her life seems to be taking a turn for the better. Her mistress Mademoiselle de Varandeuil treats her fairly, and in Jupillon, son of a local dairy-shop owner, she finds a secret lover. But her generous nature and self-sacrificial spirit make her vulnerable to his abuse and depravity. Her boundless love and loyalty will ultimately plunge her into debt, alcoholism, nymphomania, and depression—and a never-ending struggle to hide the dark side of her life from her mistress. In this, their fourth novel, the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, took inspiration from events close to home: the passing of their maidservant Rose revealed her sordid hidden life, much like Germinie’s. They called the novel that arose from their shock and surprise at Rose’s secrets their clinic of love—and it was met with high praise and utter disgust alike. A young Émile Zola adored the novel, and Vincent van Gogh called it “life as it is,” making the book one of the subjects of a still life. Other contemporary writers were less enthusiastic, calling it “putrid” and “chiseled mire.” This could hardly have been a surprise to the Goncourt brothers, for they already warned in the preface: “this book furnishes entertainment of a melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure the health of the public.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Monk

Author: M. G. Lewis

Description: Lewis claimed to have written The Monk in just ten weeks, when he was twenty-one years of age. He published the first edition anonymously, sensing that the controversial and then-pornographic nature of the novel would stun society. And so it did—the book was so sensational, so salacious, and so scandalous, that after he put his full name (and title, as a member of Parliament) on the second edition, his reputation hardly recovered for the rest of his life. The Monk is a Gothic horror novel marked by an intricate plot, melodramatic characters, and scenes of shocking terror. It follows two plots: in the first, the celebrated monk Ambrosio meets a mysterious novice at the abbey—a woman, Matilda, posing as a man, who seems to have a powerful, irresistible charisma. Matilda seduces Ambrosio not just in body but in mind, and leads him down a path of darkness and brutal violence. In the other plot, Raymond, the son of a marquis, falls in love with a nun, and the two scheme to live together; but their plans lead to encounters with evil spirits, exorcisms, riots, dungeons, and more. The novel was shocking for its time in its frank depiction of sexuality and sexual violence, demons, spirits, and scenes of raw horror; but just as shocking was its anti-religious sentiment and thesis that evil often triumphs over good. It sold so well and offended so many that just two years after its publication Lewis was forced to issue a bowdlerized fourth edition, in which any offensive passages were either muted or expunged. Despite this attempt at satisfying society, and despite at least one written apology, Lewis spent the rest of his days in a constant struggle to escape the shadow of The Monk’s reputation, which he never quite did—even posthumous assessments of him as a person sometimes concluded that the debauched excess depicted The Monk reflected a failing of his own personal morals. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the full, unexpurgated second edition of the novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Hashish Eater

Author: Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Description: When Fitz Hugh Ludlow was in college, he found a jar of cannabis extract at his pharmacy, deduced that this was the fabled “hashish” described in The Arabian Nights and The Count of Monte Cristo, and gave in to his curiosity by swallowing a spoonful. His life would never be the same. The Hashish Eater attempts to describe the bizarre distortions of perspective and imagination that Ludlow experienced on extraordinarily large doses of cannabis. Because cannabis was mostly unknown in the English-speaking world at that time, he didn’t have the vocabulary to describe his “trips,” and he couldn’t expect his readers to have had similar experiences to compare. Because of this, he tests the limits of metaphor and creative description; and because of that, his work remains an important document to both understanding and poetically revealing the phenomenology of cannabis intoxication.

Subjects: memoir

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Guy de Maupassant

Description: Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the preeminent writers in the realm of the short story. In a little over a decade he produced almost three hundred stories, many of which (e.g. “Boule de Suif,” “The Little Soldier”) are judged to be classics of the genre. As a protégé of Flaubert and contemporary of Zola, Maupassant was an early practitioner of naturalism, and his stories often reflect the stark, harsh outlook that marked that movement. Brutality—towards women, as a result of war, or just representing the baseness of humankind—is a common thread. Yet stories like “Beside the Bed” and “Country Courts” show that he had a sense of humor as well. But no matter the subject, what sets Maupassant’s stories apart is his unerring ability to paint the details of the story’s setting and participants in such a way that the reader feels as if they are part of the action. This edition includes all Maupassant stories that are known to have been translated into English, including five that have not appeared in any other English collection. It does not include the sixty-six so-called “fake” Maupassants, stories that were attributed to Maupassant but not written by him that appeared in several English collections at the turn of the twentieth century.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Can You Forgive Her?

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Can You Forgive Her? is the story of Alice Vavasor and her cousins. On her father’s side are Kate and George Vavasor, brother and sister. Alice and George had been passionately in love, but flaws in George’s character led her to break an engagement with him. As time passes, she falls in love with John Grey, and agrees to be his wife—but his placid character leaves her longing for something of the excitement of her previous lover. This engagement, too, is broken, in part through Kate’s efforts to bring Alice and George back together. But on Alice’s mother’s side, she is also cousin to Lady Glencora Palliser, recently married to Plantagenet Palliser, nephew and heir to the Duke of Omnium, and a rising man in Parliament. As Lady Glencora learns to look to Alice for support in the rocky early days of marriage, Alice herself is thrown into deeper doubt about the wisdom of her own choices. Can You Forgive Her? is the first in the series of Anthony Trollope’s political novels, known collectively as the Palliser novels. They serve in many ways to extend his earlier Chronicles of Barsetshire: the Palliser family is already introduced there, especially in Doctor Thorne and The Small House at Allington. In fact, Trollope completed this, the first of his “parliamentary” novels, in 1864, before embarking on The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1866. hile the Barchester books have the intrigues of provincial clergy and cathedral as their focal point, the Palliser series moves on to the high politics of parliament and Westminster. And much as the interest in clerical life ebbs and flows in the Barchester series, so too politics comes into prominence and recedes through the Palliser novels. In Can You Forgive Her?, political aspiration is present throughout, though personal politics comes in for closer scrutiny than the parliamentary variety. The exploration of whether others can forgive Alice parallels the need for almost every other character in the novel to be forgiven for something by someone. Trollope also examines the question of whether Alice can forgive herself, or receive the forgiveness of others—and he pointedly invites the “gentle reader” to reflect on their own preparedness to forgive.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: You Can’t Win

Author: Jack Black

Description: Beginning within the hallowed halls of a convent school as a young boy, Jack Black recounts his gradual journey towards a life of crime and his adventures within the lawless underworld as a professional thief, hobo, and member of the notorious “yegg” safecracking brotherhood in the American and Canadian West between the 1880s and 1920s. After its initial appearance as a popular series of articles in the San Francisco Call newspaper, You Can’t Win was reissued as a standalone book in 1926 and quickly became a critically acclaimed bestseller that had to be reprinted five times in order to satisfy the initial demand. Black’s gritty portrayal of life “on the road” and inside account of the criminal justice system helped inspire Beat Generation writers like William S. Burroughs, and played an influential role in prison reform efforts long after its publication.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: The Defiant Agents

Author: Andre Norton

Description: The space race has gone interstellar! Western and Soviet agents vie for control of the strategic alien world of Topaz and the lost technology it conceals. Agent Travis Fox awakens on Topaz after a crash landing, his memories a confusing mix of his own and those of a 19th-century Apache ancestor. His fellow agents have all been subject to the same experiment, some more thoroughly entangled in the past than others. Driven by his present-day memories and aided by a pair of mutant coyotes, he sets out to explore the landscape and finds Mongols of the Golden Horde who have escaped from the Russians’ colony. Despite suspicion and scrambled memories on both sides—and a Russian mind-control device—Fox is determined to unite the Apache and Mongol tribes against their common enemy and keep Topaz’ secrets from falling into Russian hands. The third novel in Andre Norton’s Time Traders series continues her tale of the Cold War expanded across time and space through the relics of a lost alien empire. It was originally published in 1962 by The World Publishing Company.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: The Mercy of Allah

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Description: The Mercy of Allah is a humorous, satirical novel on the methods by which the merchant Mahmoud rises from humble beginnings to massive wealth. The setting in a fictionalized Middle East provides deeply Catholic author Hilaire Belloc a “far-off land” in which to attack what he saw as the rapacious nature of the British businessmen, industrialists, and bankers of his day. Each episode of Mahmoud’s life satirizes greed, from small frauds and outright theft, to market manipulation, money-printing, and funding both sides in a long war. Mahmoud justifies all his dealings as simply the way things are: “For Allah, in his inscrutable choice, frowns on some and smiles on others. The first he condemns to contempt, anxiety, duns, bills, courts of law, sudden changes of residence and even dungeons; the second he gratifies with luxurious vehicles, delicious sherbet and enormous houses, such as mine.” First published in 1922, this satire fits into Hilaire Belloc’s growing advocacy for the economic and social philosophy of “distributism.” It was selected as one of four books by Belloc for Arnold Bennett and Frank Swinnerton’s influential Literary Taste: How to Form It.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Barriers Burned Away

Author: Edward Payson Roe

Description: Dennis Fleet is a hard-working and pious young Christian man who’s come to the big city of Chicago in order to earn money for his poor family. As he braves his first icy winter, he quickly moves up the rungs of business until he finds himself working for the prosperous art dealer Mr. Ludolph. Ludolph’s beautiful daughter Christine quickly catches Dennis’s eye—but much to his chagrin, she’s a non-believer. Roe, a Presbyterian minister from New York, was inspired to write Barriers Burned Away after news of the Great Chicago Fire spurred him to visit the remains of the city. He set the book against the backdrop of the encroaching fire, making the novel a fascinating portrait of an era of Chicago that was literally burned to cinders. The book went on to become the bestselling book of 1872, and with its high moral air and sermon-like prose played no small part in breaking down the prejudice against fiction novels that was common in Christian communities of the day.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Last Man

Author: Mary Shelley

Description: The Last Man chronicles the last days of humanity in the 21st century as it is slowly obliterated by a global pandemic. Radical changes and events across Europe—the king abdicates, turning England into a Republic; war erupts between Greece and Turkey—weaken the fabric of society, allowing an unknown and deadly disease to quickly spread across the world. Political leaders are disorganized; spiritual figures offer little comfort; science yields no answers. Previously distinguished individuals abandon their people in their time of need out of cowardice, while others admirably rise up to the occasion. Yet, none of this matters at all when humanity comes to its end. Mary Shelley wrote this book during the darkest time of her life. Over the years, she had lost her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; her close friend, Lord Byron; and her children. Writing the novel became an instrument to process her own hopelessness and isolation—various characters are impressions of her departed loved ones. Contemporary critics were not kind to The Last Man. While Frankenstein was lauded for its depiction of scientific presumption, humanity’s impotence and subsequent extinction were deemed offensive. The book faded into near-obscurity and merely survived until its rediscovery in the 1960s. After two World Wars, several epidemics, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, humanity’s end may not have seemed as absurd any more.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: American Indian Stories

Author: Zitkála-Šá

Description: American Indian Stories is the second story collection by Dakota author Zitkála-Šá. In contrast to her earlier collection Old Indian Legends, which is a collection of traditional Dakota legends, American Indian Stories is a collection of stories about contemporary Dakota life. Many center on the interactions and conflicts between Dakota and settler society, especially the challenges posed by the assimilationist Indian residential school system. The first few stories (through “Why I Am a Pagan”) are autobiographical in nature, drawing on Zitkála-Šá’s own experience as a student and then teacher in residential schools. Her story “The Softhearted Sioux” about a Sioux man’s loss of cultural and religious identity was even attacked as “trash” by her employer at the Carlisle School, Richard Henry Pratt (the coiner of the infamous slogan “kill the Indian, save the man”).

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Return

Author: Walter de la Mare

Description: After visiting a graveyard, a man finds his appearance has mysteriously changed. Returning home only to be received with horror and suspicion by his family, he must reckon with the social consequences of his bizarre transformation, while searching for an explanation and solution. alter de la Mare has a reputation for crafting ghost stories of philosophical depth and haunting ambiguity. The Return, one of only two of his long-form supernatural works, follows this trend, and sees de la Mare exploring ideas of personal identity, spirituality, and the consequences of living in blind adherence to social expectations. Functioning as a fantastical agent of mid-life crisis, Arthur Lawford’s condition uproots the foundations of his existence and casts into doubt all he had taken for granted about himself and his place in the world. There are no cheap scares or easy answers in The Return. It’s a work rich with enigmatic detail, describing a struggle to find meaning in a world where nothing is certain; a theme as relevant and recognizable now as when the novel was first published in 1910.

Subjects: fantasy, horror

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Title: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The Two Noble Kinsmen is Shakespeare’s final play written before his death in 1616. He collaborated on it with John Fletcher; later, Fletcher took over as playwright for the King’s Men. The plot derives from “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Thebes and Athens are at war. The tyrant Creon of Thebes commands Arcite and Palamon to fight for him. After a battle against Theseus, they end up captured and imprisoned. From their cell window, they see a beautiful woman named Emilia. Arcite and Palamon’s friendship turns into rivalry when they challenge each other to a fight to the death—with the victor claiming Emilia. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 1894 Royal Shakespeare edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: In the Midst of Life

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Description: The first major collection of Ambrose Bierce’s short stories, In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians went through multiple editions and titles, with Bierce adding, removing, and revising the stories each time. The version of the stories as collected here follows the final selection and revisions made by Bierce for his Collected Works, Volume 2, published in 1909, and is broken up into two sections, “Soldiers” and “Civilians.” Bierce fought for the Union in the American Civil War from the very first organized action at Philippi. He went on to fight in some of the deadliest battles of the war, at Shiloh and Chickamauga. He joined Sherman’s army on its march to Atlanta, and was grievously wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain. These locations serve as backdrops in his gritty and realist short stories in the “Soldiers” collection, most especially in the surreal story “Chickamauga.” While these stories are set in the war, Bierce covers a wide range of themes, from the fear of death in “Parker Adderson, Philosopher,” the requirements of duty for a soldier in “A Horseman in the Sky,” and what one might do for love in “Killed at Resaca.” Perhaps the most well-known story in “Soldiers” is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Kurt Vonnegut called it “the greatest American short story,” saying “It is a flawless example of American genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.” Bierce, much like Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, was an American pioneer in what he called his “tall tales”—psychological, supernatural, grotesque, and horror fiction. Many stories in “Civilians,” such as “The Man and the Snake,” “A Holy Terror,” and “The Suitable Surroundings,” foreshadow his later and darker works as studies in psychological horror. “The Eyes of the Panther” is a tragic, near-supernatural (though the reader is left guessing) tale of a woman of “feline beauty” and the man seeking her hand. Other stories found in the collection are satirical and ironic, like “The Famous Gilson Bequest” and “The Applicant.” Bierce’s writing earned him the title “Bitter Bierce” from his contemporaries, as one finds precious little hope and compassion in his stories, with death—often cruel—a recurring theme. A very rare exception can be found in “A Lady from Redhorse,” an epistolary romance.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Ferdinand and his three friends, Biron, Longaville, and Dumain, plan to study philosophy for the next three years. During their academic pursuits, they must vow to sleep only three hours a night and not let any woman within a mile of court. These strict rules will prevent any distractions from their work—but their promises are soon put to the test when a princess and her three companions arrive for a state visit. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Cymbeline

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Cymbeline had plans to arrange the marriage between his daughter Imogen and his son-in-law Cloten. Instead, she secretly marries Posthumus Leonatus, a poor gentleman. Before Cymbeline banishes Posthumus, Imogen is gifted a beautiful bracelet that she vows never to remove, while Posthumus is given an expensive ring. hile on his way to Rome, Posthumus meets Iachimo, who is heading to Britain, and the two make a bet: If Iachimo can seduce Imogen and provide proof of her adultery, Posthumus must hand over his ring. Cymbeline is set in pre-Roman Britain during the 1st century AD. The plot is inspired by the story of King Cunobeline, most likely sourced from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Shakespeare also drew from other sources; Boccaccio’s Decameron tells of a similar wager involving hiding in a trunk. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Cousin Henry

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: As an old squire approaches his death, he vacillates over how to leave his substantial property: to the niece he loves, or to the nephew he despises? A will is made in favor of the nephew, following the squire’s sense of duty. But during the young man’s visit to the estate, the squire’s revulsion makes him produce a new will in favor of his niece. After his funeral, the earlier will is found among his papers, but not the later one. Cousin Henry takes his place as the new squire under a cloud, and worse—as it transpires that, unknown to anyone else, he alone knows where the later will is hidden. Too weak to destroy the will, and too greedy to disclose its existence, he descends into misery as the lawyers close in. Anthony Trollope’s later fiction is marked by his keen interest in the psychology of his characters, what Michael Sadleir called his “novels of the mind.” In Cousin Henry, the plot is simple, but the psychological is paramount. The inner life of each of the leading characters is laid bare under Trollope’s pen: not only the unfortunate Cousin Henry, but equally his proud and imperious rival, Isabel, and the indefatigable lawyer, Mr. Apjohn.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Harry Heathcote of Gangoil

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Harry Heathcote is a young immigrant “squatter,” farming thousands of acres in Queensland, Australia. His strong personality wins the loyalty of friends and family. But that same imperious nature makes him enemies, too, who would like nothing more than to see him ruined. As Christmas approaches, the conditions for his ruin arise naturally in the intense, scorching heat of a southern hemisphere summer. His enemies, however, spot an opportunity to give nature a helping hand. Their sharp conflict contrasts with a muted romantic subplot—but even here, Heathcote’s tone and temper complicate the path of true love. An invitation to produce a “Christmas story” came while Anthony Trollope was writing The Way We Live Now. Harry Heathcote was the result, fulfilling the brief, but without the “humbug” that Trollope believed marred too much writing in that genre. Harry Heathcote is one of Trollope’s shorter novels, but still displays his sharp psychological insight into his leading characters, and his capacity to produce natural dialog. It also draws on his first-hand knowledge of his son’s experience of farming in Australia, observed during Trollope’s extended tour of the Antipodes in 1871.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Against the Grain

Author: J.-K. Huysmans

Description: Ailing, neurotic, and bored with the world, the nobleman Des Esseintes retreats to a secluded cottage in the French countryside. Determined to shun all contact with other people—demanding that even his live-in domestics must wear face-covering robes in his presence—he throws himself into an all-out celebration of the ultimate in artificial and unnatural pleasure. Surrendering to religious and profane literature, morbid paintings, overwhelming perfumes, expensive liquor, grotesque flowers, and reminiscences of his depraved past brings him unsurpassable pleasure, but his mental and physical condition may not be able to keep up. hen Huysmans wrote Against the Grain, he did so to move away from the creative restrictions he felt the Naturalist school of literature imposed on him. According to him, “it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.” Instead, he dedicated Naturalism’s attention to detail to just one extraordinary, perverse individual, Des Esseintes—fully expecting the resulting work to fail critically and commercially. That the novel would become a scandalous success, and would define Decadence as a movement and ideology, was far beyond his expectations. Oscar Wilde was a well-known admirer of the novel, and drew heavily from it to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. During his trial in 1895, Wilde all but confirmed that the “poisonous French novel” in his work refers to Against the Grain. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the first unabridged English edition, which was translated anonymously and published by Groves Michaux in 1926. It reinstates passages that were considered too obscene in previous editions, and includes a preface Huysmans wrote twenty years after the first publication of the book.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Education of Henry Adams

Author: Henry Adams

Description: One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century.

Subjects: autobiography, memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Description: While better known for his short stories and his satirical The Devil’s Dictionary, American journalist Ambrose Bierce was also a prolific writer of serious, comic, sentimental, and satirical poetry, verse, and epigrams. Bierce’s poetry contains similar themes as much of his other work. His bitter cynicism on human nature is exemplified in “Montefiore,” “Incurable,” and “The Man Born Blind.” Echoes of the American Civil War, in which Bierce fought for the Union, appear in works such as “At a ‘National Encampment,’ ” “The Death of Grant,” and “The Hesitating Veteran.” Religion is not spared, and he addresses it in “The Lord’s Prayer on a Coin,” “Religion,” and “Theosophistry.” He even wrote several short satirical dramas in verse, addressing, among other topics, Prohibition (“Metempsychosis”), the railroads (“The Birth of the Rail”), and Chinese expulsion in California (“ ‘Peaceful Expulsion’ ”). His poems such as “A Vision of Doom,” “Avalon,” “The Passing Show,” and “Invocation” (one of his most well-known poems) capture his metaphysical outlook and pessimism. He even pens a fine elegy to his cat in “In Memoriam.” This comprehensive collection contains much of Bierce’s poetical work from multiple sources: his early poems and epigrams published in The Fiend’s Delight under his pseudonym “Dod Grile”; his poetry collections Shapes of Clay and Black Beetles in Amber, as edited and revised by him in his Collected Works; his various “ante-mortem” epitaphs on individuals who had not yet died (“On Stone”); his collection of hundreds of epigrams, also published in his Collected Works; and several uncollected poems, published in various newspapers.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Measure for Measure

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Duke Vincentio has given his deputy Angelo temporary power over Vienna before his leave for a diplomatic mission. But instead of leaving the city, the Duke disguises himself as a friar named Lodowick, and stays behind to observe the city’s happenings and Angelo’s brief reign. Meanwhile, Angelo decides to enforce the laws on prostitution and debauchery, effectively shutting down the red-light district. A man named Claudio gets arrested for impregnating his lover, and Angelo sentences him to death. Claudio’s sister enlists a certain friar’s help to trick Angelo into releasing her brother. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Old Indian Legends

Author: Zitkála-Šá

Description: Old Indian Legends is a collection of Dakota legends, retold by the 19th and early 20th-century Dakota author Zitkála-Šá. The collection was compiled in 1901 when Zitkála-Šá returned to her birthplace in the Yankton reservation to take care of her mother, after she had spent several years in the assimilationist Indian residential school system, both as a student and as an educator. While taking care of her mother, she gathered traditional tales from Dakota storytellers which were retold in English for Old Indian Legends. The stories revolve around various spirits and heroes from Dakota myth, especially Iktomi, a shapeshifting spider trickster.

Subjects: children’s, fiction, shorts

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Title: Unto This Last

Author: John Ruskin

Description: John Ruskin’s essay Unto This Last quickly made him a household name in Victorian England, and marked a shift in his work away from art criticism and towards social issues. The title comes from Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard, wherein a landowner agrees to pay all his workers the same amount, regardless of how much work they actually did. Though the parable is an allegory about religious conversions, Ruskin analyzed it from a literal, economic point of view. Ruskin strongly criticizes the 19th century economic orthodoxy, in particular the works of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. He argues that their view of economics is flawed due to an implicit assumption that wealth can only be measured in money and material goods. Any policy or set of ethics that accepts this definition of wealth therefore neglects any non-measurable kind of value. The pursuit of this kind of wealth leads people to accept (or more often ignore) human suffering as a necessary part of the economy. Unto This Last remains a highly influential and often-criticized book. It was an inspiration to many prominent people, including Mahatma Gandhi, who published his own paraphrased Gujarati translation in 1908.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Coral Island

Author: R. M. Ballantyne

Description: Three young members of the crew of a merchant ship sailing in the South Pacific are the sole survivors of its wreck in a storm. Swept ashore an uninhabited island, their initial efforts to survive soon lead them to a settled life in what seems to be a tropical paradise. However, their enjoyment of their new island home doesn’t dampen their desire to return to England, their homeland. As their planning and preparations to escape patiently unfold, encounters with visitors both native and European dramatically alter their idyllic existence. The dangers they confront threaten not only their hopes, but their lives—and ultimately lead to unexpected results. The Coral Island is the most popular and enduring of R. M. Ballantyne’s prodigious literary output. It was met with acclaim on publication, and has never been out of print since. His own travels as a young man had taken him for a few years to Hudson Bay, and this experience formed the basis of his early writings—adventure stories for younger readers, boys in particular. Meeting with some success, he began to use other exotic locations for further adventure writing, giving rise to The Coral Island, written in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe. Ballantyne’s work in its turn influenced others. Robert Louis Stevenson was an admirer of Ballantyne, and he acknowledged the influence of The Coral Island on his own Treasure Island. In a different way, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is the antitype of the “Muscular Christianity” ideal found in Ballantyne’s work, internalizing the evil which Ballantyne’s young heroes, for the most part, confronted as something outside themselves. ith its vigorous narration, attention to detail of flora and fauna, and social and ethnographic observations, the appeal of Ballantyne’s most popular work remains evident, even while its role in mid-Victorian imperialism continues to be debated and re-evaluated.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: Troilus and Cressida

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” characterized by its duality of tone as it jumps from bawdy comedic to dark tragedy. The plot was sourced from two epic poems: Homer’s Iliad is the source of the play’s Greek mythological references, the Trojan War, and the war’s key figures, while Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is the source of Troilus’s love affair with a Trojan woman. At the beginning of Troilus and Cressida, seven years have passed since the start of the Trojan war. Achilles refuses to fight due to his hurt pride, but one day, the Trojan hero Hector challenges the Greeks to one-on-one combat. On the other side of the city walls, the Trojan Prince Troilus is madly in love with Cressida, and his heartache makes it difficult for him to fight. Pandarus, Troilus’s close friend and Cressida’s uncle, tries to bring the couple together, but Cressida’s father has plans to use her as a bargaining chip in the siege. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: An Inquiry Into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity

Author: Jonathan Dymond

Description: In his Inquiry, the early 19th-century Quaker philosopher Jonathan Dymond investigates the centuries-old question of whether war is compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Examining the question through both the lenses of Christian tradition and secular philosophy, Dymond argues that war is thoroughly incompatible with Christianity in its preceding causes, present reality, and following consequences. Much of the tract is dedicated to refuting the arguments of his opponents, such as claims that certain passages of the Bible sanction war or that the moral commandments of Christianity can be superseded on a case-to-case basis on utilitarian grounds of “expediency.” Dymond’s Inquiry was later cited by his fellow Christian pacifist Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, further advancing Dymond’s argument that it is the duty of a Christian “mildly and temperately, yet firmly, to refuse to serve” in the military.

Subjects: philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Anne of Avonlea

Author: L. M. Montgomery

Description: Anne Shirley, now 16, is moving from childhood into adulthood. As she begins teaching at Avonlea school she is determined to treat the children as she wishes she had been treated, and has many theories as to how that should be accomplished. She also enters the grown-up world of Avonlea in typical Anne fashion by working to beautify the landscape, and helping to form the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. Old friends are joined by new ones, including an outspoken neighbor with a rude parrot and a young-at-heart spinster who proves to be a true kindred spirit. Anne of Avonlea, originally published in 1909, is the sequel to Anne of Green Gables, and follows Anne Shirley through her next two years. While it has received less critical acclaim than its predecessor, it has enjoyed enduring popularity and has been adapted into television, movie, and theater.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sport of the Gods

Author: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Description: The Sport of the Gods is a novel set in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It chronicles the tribulations of the Oakleys, an African American family of four, as they struggle to survive and maintain their integrity in a Southern town and then in New York City. Prejudice, provincialism, and temptation take their tolls, and the justice system stands ever ready to grab the losers. This was Paul Laurence Dunbar’s final novel, published first in the May 1901 issue of Lipincott’s Monthly Magazine. In 1902, Dodd, Mead Co. published it as a book.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Author: Edward Gibbon

Description: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tells the story of the Roman Empire from the time of Trajan in the third century to the fall of Constantinople in the sixteenth. Along the way Gibbon describes not only the internal issues that arise within the empire, but also the various outside forces that contribute to its fall: the Goths, Huns, Persians, Muslims, and many others. He also has two highly controversial (at the time, and still today for some) chapters on his view of the role of Christianity in the empire’s unraveling, which caused a firestorm when the first volume of the history was published. As a history, it is perhaps without peer. Gibbon committed to studying, and quoting, first-hand sources whenever possible, and had an unerring eye for the difference between facts, opinions, and nonsense. He quoted from 1,850 unique sources written in eleven languages, and was scrupulous about referencing those sources: his text of over a million words contains almost 8,000 endnotes of another 400,000 words. Although history might be static, the study of it is not, resulting in his later nineteenth century editors adding another twenty percent to those notes with updates, corrections, and additional information that had come to light since the original publication. But if Decline and Fall excels at history, it is even better as literature, for Gibbon was not only an outstanding historian, he was also a remarkable writer. His narrative reads more like a novel than a dry history text, and his dry wit is apparent throughout, especially in his notes. In an effort to make it easier for the reader to refer to Gibbon’s sources if desired, this edition expands the often cryptic abbreviations used in the source references, both for the publication titles and the author’s names.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Crowd

Author: Gustave Le Bon

Description: The world of the 18th and 19th centuries had been wracked by change and revolution. Gustave Le Bon, a doctor by trade but wandering philosopher by avocation, was a first-hand witness to one such revolution: the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, in which a crowd of mutinous National Guardsmen seized the city and established a socialist government for two brief months in what Engels called one of the first examples of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” After that revolution, Le Bon left to travel the world, developing his theories on the psychology of crowds. The Crowd is his distillation of that philosophy, and one of the earliest treatises exploring the behavior and motivations of crowds of people. In it, Le Bon posits that with the rise of democracy and industrialization, it’s the unreasoning crowds who will control the affairs of the people, not kings or the elite; and these crowds are largely irrational in action, conservative in thought, violent both in act and in speech, and easily hypnotized by individuals with prestige but not intelligence. Le Bon is ultimately cynical in how he views this development in human affairs. Individuals in crowds feel anonymous and powerful, leading to destruction and violence; and the susceptibility of crowds to pure charisma means that they’re easily dominated by thuggish men of action, not wise men of foresight. People in a crowd are “a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” His conclusion is that the increasing relevance and power of crowds in modern society will lead to negative outcomes in the long term. In his view, democracy can only lead to more and more violent crowds, who demand charismatic figureheads to give them meaning. As one of the earliest examples of the study of crowd psychology, The Crowd was a direct influence on many titanic figures in 20th century history, including Theodore Roosevelt, Freud, Mussolini, Lenin, and Hitler.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Three Impostors

Author: Arthur Machen

Description: Two idlers in London are sauntering in the streets when they pick up a coin dropped by a fleeing man. They keep meeting three persons, each time in a different disguise, who recount lurid tales. They seem to be looking for a spectacled man who regrets working with them, and has run away with a valuable coin … This novel is a Gothic horror classic, and takes the form of an episodic novel, with each chapter containing a story recounted by one of the three impostors. It contains “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder,” popular stories which have been widely anthologized.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: Charlotte Temple

Author: Susanna Haswell Rowson

Description: Charlotte Temple is the story of the titular young woman who becomes entangled in a love affair with a lieutenant in the British army. Encouraged by her wayward teacher, Mademoiselle La Rue, Charlotte leaves behind her boarding school and absconds to America along with her seducer, lieutenant Montraville, and his friend Belcour. Far from her home in England, Charlotte’s notions of purity, romance, and familial devotion are quickly brought into stark conflict as she experiences the pain of misplaced trust and betrayal on the unfamiliar shores of New York. The novel, first published in 1791, quickly became a bestseller, and remained the best-selling novel in American literature until it was unseated in 1851 by Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Titus Andronicus

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Titus Andronicus, a famous Roman general, has just returned to Rome after a war against the Goths. He brings with him five prisoners: Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, her three sons, and her lover Aaron the Moor. After losing two of his sons to the Goths, Titus kills Tamora’s eldest son as retribution, triggering a blood feud between the two families. Saturninus is elected as the new Emperor of Rome with the support of Titus Andronicus. He declares he will marry Titus’s daughter Lavinia. Titus agrees, but she has already been promised to Bassianus, Saturninus’s brother. A violent argument breaks out, resulting in Titus killing one of his sons and Tamora becoming the new empress. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Spoon River Anthology

Author: Edgar Lee Masters

Description: Spoon River Anthology is a collection of short poems that reveals the true nature of the citizens of a fictional small town in Illinois. Each poem is a candid autobiography of a now-deceased resident that lies in the Oak Hill Cemetery—often exposing their darkest secrets. Edgar Lee Masters was raised in Lewistown, Illinois and based these stories on the gossip he heard there. The book was a commercial success, but was banned from schools and libraries in the area due to the real-life citizens knowing exactly whom each poem was written about. As the years have passed and more generations now lie in Oak Hill Cemetery, Lewistown has forgiven Masters, and he’s now celebrated there. The poems were originally published in the literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror under the pseudonym Webster Ford. The first book edition was published in 1915 and contained 209 poems. Masters added 35 new poems, including the epilogue, for the 1916 edition, which is the edition that this Standard Ebooks edition is based on.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Golden Ass

Author: Apuleius

Description: In The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses, Lucian is on a business trip to Greece when his curiosity gets the best of him and he finds himself accidentally transformed into a donkey. He then narrates his provincial odyssey in a world where old gods rule, myth informs life, Fortune is fickle, Thessalian witches are puissant, and a curious man seeking to learn their craft might well lament making an ass of himself. Apuleius was a second-century speaker and writer born in present-day Algeria who authors, narrates, and is the subject of this bawdy, picaresque, quasi-autobiographical story. He himself traveled extensively, studied philosophy, was initiated into mystery cults, and became a priest. He was also tried for witchcraft, accused of having betrothed his wife Pudentilla by charms other than those of his personality. The novel was translated into “Tudor prose” by Adlington in 1566 during the “golden age of translation,” and it was this version that was read by Shakespeare and influenced his work. The novel contains many digression, mythological references, and inset stories, the most significant being the story of Cupid and Psyche. This is the only complete Latin novel from antiquity that has survived to the present day, and has been called “a beginning of modern literature.” The Latin original was the one read by Augustine of Hippo who adapted Apuleius’ confessional style in his own writing—he even responded to Apuleius directly in his own philosophy. In its theology, The Golden Ass embodies an inclusive monotheism. From Kafka, to Pinocchio, to the motion picture The Fly, the influence of Apuleius and his Metamorphoses continues to be felt.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: Taras Shevchenko

Description: Taras Shevchenko is celebrated as the Ukrainian national poet and a founder of modern Ukrainian literature. A child of serfs, Shevchenko received a religious education before being discovered as a painter, leading to his emancipation from serfdom in 1838. After a few years of activity as a painter and poet in the early 1840s, Shevchenko was arrested by Tsarist Russian authorities for his revolutionary poetry and association with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society for the liberation of Ukraine. Subsequently, Shevchenko was ordered to be exiled to Siberia “under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint” by Tsar Nicholas I himself. (He had earned the Tsar’s enmity by writing a poem mocking his wife’s appearance.) Shevchenko returned to Ukraine following Nicholas I’s death, but died shortly thereafter. Shevchenko’s poetry continues to inspire those engaged in the struggle for Ukrainian independence, including the Euromaidan protests of the early 2010s and resistance against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Damnation of Theron Ware

Author: Harold Frederic

Description: Theron Ware is a young Methodist pastor raised in a strict religious tradition and without much of a worldly education. As his career begins, he quickly finds himself reassigned to a congregation in Octavius, a small town in the Adirondacks. As Ware and his wife settle into their new roles in small-town America, he meets Celia, a young girl fascinated by music, poetry, and literature—and he quickly finds himself struggling with both carnal temptation, and the world of experience outside of religion. The Damnation of Theron Ware (published in the U.K. as Illumination) is Frederic’s most famous novel. Its realistic style—Frederic modeled the fictional Octavius after Utica, New York—paints a nuanced portrait of the small-town American religious life of the era. It was received very positively, becoming the fifth best-selling book in the U.S. in 1896 with outfits like the Chicago Tribune saying that “it is a book which every one must read who wishes to hold his own in popular literary discussions.” It garnered literary allusions in works like Main Street; like Main Street, The Damnation of Theron Ware skewers small-town life, but unlike Main Street, its primary focus is religion. It also earned a mention from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in a letter wrote that he once considered it the best American novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Conscious Lovers

Author: Richard Steele

Description: The Conscious Lovers was first performed in 1722 at Drury Lane and is generally acknowledged as the first “sentimental comedy.” Borrowing heavily from Roman playwright Terence’s Andria, Richard Steele veers away from the traditional lewdness of Restoration comedy by deliberately focusing on restrained passion and patience over bawdy or salacious behavior. Laughter is replaced with a more sentiment-based set of comedic values. Steele’s model proved so influential that not until 1773 with Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer does the “laughing comedy” return to the English stage. The plot revolves around Bevil Junior who, though promised to a young women by his father, has fallen in love with another. On his wedding day he discovers his friend Myrtle loves the young woman he is to marry, and he becomes consumed with jealousy. Steele states in his Preface that he very intentionally wrote the play around a crucial “dueling” scene, attempting to nudge his audience towards more restrained and refined behavior, hoping that “it may have some effect upon the Goths and Vandals that frequent the theaters.” Whether it did or not is debated, but it certainly affected the nature of English comedy for decades to follow.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Agnes Grey

Author: Anne Brontë

Description: Agnes Grey, published in the month of December, 1847, is the debut novel of Anne Brontë, writing under the pen name of Acton Bell. Written largely based on Anne’s own personal experiences as a governess, the novel tries to highlight what a governess’ work entailed in the 1800s and the consequences it had on the protagonist. Agnes, an eager young woman, tired of being treated as the youngest and filled with overwhelming ambition, takes on work as a governess for the rich and cruel Bloomfields. The unprecedented and abysmal depravity with which she is treated renders her lonely and isolated, missing her family, wanting to go back home.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Allan Quatermain

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: Allan Quatermain, the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, was first serialized in Longman’s Magazine in the U.K. and subsequently published as a novel in 1887. In it we see the eponymous hero reunited with his companions to travel to Africa on a dangerous and adventuresome quest to try to find a legendary tribe of white-skinned people, the Zu-Vendi. Having discovered their remote and isolated country, Quatermain and his crew become embroiled in its internal affairs, culminating in a bitter and violent civil war.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: C. S. Lewis

Description: C. S. Lewis is perhaps best known for his series of children’s novels and his many Christian writings. But prior to his conversion to Christianity, he was a staunch agnostic, and had a very different view of the world and spirituality. The poetry collected here represents some of his earliest writings, most written before his conversion. As such, they offer an interesting contrast to Lewis’ later, much more well-known literary output. Spirits in Bondage was Lewis’ first published writing, released to little fanfare. It’s a cycle of poems that offers a pessimistic view of the world, often illustrating the natural world as cruel and uncaring. In contrast, Dymer is a long narrative poem that tells the story of the titular character’s tragic fate, beginning with his exile and leading to his suffering through trials and temptations of a nature he had never imagined before.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Vathek

Author: William Beckford

Description: The titular Vathek is a powerful caliph who, though intelligent and capable, has a tendency to indulge in sensuality. A mysterious traveler arrives in his kingdom and mesmerizes Vathek with a promise of dark powers and hedonism beyond imagination. Vathek becomes obsessed with the supernatural possibilities, and, goaded on by his power-hungry mother, embarks on a journey of blasphemy and debauchery. Vathek is one of the best-known Gothic novels, frequently referenced in literature of the era and beyond. Beckford, an English novelist, wrote it in French over the course of just several days at the age of twenty-one, after having hosted a three-day-long party in a lavish Orientalist style. European culture at the time was delighting in Orientalism, and Beckford capitalized on this by merging a fashionable Gothic narrative with a lush Orientalist setting. The novel’s emphasis on the supernatural and on the horror of ghosts, ghouls, efreets, and djinns, was something still new to many contemporary readers; and couching a familiar morality tale in the trappings of an exotic setting made the story both accessible and fresh, contributing greatly to its popularity. The story went on to inspire Romantic writers, including Lord Byron, Southey, Moore, and Keats; Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith were also influenced by Vathek’s decadent and fantastic style.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Voltairine de Cleyre

Description: Although most of Voltairine de Cleyre’s literary output was in the form of poetry, she also wrote several short stories and sketches in prose form. De Cleyre, whose life and career overlapped with the height of the Gilded Age in the United States, depicted the lives of the urban poor—especially women—in her stories, reflecting her social concerns and her radical politics as an anarchist feminist.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Idiot

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: Acclaimed by the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for its “polyphony” (a literary concept introduced by Bakhtin to describe a plurality of voices within a narrative), The Idiot is regarded by modern critics as one of Dostoevsky’s most experimental and artistically uneven novels. The novel follows the entrance of the epileptic Prince Muishkin—a character Dostoevsky meant to represent a “positively good and beautiful man”—into a circle of Russian high society characterized by vanity, greed, and social ambition. Thanks to his epileptic condition and his simplicity, earnestness, and kindness of heart, Muishkin is frequently branded by his newfound social circle as the titular “idiot”; but in reality, he’s a man of extraordinary sensitivity and insight. His arrival in society sets off a series of dramatic events and interpersonal strife centered around himself and his distant relations. The Idiot drew upon many of Dostoevsky’s significant personal experiences, such as his Russian Orthodox faith, his experience of nearly being executed in 1849, and his own struggle with epilepsy, all of which inform his depiction of Prince Muishkin’s distinctive psychology.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Fifty-One Tales

Author: Lord Dunsany

Description: Lord Dunsany earned literary fame through his otherworldly short stories. This book compiles fifty-one of them, without a seeming theme except that they’re extremely short—sometimes as short as a few paragraphs. The stories range from morality tales, to dreamlike vignettes, to gloomy prophecies told in a foreboding voice. A thread of bleak humor sometimes runs through them, like with much of Dunsany’s literary output. Fifty-One Tales was published simultaneously in England and America, with each edition featuring a story that the other did not. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the ordering of the American edition, and includes the story that was only published in the English edition, bringing the total number of stories in this edition to fifty-two.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: Martin Eden

Author: Jack London

Description: Martin Eden is a young, hard working man of the working class. After a chance encounter with a beautiful woman of the bourgeoisie, he finds himself in love. In order to win this woman’s approval he decides to educate himself: He corrects his speech, he learns proper manners, and he reads the classics of literature, philosophy, and science. Eventually they become engaged, and he decides to become a writer. But he’s continually flummoxed by the greedy and unintelligent editors who are incapable of understanding his work, and by a society that values money as the pinnacle of success. In Martin Eden, Jack London weaves in several details from his own life and experience as an early writer. However, unlike the titular character, a self-described “individualist” and “Nietzsche-man,” London was in reality a vocal socialist, and had intended Martin Eden to be an unflattering caricature of a man who seeks only self-improvement instead of class-improvement. Ironically this was unremarked upon in contemporary reviews. As he inscribed in a copy of the novel given to Upton Sinclair, “One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism. I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.”

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

Author: Hugh Lofting

Description: After discovering an injured squirrel, young Tommy Stubbins is introduced to Doctor Dolittle. Enamored by the Doctor’s ability to speak with animals and his wonderful house full of creatures from around the world, Tommy convinces the Doctor to take him as an apprentice. Together with Polynesia the parrot, Jip the dog, and an African prince named Bumpo, they set out in search of the famed naturalist Long Arrow, son of Golden Arrow, who has gone missing. This is the second book in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series. It was awarded the 1923 Newbery Medal.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: A Prefect’s Uncle

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: A new term is beginning at Beckford College, and “Bishop” Gethryn seems to have it all: He’s the head prefect of his schoolhouse, a top athlete on both the cricket and rugby teams, and is respected by his schoolmates and the Headmaster. But when his uncle arrives at the school, Gethryn’s world (and that of the school’s cricket team) is upended. The Prefect’s Uncle is P. G. Wodehouse’s second novel, and was first published in 1903.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Vicomte de Bragelonne

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Description: The last and longest of Dumas’ three d’Artagnan novels, The Vicomte de Bragelonne finds the four musketeers, Aramis, Athos, Porthos, and d’Artagnan, in their later years, and for the first time keeping secrets that are not to be shared with each other. Louis XIV is now an adult, and the regency of his mother is at an end. D’Artagnan is still his Lieutenant of Musketeers, Athos has raised his son Raoul (the Vicomte de Bragelonne of the title) to adulthood, and Aramis and Porthos are engaged in a mystery that is not touched on until well into the novel. There are adventures involving Charles II of England, the son of the doomed king the musketeers could not save from Cromwell in Twenty Years After, romances of Louis’ early court, intrigues involving Louis’ finance ministers, and, ultimately, Dumas’ fictional explanation of a centuries-long mystery involving an unidentified prisoner in the Bastille. The original French serialization of The Vicomte de Bragelonne took three years because of the size of the work. English translations were typically divided into three, four, or occasionally as many as six parts; in the three-volume editions, each volume had as many words as The Three Musketeers. This edition is presented in a single ebook. The Vicomte de Bragelonne brings a satisfying conclusion to one of the greatest adventure series of all time. Like The Three Musketeers, the final part of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” has been adapted many times for stage, film, television, and animation.

Subjects: adventure

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Title: Democracy

Author: Henry Adams

Description: At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires. As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right. There is only one thing in life that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.” She visits the White House, George Washington’s estate, and the newly established Arlington Cemetery, accompanied by politicians, diplomats, aristocrats, and the newly rich. But it’s not until a marriage offer from an ambitious senator that things come to a head. Mrs. Lee must decide what she is and isn’t willing to do to satisfy her own ambition for power, and whether she can trust herself to use that power for good. Democracy: An American Novel was first published anonymously on April Fools’ Day in 1880. The fact that Adams hid his identity helped make it a best seller, as readers tried to guess who was close enough to Washington society to portray it so knowingly—and maliciously. It wasn’t until two full years after Adams’s death that his publisher identified him as the novel’s author.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: In Search of the Castaways

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Following the clues found in a bottle cast into the ocean, Lord and Lady Genarvan set off for South America and Australia in their ship Duncan to search for the shipwrecked Captain Grant. Their eventful and perilous journey gives Verne the opportunity to describe a variety of exotic places. Originally titled Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant (“The Children of Captain Grant”), the story has inspired several movie adaptations. Ayrton, one of the characters, reappears in The Mysterious Island.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mike

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Mike Jackson is the youngest son of a family of excellent cricket players and the most promising batsman of them all. At Wrykyn, the public school his elder brothers once attended, his desire to prove himself as a cricketer is challenged by his apathy for studying and his penchant for mischief. In the second half of the novel, his poor academics result in his being sent to Sedleigh, where he immediately befriends Psmith, an eccentric monocle-wearing student in a similar situation. Together they navigate the social waters of a school that neither one of them wants to attend. Mike was one of P. G. Wodehouse’s earlier novels, and one of his personal favorites. In a preface to a later edition, he stated that the school setting allowed Psmith’s “bland clashings with Authority” to truly shine. The cricket scenes are memorable and exciting, but the meat of the story is in Mike and Psmith’s school escapades. Mike was originally published in The Captain magazine in two parts, Jackson Junior (published in 1953 as Mike at Wrykyn), and The Lost Lambs (also published later as Enter Psmith in 1935 and Mike and Psmith in 1953).

Subjects: comedy

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Title: Michael Strogoff

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Jules Verne is perhaps best known for his science fiction stories, and Michael Strogoff breaks that mold. It’s a true-to-life tale of the titular character’s journey across Siberia to deliver an important message to the brother of the Russian Czar. Like other of Verne’s works, Strogoff encounters many colorful characters along the way, and together they create a vivid depiction of the harsh life in Russo-Siberia, as well as the resilient spirit of its inhabitants. The attention to detail and the accuracy of both the physical and geographical depictions of Siberia was noted by contemporaries, though it’s also said that Verne took some dramatic license in recreating some of the historical events. Contemporary critics agreed that Michael Strogoff is a thrilling tale of the strength of men, of patriotism, and of the devotion of one human being to another. Modern critics consider it to be one of Verne’s best novels. Though W. H. K. Kingston was named as the translator when this edition was published, in fact it was Kingston’s wife, Agnes Kinloch Kingston, who executed this translation. This fact was mentioned in her public obituary, but was forgotten until it was rediscovered by modern research.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Author: John Locke

Description: John Locke, the English philosopher considered to be the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers, never married or had children. Despite this, in 1684 his friends Mary and Edward Clarke asked him for advice on how to raise their son. In response, Locke composed a series of letters to them that outlined his philosophy of education. In 1693, encouraged by the Clarkes and by his friend William Molyneux, he compiled the letters into a single treatise. This treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, went on to become the most influential works in educational philosophy in England for over a century, and was so influential on society as a whole that some critics consider it to be equally as important as his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Thoughts went through at least fifty-three editions in the eighteenth century alone, and inspired a movement for childhood education then-unheard of in Europe, ultimately resulting in the popularization of Victorian public schools. In the Thoughts, Locke advocates a practical education for a child consisting of exposure to foreign languages, gentle introductions to topics like reading and mathematics through game-like approaches, physical training and exercise, and rhetoric, all delivered by a competent and dedicated tutor. He placed the instillation of a sense of virtue as one of the most important parts of a complete education. Education was to be administered through gentle encouragement focused on the child’s natural interests, and tempered with both shame and a feeling of awe for the parent. He argues that much of a child’s social education is received at a very young age from their peers and the society around them; thus, controlling the societal influences around the child is of paramount importance. All of this was starkly opposed to the then-common theory of education through rote repetition, enforced with beatings. Some Thoughts Concerning Education’s influence continues to the modern day, where its principles and techniques are embraced by Montessori-style education, and even television shows like Sesame Street.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Pan Michael

Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Description: The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving Michael despairing of life—to the point of him joining a monastery. His friends, shocked at the loss of the great knight which has now left the Commonwealth unprotected, hatch a plan to bring him back to his true calling. As with many of the characters in the Trilogy, Michael is fictional but based heavily on historical record: his character’s exploits and circumstances owe a lot to the real Polish knight Jerzy Wołodyjowski, who was also in Jan Sobieski’s cavalry. Pan Michael was, like the other books in the Trilogy, initially serialized in Sienkiewicz’s newspaper Słowo, before being collected into a novel five years later in 1893. The book, and the Trilogy as a whole, was very well received, and allowed Sienkiewicz to resign his editorial post to focus on his novels. The novel was the first of the Trilogy to be filmed (as 1969’s Colonel Wolodyjowski), and it was also later converted into a successful television series in Poland. This edition is based on the 1893 translation by Jeremiah Curtin.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Dialogues

Author: Plato

Description: Alfred North Whitehead once said, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” It’s hard to overstate Plato’s influence on the West’s philosophical heritage and its civilization. As the first philosopher whose works survived to the present day, his writings and ideas are often characterized as the starting point of Western philosophy. Nor was his influence confined to the modern form of philosophy—Plato also affected political, religious, and spiritual thinkers, including early Christian theologians. Plato’s works are written as dramatic dialogues. His focus is often on following the argument itself—the “dialectic”—rather than working toward a specific conclusion. His mentor, Socrates, is frequently the principal speaker, but scholars still debate whether Plato was expressing Socrates’ views or merely using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. In general, there are forty-five major works attributed to Plato, and all but one are dialogues. Modern scholars agree that roughly half of those were definitely written by him, some of those are definitely forgeries, and the rest they’re still unsure about. In this translation Jowett includes all but one of the works that modern scholars agree are authentic, along with an appendix of selected spurious dialogues. Over time, opinion on which works attributed to Plato were definitely written by him has changed; the only work that modern scholars believe is authentic that Jowett doesn’t include in this collection is “Hippias Major.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Liberalism

Author: L. T. Hobhouse

Description: In Liberalism, L. T. Hobhouse explains the philosophy of what he calls “liberal socialism.” Liberalism, as Hobhouse defines it, is the freedom from coercion. Crucially, this means freedom not only from government coercion, but from all forms of coercion, including economic coercion. It’s important that everyone is free to grow and develop their own individuality within society, but the government has the ultimate responsibility to ensure that one individual’s freedom is not used to limit the freedom of another. The socialist aspect of the philosophy is the belief that people are not purely self-serving and are capable of voluntarily exercising restraint when needed in order to help society flourish. Viewed through this lens, liberty and equality are not in competition, but rather go hand in hand. In a liberal socialist society, “any common life based on the avoidable suffering even of one of those who partake in it is a life not of harmony, but of discord.” Tracing the history of the idea of liberalism, from pre-liberal societies, to the philosophies forged in the French and American revolutions, to the concept of socialism expounded by John Stuart Mill, Hobhouse defends the progress of liberalism, while asking what the future of liberalism should look like.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Mark of Zorro

Author: Johnston McCulley

Description: hile mild-mannered Don Diego Vega seeks a bride, cloaked crusader Señor Zorro (Spanish for “Mr. Fox”) rides the dangerous highway of Mexican California armed with a sword, whip, and pistol—righting wrongs, defending the weak, and punishing injustice. The story is set in Reina de Los Angeles, a town in southern California circa 1800 when California was still a part of Mexico, and when Mexico was controlled by Spain. The Los Angeles of this time is populated by four societies that must coexist, but that coexistence is out of balance. The oldest and weakest group is the “natives” who live in the pueblo. Next come the clergy, the friales who first planted the orchards and who live in the missions. Then, the gentry, who live as dons and doñas on feudal estates, or haciendas. Finally, the land is ruled by the strongest of these powers, an unjust governor in San Francisco de Asis. He controls the army under whose rule the natives are abused, the friales mistreated, and the gentry disrespected. This is the story of a young man of “good blood” who decides he must restore balance to this frontier society. Johnston McCulley wrote stories of Zorro for forty years. This, his first Zorro story, was originally serialized in a magazine as The Curse of Capistrano. Señor Zorro went on to leave a deep impression on popular culture, and has appeared in the work of many other authors and artists, in many media, ever since. One reason the character of Zorro endures is that he carries on a tradition of daring and heroic figures, both literary and historic, who precede him. Best known perhaps are the medieval Robin Hood of English folklore whose “merry men” are reminiscent of Zorro’s “avengers,” and the Scarlet Pimpernel of revolutionary France. Lesser known is the real-life figure William Lamport, the “Irish Zorro,” whose statue still stands in Mexico City.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Vikram and the Vampire

Author: Richard F. Burton

Description: Baital Pachisi, also known as Vikram-Betaal, is a collection of Hindu tales featuring King Vikramaditya as the hero. Eleven of these tales were adapted from Sanskrit to English by Richard F. Burton as Vikram and the Vampire. A tantric yogi is after King Vikram’s life because of the wrongdoings of his father. He fools the brave king into bringing him Baital (a vampire) hanging from a siras tree. Baital, in turn, traps the king in an endless loop of stories. If King Vikram answers any question posed by the vampire during his storytelling, the vampire will escape back to the tree, and the king will have to start again. Will King Vikram be able to escape Baital’s trap? What doom awaits the king when finally meets his nemesis?

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Maria Chapdelaine

Author: Louis Hémon

Description: It takes a hardy people to survive farming the harsh lands of the French Canadian wilderness, and Maria Chapdelaine must choose either to remain Québécois in this unforgiving land that has broken her heart, or to pursue a softer urban life in foreign New England. French writer Louis Hémon wrote Maria Chapdelaine during the two years he lived in Quebec, and it’s based on his experiences working on a farm in the Lac Saint-Jean region where the novel is set. It was his only work published in his lifetime, as he died in a tragic train accident before learning of its success. The novel is described as a masterwork that was Canada’s entry into world literature and Quebec’s introduction to the rest of the Francophone world. An enduring work, it has served as the basis of four movies, and has been adapted into plays, an illustrated novel, a radio novel, a television series, and an opera.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Riceyman Steps

Author: Arnold Bennett

Description: Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after. It quickly becomes clear that his miserliness, his “grand passion and vice,” has rubbed off on Violet, threatening her chances at happiness just as much as his. His obsession also imperils Elsie’s ability to help her lover Joe, who returned from World War I with shell shock, and who desperately needs her. The year it was published Riceyman Steps won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Its tragic tone represents a departure from many of the novels and stories Arnold Bennett set in the “Five Towns,” the fictional location inspired by his Staffordshire childhood. Instead, it reflects the pain and disappointment of the years immediately following the Great War. As Earlforward tells a customer early on, “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Storm Over Warlock

Author: Andre Norton

Description: A brutal force of insectoid aliens called Throgs effortlessly destroy a Terran survey camp on Warlock, a planet seemingly devoid of intelligent life that both Throgs and Terrans hope to colonize. Two Terrans who survive the enemy attack must go on the run, weaponless and with only a pair of wolverines as their companions. These survivors are driven to an unknown destination by dreams so powerful that they may be visions; but as they get closer to their goal, crossing brutal landscapes, tumultuous seas, and fog-filled caverns, the two find themselves losing control over their actions and unsure of what is real in this strange and hostile world.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Lud-in-the-Mist

Author: Hope Mirrlees

Description: Two hundred years ago, merchants in the small country of Dorimare, weary of the capricious nature of the ruling class, cast out the aristocracy and established their own government. Believing that their former rulers’ erratic behavior was caused by their neighbors in Fairyland, the mention of anything fairy quickly became taboo among Dorimare’s citizens. Now, though, illicit trade of fairy fruit is on the rise in the border town of Lud-in-the-Mist and the government seems powerless to stop it. As influential families fall victim to the maddening effects of the fruit it becomes clear that someone is working to undermine the status quo, and the Mayor needs to discover who it is before it’s too late. Lud-in-the-Mist is Hope Mirrlees’s third and most popular book. It has been reprinted several times, and was a part of the Fantasy Masterworks series produced by Orion Books. It has been referred to as a masterpiece of fantasy literature, with Neil Gaiman calling it “a little golden miracle of a book.”

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Short Works

Author: Epictetus

Description: Born enslaved and lamed by his master, Epictetus studied Stoic philosophy while in bondage. Once freed, he survived Domitian’s banishment of all philosophers from Rome to settle in Greece, where he founded a school of philosophy. He quickly rose to prominence as a renowned Stoic scholar and teacher, and even though he was personally favored by emperors, he kept a simple life. hile most of Epictetus’s writings were compiled in the Discourses by his student Arrian of Nicomedia, his writings were also summarized in a short manual called the “Enchiridion.” A short handbook with practical suggestions on how to live a good and satisfying life, it remained popular for centuries with translations to different languages completed as early as 1493, and was even a common school text in Scotland during the 18th century. This Standard Ebooks edition collects the “Enchiridion” together with Epictetus’s miscellaneous fragmentary teachings.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

Description: In June 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft embarked on a three-month trip around Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, on undisclosed business at the request of her lover Gilbert Imlay. During the course of this voyage she wrote twenty-five letters to him, which were compiled the following year at the behest of her publisher into this volume. As a travelogue, the letters of course contain descriptions of the natural beauty of the places she visited and the habits and interests of the people she met; but what is more apparent is Mary’s growing realization that this journey she has undertaken for Imlay ultimately won’t heal their relationship. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was the last work of Mary Wollstonecraft’s published during her lifetime; she died two years later, shortly after the birth of her second child, Mary Shelley. It follows the themes of her earlier works: a belief in reason’s ability to elevate people, the injustice of society’s oppression of women, and a spreading idea that commercialism does more to deprave than to enlighten humankind.

Subjects: nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Vicar of Wakefield

Author: Oliver Goldsmith

Description: Though published in 1766, The Vicar of Wakefield was one of the most popular and widely read books of the Victorian era. References to Vicar in Victorian literature abound: George Eliot, Austen, Dickens, Mary Shelly, Charlotte Brontë, Alcott, Goethe, and many more famous writers all mention Vicar in their books. The plot concerns the titular vicar, Charles Primrose, a mild-mannered and forgiving man who lives with his family in a country parish. His prosperity comes from careful investments of his inheritance—but when one of his business partners goes bankrupt, the vicar finds himself suddenly impoverished. Perhaps the reason for Vicar’s long-lasting appeal is its careful balance between its being interpreted as either a sincere sentimental novel, or a satire of sentimental novels. Primrose is an oblivious protagonist, totally helpless against the evil forces of the world that constantly buffet him and his family. Despite this, the almost-ridiculous plot always manages to find a deus ex machina to save him from his latest calamity. The plot is so unbelievable that the reader is led to think that Goldsmith must have meant Vicar as a satire—and yet the novel is so earnest that the reader is left wondering. In the end, Primrose and his family serve as warnings to the reader to not be as heedless and powerless as they. The family’s constant deliverance from the disasters they blunder in to are Goldsmith’s way of saying that life is really not so Panglossian as one might want to believe, and that bad things can and do happen to good people—though in real life, rarely does a hero appear for a last-minute rescue. This worldview, which is so contrary to the Victorian’s ideals of romance and sentimentalism, may be what made it so popular as a satire in that era.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: She Stoops to Conquer

Author: Oliver Goldsmith

Description: She Stoops to Conquer is one of the few 18th century plays that has stood the test of time. First produced in 1773 in Covent Garden, it has been revived many times—once even running for 1,777 performances in the 1860s. The events take place over the course of a single evening in a country house where two young ladies await potential suitors. The young squire of the household, a prankster and layabout (and intended for one of the young ladies by the family matriarch), sets off a comic chain of mistaken identities and farcical intrigues when he encounters the potential suitors in a nearby tavern, and sends them to the house with the belief that they’re visiting an inn. The impact of She Stoops to Conquer was such that it was heralded as restoring “laughing comedy” to the English stage after decades of sentimentality. It also stands as the origin of the phrase, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Northanger Abbey

Author: Jane Austen

Description: Northanger Abbey is the coming-of-age story of Catherine Morland, a seventeen-year-old girl who’s entering society for the first time. Despite her naivete, she quickly gains two potential suitors. We follow Catherine as she tries to navigate the difficulties of romance, friendship, and responsibility—problems amplified by the fact that Catherine views her world through the lens of the dramatic Gothic novels she loves to read. Austen deftly satirizes both the Gothic novels popular at the time (especially Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho), as well as contemporary society and women’s role in it. Completed in 1803, Northanger Abbey was the first of Austen’s novels to be completed, but it was only published posthumously in 1817.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Smoky the Cowhorse

Author: Will James

Description: On an isolated range in the American West, a young horse named Smoky is born and raised. Allowed to run free for the first few years of his life, he’s later captured and tamed by a cowboy named Clint. Clint sees something special in Smoky, and quickly falls in love with the intelligent, wild young horse. As the years pass, Smoky must overcome many challenges ranging from mountain lions and winter storms to horse thieves and the greatest challenge the wilderness faces: modern society. inner of the 1927 Newbery Medal, Smoky the Cowhorse is Will James’s most famous book. Upon winning the award, James expressed surprise, because he had intended the book for adults.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Downstream

Author: Sigfrid Siwertz

Description: The five Selambs siblings have suffered the death of their mother and the incapacitation of their father, and consequently are left to fend for themselves, apart from the occasional check-in from both their guardian and the appointed manager of their ancestral estate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of them emerge unscathed from this upbringing, although the damage manifests itself in different and unforeseen ways. As they each attempt to forge their own path through the ranks of fin de siècle bourgeois Swedish society, it becomes apparent that none of them can escape the family traits of egoism and a desire for money regardless of ethics. In this bildungsroman with five subjects, Siwertz charts the societal and cultural changes he observed during his own adolescence and early adulthood in Stockholm and the surrounding areas. Downstream (titled in the Swedish original simply as Selambs) is perhaps his best known work from a broad corpus of novels, short stories, poems and plays, and has remained highly regarded. Siwertz himself became part of the Swedish literary establishment later in life, as a member of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize in Literature committee.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Old Wives’ Tale

Author: Arnold Bennett

Description: The Old Wives’ Tale, considered to be one of Bennett’s finest works, begins in the 1860s, in the industrial “Five Towns” of the English Midlands, where he set many of his partially autobiographical stories. The novel follows the prosperous Baines family, who live above the successful clothing shop they own in the town of Bursley (based on Burslem, in Staffordshire). Even when the two Baines daughters were still young, their characters are already formed. Sophia has “youth, beauty, and rank in her favour,” while Constance is “foolishly good-natured,” with benevolence that is “eternally rising up and overpowering her reason.” Their paths diverge quickly. While still in her teens, the headstrong Sophia elopes with a traveling salesman, leaving England’s provinces for Paris. Constance, who later marries the head employee at the store, hardly ever leaves their town—or even the square where their shop is located. As the novelist J. B. Priestley observed, this gently ironic and sprawling novel sets its “two suffering heroines” against “three conquering heroes, Time, Mutability, and Death.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lady Into Fox

Author: David Garnett

Description: A newly married couple are taking a leisurely walk through the woods in England when, without warning, the woman suddenly transforms into a fox. The grief-stricken husband does his best to look after his transformed wife after this astonishing change. That’s the unlikely premise of Lady Into Fox. Other than the mysterious transformation of the woman, this short work is otherwise completely realistic, placing it in the category of contemporary fantasy or magic realism. Published in 1922, the book quickly attracted critical attention and praise. It won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, and was included by the writer Rebecca West in a list of the “best imaginative productions” of the 1920s alongside Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Lady Into Fox was turned into a ballet in 1939 by the choreographer Andrée Howard, with music based on piano pieces by Arthur Hoenegger. Performed by Ballet Rambert, it was apparently a success. In 1960, a French writer using the pseudonym “Vercours” wrote a novel titled Sylva directly inspired by Garnett’s novel, in which the reverse transformation occurs: a fox on the run from a hunt is transformed into a naked young woman, who is taken in and cared for by the owner of a nearby manor. This novel, translated into English, was nominated for Best Novel in the Hugo Awards presented by the World Science Fiction Convention in 1963.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Son of Tarzan

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Following the events in The Beasts of Tarzan, Tarzan and his wife, Jane, return to England to raise their infant son, Jack. Now, ten years later, Jane has refused to allow Tarzan to share his past in the jungles with their son for fear of awakening a desire in him to follow in his father’s footsteps. Unfortunately, Jack is already feeling drawn to Africa, and when one of Tarzan’s old friends surfaces, Jack is quick to set out on his own adventure. The Son of Tarzan was originally published as a serial in All-Story Weekly between December 4, 1915 and January 8, 1916. It’s the fourth book in the Tarzan series, and is only entry without Tarzan as the main character. Since its initial publication, the book has been adapted to both film and comics.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Acquisitive Society

Author: R. H. Tawney

Description: “The faith upon which our economic civilization reposes, the faith that riches are not a means to an end but an end, implies that all economic activity is equally estimable whether it is subordinated to a social purpose or not.” So states R. H. Tawney in this treatise on the difference between an Acquisitive Society, one guided purely by profits, and a Functional Society, one guided by professional motives. In the former—which is largely the world we live in today—businesses are concerned only with making profit for their owners, who have little or no connection to the industry they own, and high-quality service and efficient use of labor is at best only a pleasant byproduct. Tawney contrasts this view of society with the latter society, in which businesses are run by professionals instead of owners. In this scenario, professional considerations not related to financial profit would lead to better service and higher efficiency, as well as happier workers. As an executive of the socialist Fabian Society, Tawney was considered one of the most influential historians of the early twentieth century, especially in politics, where he was a major contributor to the British Labour Party. His influence extended beyond Britain as well, and he has been credited with influencing the policies of Swedish Social Democrats.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Last Chronicle of Barset

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: The Last Chronicle of Barset is the sixth, and as its title would suggest, final novel in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire. Like the earlier books, it was serialized in Cornhill Magazine, with a hardcover edition coming out in 1867. It brings together many of the characters who had appeared in series’ earlier novels, and rounds off a number of story threads that those novels began. The primary storyline is concerned with the Reverend Josiah Crawley, who, as the book opens, has been accused of passing a check for twenty pounds, a check not made out to himself and whose possession he cannot account for. The accusation has significant implications for many of the other characters. The Last Chronicle of Barset was made into a television series released by the BBC in 1959. Along with the other novels in the series, it was made into a radio play released by Radio 4 in the United Kingdom in the 1990s.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill

Author: John Stuart Mill

Description: John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century. His more well-known works include On Liberty, a highly influential treatise applying the Utilitarian philosophy to systems of government, and The Subjugation of Women, a treatise arguing for gender equality in an age where that was anything but the norm. Besides these monumental works, he also produced A System of Logic, an important work on the philosophy of science, Principles of Political Economy, one of the most influential economics textbooks of the 19th century, and many other notable books of philosophy. When not composing profound tracts that would shape philosophy in the next century, he wrote volubly in various magazines and newspapers of the day, became the godfather of Bertrand Russell—himself the 20th century’s most prominent logician—and even spent time as a Member of Parliament, becoming the first M.P. in history to call for women to be given the right to vote. But perhaps the most interesting part of Mill’s rich life is his education. His father, Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, raised John in a special mode of education purposefully designed to produce a genius, with the intent of making John the standard-bearer of Utilitarianism in the next generation. To this end he kept young John isolated from his school-age peers to prevent them from making him feel too smart, and gave John a rich classical, moral, and scientific education. By the age of three John was studying Greek, and by eight he was studying Latin and in charge of educating his younger siblings; by twelve, he was studying scholastic logic, and had already consumed nearly all of the major Greek and Latin classics in their original language. That James Mill’s unique method of education produced a genius is without a doubt, and John’s youthful experiences are recounted here in detail. This short and to-the-point autobiography is a fascinating window into the life of one of the 19th century’s most important thinkers.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: The Lodger

Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes

Description: The Lodger is the first known novelization of the Jack the Ripper story. It follows the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a maid and butler. An eccentric lodger, Mr. Sleuth, arrives at their lodging-house just as a wave of horrific murders begins to sweep London. The Buntings become engrossed in the newspaper sensationalism as well the detailed accounts of their young friend, a Scotland Yard detective. Lowndes first wrote The Lodger as a short story published in McClure’s Magazine, then later published the novelization in the Daily Telegraph as a serial. It was very successful, with over a million copies sold within a few decades. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein praised it, with one contemporary reviewer calling it “the best novel about murder written by any living author.” It has since been adapted to other media, notably as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first movies. Today the novel is still considered the best fictional adaptation of the Jack the Ripper legend.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Deluge

Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Description: Six years after the events of With Fire and Sword the Polish Commonwealth has recovered from the earlier bloody wars against the Cossacks and the Crimean Khanate, but the King is being kept busy by skirmishes on the Russian border. Unfortunately for the Commonwealth, this wealthy land is all too tempting for the Swedish king Karl Gustav who sweeps in to claim his prize, forcing soldiers and nobles to reconsider where their loyalties truly lie. This backdrop allows the impetuous Pan Andrei Kmita to demonstrate all sides of his loyalty and recklessness, even at the expense of his comrades and his fiancée Panna Aleksandra Billevich. The Deluge is the second book in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy of novels dealing with a series of wars in seventeenth-century Poland. Written two years after With Fire and Sword, it was serialized in the newspaper that Sienkiewicz was editor-in-chief of, and started to cement his reputation as an novelist. Throughout the Trilogy Sienkiewicz weaves historical events and people with fictional characters and stories to great effect; this mastery of the historical epic went on to earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. This edition is based on the 1891 translation by Jeremiah Curtin.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Pointed Roofs

Author: Dorothy M. Richardson

Description: Pointed Roofs is the first installment in Dorothy M. Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence of autobiographical novels. It is also one of the first novels identified with the modernist technique of stream of consciousness. Set in the early 1890s, Pointed Roofs centers on seventeen-year-old Miriam Henderson. After her family runs into financial troubles, Miriam is sent to Germany to teach English at a finishing school in Hanover. The narrative chronicles Miriam’s daily life at the school, as well as outings to the city and the countryside with the other teachers and pupils. All the while, it tells of her experience of living abroad, her attitude to the people around her, her future prospects, and her thoughts on religion, literature, and the status of women in society.

Subjects: autobiography, fiction

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Title: Darby O’Gill and the Good People

Author: Herminie Templeton Kavanagh

Description: When Tipperary man Darby O’Gill is imprisoned by the fairies of Sleive-na-mon in their home under the hollow mountain, he starts a lasting friendship with their King Brian Connors. Using the voice of a local story-teller, Herminie Templeton Kavanagh shares this series of tales of Darby and King Brian’s adventures. We follow Brian as his fairies are banished from Heaven for not taking sides as angels wage war against each other, and we follow Darby to face the Banshee in Croaghmah, the realm of ghosts and the final destination of the spectral death coach driven by its headless horseman. We join Darby as he matches wits with the crafty Leprechaun, and join King Brian as he debates philosophy with parish priest Father Cassidy. Pious Christianity, superstition, and pagan folklore are each real and important elements of Darby’s life and world. Reconciling them is a persistent theme in Kavanagh’s stories, one that was largely absent from the classic children’s film that it inspired.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy, shorts

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Title: The Rough Riders

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Description: With the destruction of the Maine and other events leading to the Spanish–American War, Theodore Roosevelt resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in order to go to the front. Under Colonel Leonard Wood, Roosevelt raised and trained the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, who were quickly nicknamed the “Rough Riders.” The regiment received a surplus of volunteers, with a mix of recruits ranging from Southwestern cowboys to Ivy League scholars. Logistical difficulties challenged the regiment almost immediately in their transit to Cuba. Before sailing from Tampa, they were forced to leave behind four of the twelve total companies and almost all of their horses. As an officer, Roosevelt kept his horse, which he rode to lead the charge in the Battle of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt recalled the battle as “the great day of my life” and “my crowded hour.” After winning the war, the onset of yellow fever, malaria, and other incapacitating diseases made it imperative to return the soldiers home quickly. Along with nine generals, Roosevelt drafted and signed a “round robin” letter, which was also published nationwide to turn public attention toward returning the troops. Back home, Roosevelt initially published the work serially in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, and its popularity contributed to his rise as a national figure.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Path to Rome

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Description: The Path to Rome is British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc’s first travelogue. It describes the pilgrimage he took to Rome as the result of a vow he made while visiting his hometown of Toul, in Lorraine, France. In his own copy of the book, dated May 29, 1904, he notes: “I wrote this book for the glory of God.” Belloc walked “two and a half hundred leagues” to Rome, over twenty-two days, and arrived in time to hear Mass on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. As he walks, he quickly discovers the difficulty of keeping every vow he made before starting, as the days are long, the mountains steep, and his finances stressed. But the book is far more than a simple travelogue; alongside the narrative of the journey, Belloc wanders into topics as varied as the art of writing, life in the military, his Catholic faith, the middle class, literary criticism, music, poetry, and more. His unique politics and personality shine in his many digressions and asides. The Path to Rome sold very well, and many critics have viewed it as the book that made Belloc’s name. His great friend G. K. Chesterton said of it in The World: “The Path to Rome is the product of the actual and genuine buoyancy and thoughtlessness of a rich intellect. …”

Subjects: nonfiction, spirituality, travel

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Title: The Dark Forest

Author: Hugh Walpole

Description: John Durward and John Trenchard are two Englishmen who join a company of Russian doctors, nurses, and orderlies working on the Russian side of the Eastern Front at the height of World War I. Durward, the primary narrator, is a detached and seemingly objective observer of events; his friend Trenchard is a dreamy, clumsy, and naive man whose fiancee, Marie Ivanova, is serving alongside him as a nurse. The narrative follows the unlikely group as they are embedded in the Front, treating casualties and cholera victims while dodging shellings and enemy ambushes. At first the group seems to get along well enough, until Semyonov, a dark, charismatic, hyper-masculine doctor in their company, sets his romantic sights on Ivanova. As the medics desperately try to fulfill their duty among the brutal backdrop of the war, their intricate relationships become the centerpiece of a complex emotional narrative that winds through the dark forest, a symbol of the confusing shadows that can lie between even two people bonded by wartime. alpole served in the Russian Red Cross on the Russian-Austrian front during World War I, and his real-life experiences are reflected in the narrative. On its publication The Dark Forest was called “the best picture of life in a field-ambulance on the Eastern Front that has yet been written” by the Saturday Review, and it was popular enough for Walpole to write a sequel, The Secret City, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Description: Faced with the possibility of financial ruin, slave owner Arthur Shelby decides to sell two of his slaves: Uncle Tom and a young boy named Harry. Eliza, Harry’s mother, makes the decision to run away while Uncle Tom decides that his moral duty is to submit to his master and cooperate with the sale. The story follows the diverging lives of these two slaves—Eliza’s flight to Canada and Uncle Tom’s journey into the deep south. Eliza is accompanied by her husband, George, who also escaped from his owner at the same time. Together they must outrun bounty hunters and somehow make their way to freedom. Uncle Tom, on the other hand, must face the uncertainty of new owners and separation from his family, while somehow remaining true to his religious faith. Upon its release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sparked immediate criticism from slave owners and praise from abolitionists. Its influence was such that one apocryphal story claims that Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe, stated “so this is the little lady who started this great war.” The book remains controversial, with critics pointing to Uncle Tom’s passive nature and the extensive use of racial stereotypes. Despite this, the novel’s influence is undeniable, and it helped pave the way for modern protest literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Coriolanus

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Rome has transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. The last king of Rome was dead, and the Senate and rich aristocrats now control Rome. The citizens are starting to riot due to a food shortage. The plebeians blame the patrician Caius Marcius for hoarding grain and fixing prices, but Marcius believes the citizens don’t deserve grain if they’ve never served in the military. To calm the plebeians, five tribunes are chosen to represent the common people in legal matters. Soon after, a Volscian army attacks, and Marcius leaves the city to fight. After a successful siege on the city of Corioli and the defeat of the Volscian army, Caius Marcius is rewarded with the name of Caius Marcius Coriolanus. He returns to Rome a hero, beloved by both the Senate and the plebeians. Coriolanus is encouraged to pursue politics and run for consul, a position elected by the people. There are others, like the tribunes Brutus and Sicinius, who still remember Coriolanus’ disdain for the plebeians and view him as an enemy. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Poetry

Author: Voltairine de Cleyre

Description: Voltairine de Cleyre was a prominent American feminist anarchist active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) her childhood experience of being placed in a Catholic convent school, de Cleyre became a member of the anticlerical Freethought movement. Later, she became a member of the American anarchist movement after becoming outraged at the way defendants were sentenced at the 1886 Haymarket Affair trials. Influences on de Cleyre’s beliefs and writings included Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover and fellow anarchist Dyer Lum. She also shared a respectful disagreement with her fellow feminist anarchist Emma Goldman, who eventually came to praise her as “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” Prominent themes in de Cleyre’s poetry include the Haymarket Affair and its aftermath (e.g. “At the Grave in Waldheim”), anti-clericalism (e.g. “The Gods and the People”) and women’s liberation (e.g. “Betrayed”). While largely ignored during most of the 20th century, interest in de Cleyre and her poetry has revived during the late 20th century, thanks in part to Paul Avrich’s 1978 biography, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Crock of Gold

Author: James Stephens

Description: hen the ancient god Pan appears in Ireland and the beautiful Caitilin Ni Murrachu decides to follow him, her father asks an old philosopher to deliver her back. In his quest, the philosopher requests the help of the Celtic god of love, experiences catharsis, and is apprehended by policemen tipped off by leprechauns, provoking a second rescue mission—for himself. It is through this humorous mixture of philosophy and Irish folklore that James Stephens presents deep philosophical questions and social commentary. The novel’s meandering plot sets the stage for contrasts between man and woman, city and countryside, and virtue and vice. First published in 1912, The Crock of Gold is the book that established James Stephens’ fame.

Subjects: comedy, fantasy, philosophy

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Title: Doctor Syn

Author: Russell Thorndike

Description: Doctor Syn is a quiet, unassuming vicar in the small fishing village of Dymchurch-under-the-wall. He, his sexton Mipps, and the friendly villagers lead a simple life—until a frigate sent by the King lands at their docks, and an officious captain steps down into the village in search of smugglers. As the captain and his crew investigate the tiny town of Dymchurch, the village is struck by a string of mysterious murders, and the king’s men soon find themselves embroiled in a dark conspiracy. The town and its quirky inhabitants may not be all that they seem. Russell Thorndike turned to fiction writing after serving in World War I. Doctor Syn is the first in his series of thirteen novels featuring the titular character, though chronologically, the events in this novel are the epilogue to the series.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Memoirs of a Midget

Author: Walter de la Mare

Description: alter de la Mare was most famous for his uncanny fiction, and Memoirs of a Midget fits the description perfectly. The protagonist, who we know simply as “M.” or “Midgetina,” is a young woman just a few inches in height—though at times it seems that her height varies. Sometimes she’s small enough to be accosted by birds and carried on trays, and at other times it seems she’s large enough to ride horseback and even pass as a ten-year-old. She trips over hairbrushes, reads books that are larger than her, and must be especially careful around dogs and cats. The people around her seem to take this bizarre state of affairs in stride, and indeed, it’s the only truly uncanny quirk in an otherwise ornate, almost Jamesian narrative. The narrative follows Midgetina as she struggles to make her way in life after the tragic death of her parents. Even though she’s minuscule in size, she’s extremely sharp intellectually, taking an interest in literature, astronomy, natural science, and more. Her personality is so distinct that her minuscule stature becomes more of a symbol of her isolation, than the actual cause of it. In time she moves in to rooms managed by a Dickensian landlady, whose peripatetic daughter, Fanny, becomes a friend to Midgetina, a possible love interest, and even a sometimes-antagonist. Fanny, a master of manipulation, seems to float through life gleefully and selfishly using those around her. Midgetina, desperate for human connection, clings to Fanny with an interest that at times has an almost erotic edge. Fanny’s subtle manipulations, careless cruelty, and effortless charm make her a character just as memorable as Midgetina, and a powerful antidote to Midgetina’s naive, yearning hopefulness. Though largely forgotten today, Memoirs of a Midget was met with high praise from contemporary critics and went on to win the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Modern critic Edward Wagenknecht regards it as “the greatest English novel of its time.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Golf Stories

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: P. G. Wodehouse’s short stories are often set in the salons and townhouses of England, but he also wrote about golf, returning again and again to one of his favorite sports. Set against a background of the unique and often quirky world of golf in the early 1920s, Wodehouse produced a great collection of stories chronicling the loves and lives of golf fanatics. Starting around 1919 he wrote these golf stories regularly for both American and English magazines, and published two collections: The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922) and The Heart of a Goof (1926). He continued to write golf stories until the mid 1960s. Most of these stories are narrated by The Oldest Member, a talkative type who frames most of the stories by trapping other members of the club into listening to his “words of wisdom.” The stories in this collection are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form, and are mostly from the English editions—the main difference from the U.S. editions being the names and locations of the golf clubs.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: Pericles

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Antiochus has issued a challenge to any suitor proposing marriage to his daughter: answer a seemingly impossible riddle correctly, or die. Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, discovers the answer to the puzzle, but in doing so, he unearths the incestuous relationship between the king and his daughter. Pericles decides not to reveal the truth, and King Antiochus gives him forty days before his execution. When Antiochus hears that the prince has fled back to Tyre, he sends an assassin after him. At the advice of his councilor, Helicanus, Pericles plans to travel until Antiochus no longer wants to kill him. On his journeys he encounters a brutal storm that leaves him shipwrecked in Pentapolis. This play draws from many sources: Confessio Amantis by John Gower (who appears in the play as the chorus), The Odyssey, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and Plutarch’s Lives. The themes of separated families and mistaken death refer back to Shakespeare’s earlier plays, like The Comedy of Errors. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Lady Windermere’s Fan

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: Lady Windermere, who suspects that her husband is having an affair, decides to leave him. Her erstwhile rival, Mrs. Erlynne, comes to her rescue, and convinces her to return to Lord Windermere before the situation becomes a scandal. In so doing, Mrs. Erlynne exposes herself to scandal, and must choose between her own reputation and saving the Windermeres’ relationship. Lady Windermere’s Fan was Oscar Wilde’s first hit play, and the first of his enormously popular comedies of society, which culminated with The Importance of Being Earnest. It opened on February 20, 1892 at the St. James’s Theatre in London, and went on to tour the country for months.

Subjects: comedy, drama, satire

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Title: Twenty Years After

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Description: Twenty years after Aramis, Athos, Porthos, and d’Artagnan went their separate ways, the new cardinal, Mazarin, asks d’Artagnan to find his three friends and enlist them to help Mazarin during the Fronde civil war. Only Porthos accepts, and the four musketeers soon find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. This cannot, of course, last very long, and they ultimately join forces in England to try to rescue Charles I from Cromwell. Along the way, they are discovered and pursued by the son of Milady, their diabolical female adversary from The Three Musketeers. Though not as well known as the first installment, Twenty Years After continues the wit, charm, friendship, and most of all the adventures that Dumas made famous in The Three Musketeers.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Babbitt

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Description: George F. Babbitt is a middle-aged realtor, family man, and resident of Zenith, a fictitious Midwestern city. His main preoccupation is to climb the social ladder by conforming to the norms of his environment. The novel depicts his daily routines and occasional misadventures in an unorthodox writing style, where the protagonist appears altogether foolish, funny, and pathetic. This work was both celebrated as an incisive satire of American culture and criticized as an exaggeration, but was ultimately influential in Sinclair Lewis being awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: What Is Property?

Author: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Description: “Property is robbery!” This slogan coined by the French political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is one of his answers to the titular question of his 1840 treatise, What Is Property? A fervent attack against the established order of capitalism and private property, the publication of What Is Property? almost immediately led to Proudhon’s official prosecution and the revocation of Proudhon’s scholarship by the Academy of Besançon. (Proudhon, an autodidact of humble origins who began his working life as a printer, relied on the scholarship for financial support.) Proudhon evaded the worst of the consequences thanks to the intervention of the economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, to whom the second memoir contained in the book is addressed. In this treatise, Proudhon contrasts the legitimate right to possession, in which individuals own the products of their labor and the necessary means of production, and the illegitimate right to property, the absolute right granted to proprietors by civil laws to “use and abuse.” Proudhon examines the implications of the right to property and concludes that, among other things, property is “impossible,” “homicide,” and “the mother of tyranny.” As an alternative to both the proprietary and communist systems of economic organization, Proudhon advances his anarchist economic theory of “mutualism,” in which a socialist society would be organized based on free market exchanges wherein the value of a good or service is determined by the time and expense it has cost the laborer to produce. This edition of What Is Property? was translated in 1876 by Benjamin Tucker, who was a notable advocate of individualist anarchism in his own right in the United States.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Secret City

Author: Hugh Walpole

Description: The Secret City is Walpole’s sequel to his earlier book about Russian life, The Dark Forest. John Durward, the English protagonist from that book and a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Walpole, is visiting St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) when he runs in to some old friends from England. Through them he meets Vera and Nina, two young and bourgeois sisters, and Nicolai Markovitch, a downtrodden and ridiculous inventor. Semyonov, a brooding doctor who is the sisters’ uncle and a character from The Dark Forest, returns as a dark, viperous thread weaving through the story. Durward narrates the lives of these bourgeois Russians as they love each other and fight amongst themselves in equal measure. But as they obliviously carry on their cozy, lamp-lit lives, the Russian Revolution breaks out around them. St. Petersburg quickly changes from a comfortable, elegant, and gently mysterious city to a bloody and cold scar across the face of civilization. As the air fills with the sound of gunfire and the smell of smoke and soot, Durward and his English and Russian friends become a microcosm of the chaos they find themselves engulfed in. alpole lived some years in Russia during the Revolution, working as a journalist, then at the Russian Red Cross, and later as the Head of British Propaganda in St. Petersburg. His intimate knowledge of both the city and of the turbulent early days of the Revolution give The Secret City a more than convincing air. It’s the first book to have won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and is considered to be Walpole’s most delicate and insightful work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Daughter of the Samurai

Author: Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto

Description: Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto was born into a samurai family in the years following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In this autobiography, she recounts her experiences growing up in a culture with very strict expectations. As her family’s influence and power wanes, a marriage is arranged for her and she leaves to join her future husband in America. Etsu’s story is interleaved with explanations of Japanese culture, religion, and history. As she is exposed to more of the world outside of Japan, she must reconcile the differences between the traditions she grew up with and the ideas of her new homeland.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Orlando Furioso

Author: Ludovico Ariosto

Description: Orlando Furioso, one of the longest poems in European literature, is the sequel to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s incomplete epic poem Orlando Innamorato. Ludovico Ariosto continues the story’s fusion of French and British legends as well as including material from Greek and Latin literature. The Saracens and Christians are fighting over control of Europe. Agramant, the King of Africa, and his allies lay siege to Paris and Charlemagne’s forces. Meanwhile, Orlando, one of Charlemagne’s famous paladins, is returning to France with the captured pagan princess Angelica. Her beauty incites Knight Rinaldo to duel Orlando for her love. During the fight, she escapes. This tale of war, adventure, sorcery, romance, humor, tragedy, and redemption has influenced famous writers like Spenser and Shakespeare, and continues to inspire writers to this day.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Catriona

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Robert Lewis Stevenson continues the story of David Balfour, starting directly where Kidnapped left off. Compared to Kidnapped, Catriona is much more of a comedy of manners, politics, and romance than a simple action-adventure story, but it still has several of Stevenson’s trademark escapades, imprisonments, and daring escapes. The title character David Balfour attempts to navigate, to his own peril, his apparent role in the Appin murder, the subsequent trial of James of the Glens, life among high society, and the machinations of James Macgregor Drummond, the father of David’s great love, Catriona.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: The Small House at Allington

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: The Small House at Allington was originally serialized in Cornhill Magazine between July and December 1862. It is the fifth book in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, being largely set in that fictious county of England. It includes a few of the characters from the earlier books, though largely in very minor roles. It could also be said to be the first of Trollope’s Palliser series, as it introduces Plantagenet Palliser as the heir to the Duke of Omnium. The major story, however, relates to the inhabitants of the Small House at the manor of Allington. The Small House was once the Dower House of the estate (a household where the widowed mother of the squire might live, away from the Great House). Now living there, however, is Mary Dale, the widow of the squire’s brother, and her two daughters, Isabella (Bell) and Lilian (Lily). The main focus of the novel is on Lily Dale, who is courted by Adolphus Crosbie, a friend of the squire’s nephew. In a matter of a few weeks, Lily falls deeply in love with Crosbie, who quickly proposes to her and is accepted. A few weeks later, however, Crosbie is visiting Courcy Castle and decides an alliance with the Earl’s daughter Alexandrina would be far preferable from a social and monetary point of view. Without speaking to Lily, he abruptly changes his plans and asks Alexandrina to marry him instead. This act of betrayal is devastating to Lily and her family. This novel, along with the other titles in the Barsetshire series, was turned into a radio play for Radio 4 in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. The British Prime Minister John Major was recorded in the 1990s as saying that The Small House at Allington was his favorite book.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Those Barren Leaves

Author: Aldous Huxley

Description: Mrs. Aldwinkle, an English aristocrat of a certain age, has purchased a mansion in the Italian countryside. She wishes to bring a salon of intellectual luminaries into her orbit, and to that end she invites a strange cast of characters to spend time with her in her palazzo: Irene, her young niece; Ms. Thriplow, a governess-turned-novelist; Mr. Calamy, a handsome young man of great privilege and even greater ennui; Mr. Cardan, a worldly gentleman whose main talent seems to be the enjoyment of life; Hovenden, a young motorcar-obsessed lord with a speech impediment; and Mr. Falx, a socialist leader. To this unlikely cast is soon added Mr. Chelifer, an author with an especially florid, overwrought style that is wasted on his day job as editor of The Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette, and the Elvers, a scheming brother who is the guardian of his mentally challenged sister. As this unlikely group mingles, they discuss a great many grand topics: love, art, language, life, culture. Yet very early on the reader comes to realize that behind the pompousness of their elaborate discussions lies nothing but vacuity—these characters are a satire of the self-important intellectuals of Huxley’s era. His skewering of their intellectual barrenness continues as the group moves on to a trip around the surrounding country, in a satire of the Grand Tour tradition. The party brings their English snobbery out in full force as they traipse around Rome, sure of nothing else except in their belief that Italy is culturally superior simply because it’s Italy. As the vacation winds down, we’re left with a biting lampoon of the elites who suppose themselves to be at the height of art and culture—the kinds of personalities that arise in every generation, sure of their own greatness but unable to actually contribute anything to the world of art and culture that they feel is so important.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: Soon after the widowed Lilia Herriton arrives at the dusty Tuscan town of Monteriano with her friend Caroline Abbott, she falls in love with Gino Carella, a handsome—and younger—man. When her overbearing in-laws hear of the engagement, they panic, believing a marriage like that would dishonor their family and the memory of Lilia’s late husband and their child. Lilia’s brother-in-law, Philip Herriton, rushes to Italy to stop the marriage and “rescue” Lilia from Gino. He soon discovers that he’s too late, and that they’ve already married. Their impulsive decision will have major consequences—not just for the couple itself, but also for Caroline, Philip, and everyone else in their orbit. Forster was just twenty-six in 1905 when Where Angels Fear to Tread, his first novel, was published. In a contemporary review, The Manchester Guardian called it “almost startlingly original” in its setting and the treatment of its motive, but also wondered if Forster could “could be a little more charitable” in future works. In 1991 it was made into a movie starring Helen Mirren, Helena Bonham Carter, Judy Davis, and Rubert Graves.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Facing the Flag

Author: Jules Verne

Description: In another science-based entry in his Voyages Extraordinaires series, Verne takes us on the journey of Simon Hart, an engineer who poses as a medical attendant to the scientist Thomas Roch. Roch’s invention of a world-conquering weapon has driven him insane. As the paranoid doctor rests in a sanatorium, the vicious pirate Ker Karraje kidnaps both Roch and Hart. Karraje takes them to a secret hideaway in a burned-out island caldera in the Bermudas—but Hart hatches an ingenious escape plan.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Timon of Athens

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Lord Timon is known by the whole city of Athens as a very generous man. He offers to bail his friend Ventidius out of jail, hires local artists for their talents, and invites his admirers to a feast and offers them gifts. Timon’s closest friend Apemantus tries to warn him that these people are parasites, taking advantage of him. Flavius, Timon’s servant, also tries to warn his master that his finances are in dire straits due to the lavish spending, and that he owes a lot of money. Both worries are dismissed—until creditors that were once considered Timon’s “friends” demand his debts be paid. Many scholars consider Timon of Athens an unfinished work: plot developments that go nowhere, random character appearances, and other inconsistencies make it feel incomplete, and it was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. If it had been, the production might have been considered too controversial because of its allusion to King James I and his lavish spending and debts. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Beasts of Tarzan

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Beasts of Tarzan, the third book in the Tarzan series, was first published in All-Story Cavalier magazine in 1914. It was later published as a novel in 1916. Tarzan’s old enemy, Nikolas Rokoff, escapes prison and plans his revenge by kidnapping the Tarzan’s son, the heir of Greystoke. He also captures Tarzan and Jane, and takes them all back to Africa, where he strands the Ape-man on an island before continuing on with his dastardly plan. On the island prison Tarzan befriends a troop of apes led by Akut and tames Sheeta the panther before escaping and setting off to rescue his wife and child.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Journals

Author: Alexander Mackenzie

Description: Alexander Mackenzie was the first European to complete a land crossing of the continent of America north of Mexico, preceding the famous Lewis and Clark expedition by twelve years. In his journals he details two separate voyages: one up what is now known as the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 1789, and another to what is now Bella Coola on the Pacific Ocean in 1792 and 1793. Both journals provide a detailed description of the many difficulties in navigating and traveling in a country that had yet to be mapped. Having to rely on Native guides and rumors, and enduring hardships that almost beggar belief, Mackenzie and his team were able to achieve their objective of finding an east to west land crossing through the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific Ocean. Although his route didn’t prove as practical as routes found by later explorers, Mackenzie has cemented himself as a key explorer of Western Canada.

Subjects: adventure, nonfiction, travel

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Title: Household Tales

Author: Jacob Grimm

Description: hen it was first published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales, this collection of Germanic fairy tales contained eighty-six stories and was criticized because, despite the name, it wasn’t particularly well-suited to children. Over the next forty-five years, stories were added, removed, and modified until the final seventh edition was published in 1857, containing 210 fairy tales. Today, the book is commonly referred to as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. These fairy tales include well-known characters such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel, as well as many more that never became quite as popular. Over the years, these stories have been translated, retold, and adapted to many different media. This is a collection of Margaret Hunt’s 1884 English translation, originally published in two volumes.

Subjects: children’s, fiction, shorts

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Title: The Merchant of Venice

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The young venetian noble Bassanio seeks to woo the beautiful heiress Portia of Belmont. He turns to his friend, a merchant named Antonio, who agrees to help him financially. They go to a Jewish moneylender, Shylock, who agrees to lend the money—but because of their mutual animosity, Shylock demands “A pound of flesh” from Antonio as collateral. Bassanio succeeds in winning Portia’s hand. Meanwhile, Antonio’s ships are reported lost at sea, and he defaults on the loan. Bassanio rushes back to Venice to help his benefactor where everything comes to a head in Court. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Kalevala

Author: Elias Lönnrot

Description: The Kalevala is a Finnish epic poem, which tells of the creation of the world and how the heroes that inhabit it came to be, and the legends of their conflicts and adventures. Spread out over fifty cantos, we hear how existence was created from the egg of a duck, how the forests were created from the chips of a world-tree felled by an ancient wizard, how the mighty Sampo—a multicolored mill of plenty—was created and later stolen, how the nine dread diseases came to be, and many more such stories. The tales contained here are formed from Finland’s oral history. The author, Elias Lönnrot, was a Finnish doctor who was fascinated with his country’s stories, so between the 1820s and 1850s he embarked on a series of expeditions to the countryside of Finland and the surrounding area to collect and transcribe the folk stories told by local people. These tales were gradually collected into several volumes, the final of which is this “new” Kalevala. Lönnrot collected many different variants of each story, then edited each down into a cohesive whole when composing the new verse. The distinctive Kalevala-meter that was a common feature of all the original oral stories was kept during the process, and Crawford used the same with this English translation. Lönnrot’s work proved extremely influential in Finland, and the national pride it imbued has been cited as a factor in the later Finnish independence movement. The Kalevala was also a source of inspiration for later authors of the twentieth century. Tolkien reused some of the themes and characters for the basis of his fictional universe (in particular The Silmarillion), the Kalevala-meter was used in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and even Donald Duck has quested—as the Kalevala heroes did—for the legendary Sampo. This edition was translated by John Martin Crawford in the late nineteenth century, and includes his introduction discussing some of the themes, characters, and settings.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: A Gentleman of Leisure

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: After inheriting a fortune, and just back to New York from a cruise on which he spotted an intriguing young woman, Jimmy Pitt is drifting. So after seeing a blockbuster play about a gentleman thief, he’s ready to bet his friends at the Strollers’ Club that he could pull off a burglary himself. That night he makes friends with a real-life “Bowery Boy” thief, who helps him break into a corrupt police captain’s house, and everyone gets way more than they bargained for. Later, the action moves to the Earl of Dreever’s castle in England. There, the misunderstandings, threats, cheating, and confusion only multiply, requiring all of Jimmy’s wits and daring to clear up. In this short novel, P. G. Wodehouse takes on many of the themes his fans will recognize from his Jeeves and Wooster books: the ridiculous upper class, the frequent need to hide one’s suspicious origins (while uncovering those of others), and the importance of amateur theatricals, dressing for dinner, champagne, and true love. First published in 1910, A Gentleman of Leisure has also appeared in several other versions, under the titles The Gem Collector and The Intrusion of Jimmy. It was also adapted into a Broadway play that starred Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and silent movie versions followed in 1915 and 1923. This Standard Ebook is based on the edition published in 1921 by Herbert Jenkins Ltd.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: A Damsel in Distress

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: An American composer, George Bevan, falls in love with a mysterious young lady who takes refuge in his taxicab one day. He tracks her down to an English country manor, where a case of mistaken identity leads to all manner of comedy and excitement. The novel was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1919. It was later adapted into a silent film, a stage play, and a musical starring Fred Astaire.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Worm Ouroboros

Author: E. R. Eddison

Description: The Worm Ouroboros is considered to be one of the foundational texts of the high fantasy genre, influencing later authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Leguin, and James Branch Cabell. It is most frequently compared to The Lord of the Rings in its epic scope set against a medieval, magic-laced backdrop—a world called “Middle Earth” by Eddison, thirty-two years before Tolkien’s—and in its almost mythical portrayal of larger-than-life heroes and villains. The plot begins simply enough: The Lords of Demonland, a group of heroic warriors enjoying a strained peace, are called upon by an emissary of the warlock king of Witchland, Gorice XI. The emissary demands that Demonland submit to the King of Witchland—but the proud Demons refuse, setting off an epic war that spans their entire world. The heroic struggles of the Demons and their allies against the Witches reflect the circular nature of human history: the snake eating its own tail of the title. The novel is written in a purposefully archaic, almost Jacobean style. The rich, surprising vocabulary and unusual spelling are testaments to Eddison’s expertise at reading and translating medieval-era texts. To this day, it remains perhaps unique in fantasy literature in the accuracy and precision of its highly affected prose style, perhaps matched only by the out-of-time strangeness of the prose in Hodgson’s The Night Land. But where critics often find The Night Land’s prose obtuse and difficult, they have nothing but praise for Eddison’s beautiful, quotable style. Eddison had already imagined the story and its heroes as a child, and drawings he made as a youth of events in the book are preserved in the Bodleian library. While the novel is without a doubt the work of a mature and skilled writer, and while some of the events and characters are portrayed differently in the novel than they were in his youthful sketches, the names of many of the characters and places remain unchanged. Some of his contemporaries, like Tolkien, wondered about the strange naming style; others criticized it as taking away from the more serious subject matter. The Worm Ouroboros remains one of the most influential works in the high fantasy genre to this day, and traces of the foundation it laid can be still be found in genre books a century after its publication.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Dangerous Liaisons

Author: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Description: Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses) is an early French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes in 1782. At the time of its publication novels were a new literary form, and Laclos chose to present his story in an epistolary style, composing the novel solely of a series of letters written by the major characters to each other. It was first translated into English in 1812 and has since become universally regarded as one the most significant early French novels. The story is framed around the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two narcissistic French aristocrats and rivals who enjoy games of seduction and manipulation, and who most especially enjoy one-upping each other. The letters they send to each other portray an interconnected web of seduction, revenge, and malice, and are interspersed with the more innocent letters of their victims. Dangerous Liaisons has often been seen as a depiction of the corruption and depravity of the French nobility shortly before the French Revolution, thereby making a negative statement about the Ancien Régime. But it’s also a depiction of the timeless problems surrounding sex and love, and a realistic portrayal of desires that are often beyond our control. As Laclos enjoyed the patronage of Louis Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans, and as other royalist and conservative figures like Queen Marie Antoinette enjoyed the book, it’s likely it wasn’t seen as a morality tale until after the French Revolution.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Gil Blas

Author: Alain-René Lesage

Description: Gil Blas isn’t the first picaresque novel, but it’s one of the genre’s most famous examples; it’s a novel that at one point in history was on the bookshelf of every good reader, and it has been featured in allusions across literature for centuries after its publication between 1715 and 1735. Gil Blas is the name of a Spanish boy born to a poor stablehand and a chambermaid. He’s educated by his uncle before leaving to attend a university, but on the way his journey is interrupted by a band of robbers, and his picaresque adventures begin. Blas embarks on a series of jobs, challenges, advances, setbacks, romances, and fights on his path through life, ultimately continuing to rise in station thanks to his affability and quick wit. On his way he encounters many different kinds of people, both honest and dishonest, as well as many different social classes. Blas’ series of breezy, episodic adventures give Lesage an opportunity to satirize every stratum of society, from the poor, to doctors, the clergy, writers and playwrights, the rich, and even royalty. Though Lesage wrote in French, Gil Blas is ultimately a Spanish novel in nature: Blas himself is Spanish, and his adventures take place in Spain. The details Lesage wrote into the novel were so accurate that some accused him of lifting from earlier works, like Marcos de Obregón by Vicente Espinel; others even accuse it of being written by someone else, arguing that no Frenchman could know so much detail about Spanish life and society. Despite any controversy, Gil Blas was translated into English by Tobias Smollett in 1748. His translation was so complete that it became the standard translation up to the modern day.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Xavier de Maistre

Description: Xavier de Maistre lived mostly as a military man, fighting in France and Russia around the turn of the 19th century. In 1790 a duel he participated in led him to be put under arrest in Turin; during his confinement in a tiny chamber, he wrote his most famous work, “A Journey Round My Room.” “Journey” is a short story written as a parody of the grand travelogues popular at the time. He frames his six weeks’ confinement as a long journey across the unknown land of his room, visiting the furniture, the paintings on the wall, and even venturing to the north side. De Maistre didn’t hold the work in very high regard, but after his brother had it published in 1794 it became a fast success, eventually calling for a sequel (“A Night Journey Round My Room”), and warranting allusions in fiction by writers like D. H. Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, W. Somerset Maugham, and Jorge Luis Borges. The rest of his literary corpus is modest, and consists entirely of short works. “The Leper of the City of Aosta” is a philosophical dialogue on the struggles of a leper whose days are seemingly filled with unending sorrow; “The Prisoners of the Caucasus” is the fictional narrative of a captured general and his faithful servant, set against a rich background of Cossack factions in the Caucasus of Imperial Russia reminiscent of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murád; and “The Young Siberian” is the true story of Prascovia Lopouloff, a poor Russian girl who sets out on a journey to secure an imperial pardon for her exiled father. De Maistre never set out to have a literary career, but his carefully considered output made him famous across the continent.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Power of Darkness

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: The Power of Darkness is a five-act drama that follows the downfall of the peasants Anísya and Nikíta as they succumb to a series of sordid temptations, from adultery and drunkenness to outright murder. Written in 1886 but suppressed by censors until 1902, the play is a realist portrayal of some of the darkest elements of Russian peasant life. Similar to some other late Tolstoy works, like Resurrection, the play’s psychological exploration of human depravity is accompanied by a sharp social critique of the Russian Empire and its role in perpetuating poverty and ignorance among its lowest and most marginalized classes.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Invaders from the Infinite

Author: John W. Campbell

Description: In the year 2129, a doglike alien race asks the scientists Arcot, Wade and, Morey to assist them with defending their solar system from an enemy force. Their journey takes them to other solar systems across the galaxy as they build battle spacecraft out of pure matter using only their minds. Invaders from the Infinite is the third and final installment in the Arcot, Morey, and Wade trilogy. It was originally published in April 1932 in Amazing Stories.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Author: Anita Loos

Description: It’s the roaring 20s, and a young flapper named Lorelei decides to keep a diary after receiving a blank journal from a “gentleman friend.” She has an apartment in New York paid for by a Chicago businessman named Gus Eisman; when he’s in town, Mr. Eisman spends his time “educating” Lorelei by going out to dinner, taking in shows, and then escorting her to her apartment to “talk about the topics of the day until quite late.” When he’s away, Lorelei does much the same with the other men she has charmed. Joined by her best friend Dorothy, Lorelei embarks on a cruise to Europe in order to meet Mr. Eisman in Paris and continue her education. As the diary unfolds, we learn more about Lorelei’s past and her cynical, rather mercenary approach towards romance, all set in a light, funny, and very charming atmosphere. Originally published as a series of sketches known as “the Lorelei stories” in Harper’s Bazaar, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was published as a novel in 1925. Despite lukewarm initial reviews, it quickly became a success, becoming the second-best seller of 1926. Since then it has gone on to be an international bestseller, having been printed in over eighty-five editions and adapted several times—most famously as the 1953 film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Edith Wharton called it “the great American novel,” and it has garnered praise from many authors including James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Able McLaughlins

Author: Margaret Wilson

Description: The McLaughlins are prominent members of a settlement of Scottish immigrants who emigrated to the still-wild prairies of Iowa. As the story begins, their eldest son, Wully, returns to the family farm after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. But much has changed in his absence: the girl who once returned his love, Chirstie, now appears cold, fearful, and traumatized, and won’t meet his eye. Wully seeks to discover what happened to her during his absence, and what he can do to set things right, without having Chirstie lose her standing in their tight-knit and very religious Presbyterian community. Margaret Wilson grew up on a farm in the small town of Traer, and her understanding of the land and its people infuses this, her first novel. The Able McLaughlins won the Harper Novel Prize on publication and then the Pulitzer Prize in 1924.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Skylark of Space

Author: E. E. Smith

Description: The Skylark of Space is said to be the seminal space opera. Dr. Seaton accidentally discovers a source of energy which could be used to travel to other star systems, but when he tries to show others, it fails to work. Most of his colleagues ridicule him, and he quits his career to focus on trying to refine the process. Meanwhile Dr. DuQuesne realizes the truth, and is willing to do anything to have that power. Both scientists refine the process well enough to build a spaceship and visit other planets, but who will these new civilizations side with? This version of The Skylark of Space was originally published in three parts during 1928 Amazing Stories. The novelization, which was published later, differs significantly.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Pothunters

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: In this, his first novel, P. G. Wodehouse offers a glimpse into the insular world of an English public school scandalized by a recent burglary of its prized sports trophies (“pots”) from its cricket pavilion. At first an overzealous master unjustly accuses one of the schoolboys, who happens to be in need of cash to pay a gambling debt owed to his brother. But, thanks to a Scotland Yard inspector brought in especially for the case, the boy is cleared and his promising career among the elite is left intact. Along the way, Wodehouse gives snapshots of the everyday lives of various boys: from dealing with the idiosyncrasies of fellow students, to collecting birds’ eggs and sneaking a smoke in the nearby woods while avoiding capture by gamekeepers, to cranking out an underground magazine to raise needed funds. Through it all, the boys, along with their headmaster, handle things with wit and aplomb. Consistent with a worldview in which a man “should be before anything else a sportsman,” sporting contests figure prominently: a boy rises from the canvas to score an unexpected knockout, and another graciously accepts his last-second defeat at the finish line.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Indiscretions of Archie

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Indiscretions of Archie is a comic novel adapted from a set of short stories serialized in the Strand magazine between March 1920 and February 1921 in the United Kingdom and between May 1920 and February 1921 in Cosmopolitan in the United States. The novel was first published in the United Kingdom on February 14, 1921 by Herbert Jenkins and in the United States on July 15, 1921 by George H. Doran. The eponymous Archie is Archibald Moffam, a gaffe-prone but affable Englishman who has found himself living in New York City after the end of the First World War, in which he had served with distinction. After a whirlwind romance Archie marries Lucille, the daughter of wealthy hotel owner and art collector Daniel Brewster. Many of the ensuing events revolve around Archie’s attempts to win favor with his new father-in-law.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: Hercule Poirot has retired to the English village of King’s Abbot, determined to use his little grey cells in the growing of vegetable marrows. But when Roger Ackroyd, a local businessman and former acquaintance of Poirot’s, is murdered, the man’s niece begs Poirot to investigate in order to clear her fiancé. With Hastings having married and moved to Argentina, Poirot enlists the local doctor to be his assistant and scribe, and the two of them sift through clues to try to discern the ones that will lead them to the killer. Agatha Christie’s two previous Poirot novels had been generally well-received, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made her a household name. Consistently ranked among Christie’s best works, in 2013 it was voted as the best crime novel ever written by the 600-member Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: So Big

Author: Edna Ferber

Description: Selina Peake moves from Chicago to a rural Dutch farming area just outside the city to teach in a one room school. As she attempts to fit into the community, she learns about her own strength in adapting to rural life. She marries an uneducated but sweet Dutch farmer named Pervus DeJong and has a son, Dirk, nicknamed “So Big.” She wishes her son to have the same appreciation for the arts and education she has, and although he becomes an architect, his disillusionment with the architectural apprentice system leads him to a career as a successful bond salesman. He later regrets eschewing his architecture career when he meets a beautiful and eccentric artist. Ferber was not confident in the book’s prospects when it was first published. Nevertheless, it became very popular, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925, and was later made into three different motion pictures.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Wet Magic

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Wet Magic was the last novel for children published by E. Nesbit. It was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1912, with a book version published in 1913. In the book, four brothers and sisters are on their way to a holiday at the beach. While traveling on a train, they’re excited to read about the purported sighting of a mermaid near the coastal town where they’ll be staying, and agree among themselves to join the hunt for this mythical creature. But when they arrive, they discover that the mermaid has been captured and put on show at a circus at the local fairground. After the older children encounter another mermaid in the sea, who implores them to help, they agree they must do what they can to free the captured one. This leads them on to strange adventures. hile Wet Magic has much of Nesbit’s characteristic charm and humor, it doesn’t appear to have been received as well as her other books, nor has it been as frequently reprinted.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: My Disillusionment in Russia

Author: Emma Goldman

Description: In 1919, at the height of the anti-leftist Palmer Raids conducted by the Wilson administration, the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman was deported to the nascent Soviet Union. Despite initial plans to fight the deportation order in court, Goldman eventually acquiesced in order to take part in the new revolutionary Russia herself. While initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, with some reservations, Goldman’s firsthand experiences with Bolshevik oppression and corruption prompted her titular disillusionment and eventual emigration to Germany. In My Disillusionment in Russia, Goldman records her travels throughout Russia as part of a revolutionary museum commission, and her interactions with a variety of political and literary figures like Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, John Reed, and Peter Kropotkin. Goldman concludes her account with a critique of the Bolshevik ideology in which she asserts that revolutionary change in institutions cannot take place without corresponding changes in values. My Disillusionment in Russia had a troubled publication history, since the first American printing in 1923 omitted the last twelve chapters of what was supposed to be a thirty-three chapter book. (Somehow, the last chapters failed to reach the publisher, who did not suspect the book to be incomplete.) The situation was remedied with the publication of the remaining chapters in 1924 as part of a volume titled My Further Disillusionment in Russia. This Standard Ebooks edition compiles both volumes into a single volume, following the intent of the original manuscript.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Antony and Cleopatra

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Antony and Cleopatra begins two years after Julius Caesar. Mark Antony was supposed to be in Egypt to conduct government affairs on behalf of the Roman Empire. Instead, he fell in love with the beautiful Queen Cleopatra, became her lover, and abandoned his duties to his wife and country. A messenger arrives bearing news that Antony’s wife and brother are dead after attempting to kill Octavius Caesar, and one of Caesar’s generals, Pompey, is gathering an army against the Roman leaders. Mark Antony has no choice but to return to Rome. When Antony returns to the capital, he argues with Caesar over his loyalty to the empire and the other triumvirs. The only way that Antony can prove his fidelity to Caesar is to marry his sister, Octavia. The news of this marriage makes its way back to Egypt and its queen. The play was published in 1606 after the great success of Macbeth. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Taming of the Shrew

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: In the Italian city of Padua, a young gentleman named Lucentio comes to study at one of the city’s colleges. As is often the fate of men in Shakespeare’s plays, Lucentio falls in love at first sight. The object of his affection, Bianca, is the beautiful and docile daughter of a rich merchant. Her father, Baptista Minola, has declared that no one can marry Bianca until her older sister Katharina has been married first. Katharina is the polar opposite of her sister: vicious, foul-tempered, sharp-tongued, and stubborn. Any man in her vicinity is at risk of receiving her brutal insults and physical attacks. It’s no surprise that no man wants to marry her—or that’s what she believes, until an equally difficult man named Petruchio arrives in Padua. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Winnie-the-Pooh

Author: A. A. Milne

Description: innie-the-Pooh is a bear that likes honey perhaps a little too much and lives in the Hundred Acre Wood with his animal friends Rabbit, Piglet, Owl, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo, as well as his people friend Christopher Robin. Winnie-the-Pooh contains several stories of adventures involving Pooh and his friends, including a birthday party, looking for heffalumps, finding a missing tail, and playing a trick on one of their own. Most of them, of course, also involve honey in one way or another. A. A. Milne wrote for Punch magazine, authored a detective novel (The Red House Mystery), and published several plays, but all of them were largely forgotten after he began writing children’s books about his son’s stuffed toys. Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends captured the public’s imagination, and though Milne was only to publish four books of their adventures, they have lived on in the imagination of children ever since.

Subjects: children’s

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Description: Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the most influential American writer of the twentieth century. Though known mostly for his longer works, he began his writing career with the publication of short stories which helped develop his often-imitated concise, simple, and straightforward style, which stood in stark contrast to the more elaborate prose of many of his contemporaries. In 1947, during a University of Mississippi creative writing class, William Faulkner remarked that Hemingway “has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway famously responded: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” Besides his writing style, Hemingway’s most well-known contribution to the literary landscape was the iceberg theory of writing, developed while composing the short story “Out of Season.” Hemingway later said of the story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” This collection comprises all of the public domain stories published in Hemingway’s short story collections, some miscellaneous stories published in various magazines, and his novellas. With the exception of stories within collections with a thematic link, such as In Our Time, they are arranged in publication order.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: A Man Could Stand Up—

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: A Man Could Stand Up— opens on Armistice Day, with Valentine Wannop learning that her love, Christopher Tietjens, has returned to London from the front. As she prepares to meet him, the narrative suddenly shifts time and place to earlier in the year, with Tietjens commanding a group of soldiers in a trench somewhere in the war zone. Tietjens leads his company bravely as they shelter from the constant German strafes, before the narrative again jumps to conclude with an actual Armistice Day celebration. In this simple narrative Ford creates dense, complex character studies of Valentine and Tietjens. Tietjens, often called “the last Tory” for his staunch and unwavering approach to honor, duty, and fidelity, has changed greatly from the man he was in the previous installments in the series. Ford explores the psychological horror that the Great War inflicted on its combatants through the lens of Valentine’s gentle curiosity about Tietjen’s time on the front: men returned from battle injured not just in body, but in soul, too. The constant, unrelenting shelling, the endless strafes, the clouds of poison gas, the instant death of friends and comrades for no reason at all, the muddy and grim entrenchments where men lived and died—all of these permanently changed soldiers in ways that previous wars didn’t. Now the “last Tory” wants nothing more than to retreat from society and live a quiet life with the woman he loves—who is not his wife. As we follow Valentine and Tietjens through the last day of the war, we see how the Great War was not just the destruction of men, but of an entire era.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sun Also Rises

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Description: The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, and the novel that introduced the term “Lost Generation” to describe the generation that came to adulthood during World War I. The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American expat living in the Parisian café society of the roaring 20s. A wound sustained during the war has left him unable to have sex, and that drives a wedge between him and the woman he loves: Brett Ashley, a twice-divorcée who has embraced the sexual freedom and independence of the age. As they drift through their lives in postwar Paris, they find themselves on a trip with some friends to Spain to witness the Festival of San Fermin, a week-long bacchanal whose highlight is bullfighting. Hemingway explores the aimless, heavy drinking, and dramatic lives of Jake, Brett, and their friends as a means to reflect the Lost Generation as a whole. Jake is a character of troubled masculinity: his war wound has fundamentally changed him as a man, and his behavior is often tentative, unsure, and placating. On the other hand, Brett is an enigmatic New Woman: free to drink and carouse with the men, she is seductive, but aching for the reassurance and love of a real relationship, and not just sex. The satellites of friends that orbit around them are equally troubled, drinking to excess and fighting with themselves and with others. These complex characters are now mere spectators for the bullfight, a microcosm of war and death whose masters, the matadors, are the powerful and elegant emblems of masculinity that the Lost Generation finds it impossible to compete against. Though initially met with mixed reviews, modern critics consider it to be Hemingway’s best novel. The characters and events are largely based on real-life people in Hemingway’s social circle and his time spent in Paris and Spain. Thus, the book sold very well in its first print run, as the expatriate community was eager to read about the coded scandals of their peers. Today it is recognized as a foundational work of the modernist style, and an American classic.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Author: T. E. Lawrence

Description: Seven Pillars of Wisdom is T. E. Lawrence’s memoir of his involvement in leading a portion of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire during World War I. The empire had joined the side of Germany and the Central Powers in the war, and Britain hoped that a successful revolt would take the empire out of the war effort. Britain had also promised the Arabs that, if they were successful, England would recognize a single Arab state. Lawrence convinced the Arab leaders, who had historically not shown a willingness to work together, to join forces in supporting Britain’s strategy in the area. His memoir is part travelogue, part philosophy treatise, and part action novel. It details his movements and actions during his two year involvement, his relationships with the various Arab leaders and men who fought with him, and his thoughts—and doubts—during that time. It’s a gripping tale made famous by the movie Lawrence of Arabia, and one that Winston Churchill called “unsurpassable” as a “narrative of war and adventure.” The manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom has a rich history. Lawrence finished his first draft in 1919 from his notes during the war, but lost most of it when changing trains in England (it was never found). The next year, he started working on a new version from memory that ended up being sixty percent longer than the original. He then edited that version (although it was still a third longer than the original draft), finishing it in early 1922, and had eight copies of it printed to give to friends so they could review it and offer editing suggestions (and to prevent a repeat of losing his only copy). About this time he re-enlisted in the service, but friends convinced him to work on a version he could publish. In 1926, he had a first edition of approximately 200 copies published that included 125 black-and-white and color illustrations from sixteen different artists. The first edition lost money, and it was the only edition published during his lifetime. This edition uses the first edition text and includes all 125 of the original illustrations, including both endpapers.

Subjects: adventure, memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Soldiers’ Pay

Author: William Faulkner

Description: Soldiers’ Pay is William Faulkner’s first published novel. It begins with a train journey on which two American soldiers, Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe, are returning from the First World War. They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family. The novel continues to focus on Mahon and his slow deterioration, and the various romantic complications that arise upon his return home. Faulkner drew inspiration for this novel from his own experience of the First World War. In the spring of 1918, he moved from his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, to Yale and worked as an accountant until meeting a Canadian Royal Air Force pilot who encouraged him to join the R.A.F. He then traveled to Toronto, pretended to be British (he affected a British accent and forged letters from British officers and a made-up Reverend), and joined the R.A.F. in the hopes of becoming a hero. But the war ended before he was able to complete his flight training, and, like Julian Lowe, he never witnessed actual combat. Upon returning to Mississippi, he began fabricating various heroic stories about his time in the air force (like narrowly surviving a plane crash with broken legs and metal plates under the skin), and proudly strode around Oxford in his uniform. Faulkner was encouraged to write Soldiers’ Pay by his close friend and fellow writer Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner met in New Orleans. Anderson wrote in his Memoirs that he went “personally to Horace Liveright”—Soldiers’ Pay was originally published by Boni Liveright—“to plead for the book.” Though the novel was a commercial failure at the time of its publication, Faulkner’s subsequent fame has ensured its long-term success.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Riders of the Purple Sage

Author: Zane Grey

Description: In a small Mormon community in southern Utah, Jane Withersteen, a young, unmarried Mormon woman faces growing pressure to marry a local elder of her church. Elder Tull, a polygamist, already has two wives and seeks to marry Jane not just for her beauty, but to take control of the ranch her late father passed on to her. Jane’s resistance to marriage only serves to increase the mounting resentment against “Gentiles” (non-Mormons) in the area. Bern Venters, one of Jane Withersteen’s ranch hands and potential suitor, becomes the focus of this resentment and is nearly killed by Elder Tull and his men before a mysterious rider interrupts the procedure. The rider, a man named Lassiter, is a gunslinger known for his exploits in other Mormon settlements further north. Lassiter’s intercession on Venters’ behalf sets off a chain reaction of threats, violence, theft, and murder as Jane Withersteen fights to maintain both her ranch and her independence. First published in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage is considered to have played a prominent role in shaping the Western genre. It was Zane Grey’s best-selling book and has remained popular ever since.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: With Fire and Sword

Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Description: Goodwill in the seventeenth century Polish Commonwealth has been stretched thin due to the nobility’s perceived and real oppression of the less well-off members. When the situation reaches its inevitable breaking point, it sparks the taking up of arms by the Cossacks against the Polish nobility and a spiral of violence that engulfs the entire state. This background provides the canvas for vividly painted narratives of heroism and heartbreak of both the knights and the hetmans swept up in the struggle. Henryk Sienkiewicz had spent most of his adult life as a journalist and editor, but turned his attention back to historical fiction in an attempt to lift the spirits and imbue a sense of nationalism to the partitioned Poland of the nineteenth century. With Fire and Sword is the first of a trilogy of novels dealing with the events of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the following wars of the late seventeenth century, and weaves fictional characters and events in among historical fact. While there is some contention about the fairness of the portrayal of Polish and Ukrainian belligerents, the novel certainly isn’t one-sided: all factions indulge in brutal violence in an attempt to sway the tide of war, and their grievances are clearly depicted. The initial serialization and later publication of the novel proved hugely popular, and in Poland the Trilogy has remained so ever since. In 1999, the novel was the subject of Poland’s then most expensive film, following the previously filmed later books. This edition is based on the 1890 translation by Jeremiah Curtin, who also translated Sienkiewicz’s later (and perhaps more internationally recognized) Quo Vadis.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tarzan of the Apes

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The baby of an English aristocratic family becomes orphaned in the equatorial African jungle, and is raised by apes. As he grows up he discovers he is human, and very different from his anthropoid companions. He learns and develops human traits, yet retains his primitive skills and physical prowess. As he comes into contact with other humans, conflict, adventure, wonder, and triumph result. To those he encounters, Tarzan becomes a symbol of the natural man, contrasting with the shortcomings and perfidies of human society.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Two close friends, Proteus and Valentine, are saying their goodbyes in the streets of Verona. Valentine plans to travel to Milan and discover the world, but Proteus wants to stay with Julia, a woman he loves. While in Milan, Valentine falls in love with the duke’s daughter, Sylvia, and plans to elope with her. Antonio, Proteus’ father, later orders his son to join Valentine in Milan. Before leaving, Proteus exchanges rings and vows of undying love with Julia. When Proteus enters the aristocratic courts of Milan, he instantly falls in love with Sylvia and forgets all about Julia. The love triangle between Sylvia, Proteus, and Valentine will test the loyalty of friendship. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Return of Tarzan

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Return of Tarzan was first published in the pulp New Story Magazine between June and December of 1913, and later published as a novel in 1915. The story picks up shortly after the events in the first book as Tarzan is traveling to France from the United States. While on the ship, he intervenes in the plots of a man named Nikolas Rokoff and his companion Alexis Paulvitch. Upon reaching Paris, Rokoff executes the first of many revenge plots, which plunge Tarzan into a series of adventures.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Dead Secret

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: The Dead Secret is Wilkie Collins’ fourth novel. It first appeared in serial form in Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine during 1856. Like many of Collins’ books, it features incidents and themes which were considered to be sensational at the time; in this case, sex before marriage, illegitimacy, and fraud. The novel opens with a scene at Porthgenna Tower, a mansion in Cornwall, where the lady of the house, Mrs. Treverton, is dying. On her deathbed, she tries to force her maidservant, Sarah Leeson, to swear that she will give a letter Mrs. Treverton has written to her husband, Captain Treverton, once she is dead. The letter reveals an important family secret in which Sarah is deeply involved and which she consequently is desperately unwilling to pass on. Mrs. Treverton succeeds in making Sarah swear not to destroy the letter or remove it from the house, but dies before making the young woman swear to give the letter to the Captain. Sarah therefore finds a place to conceal it within the house. The rest of the novel deals with Rosamond, the Treverton’s daughter, who grows to adulthood and marries Leonard Franklin, a young man of a well-to-do family, who is afflicted with blindness. Franklin purchases Porthgenna Tower after the Captain’s death, and the couple plan to move into the property and renovate it. Doing so, however, means that they are likely to uncover the hidden letter concealing the family secret. hile critics don’t consider The Dead Secret to be one of Collins’ best novels, it contains some of the same elements of mystery and suspense as The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and much of his characteristic wry humor.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Murder in the Gunroom

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: Jeff Rand, a private detective, is skeptical when he is employed by Gladys Fleming to evaluate her recently acquired gun collection, which happens to contain a dark secret. The more facts he uncovers, the more interesting the story becomes. Gun dealers, butlers, wives and cops all become suspects in the investigation of a mysterious death. The book is rich with detailed descriptions of the many different guns that star in this tale. This is the only murder-mystery written by Piper, who was mostly known for his science fiction novels.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: What Is Art?

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: What Is Art? is an 1897 philosophical treatise by Leo Tolstoy that lays out his philosophy of aesthetics. Rejecting notions of aesthetics that center around beauty, Tolstoy instead posits that art is defined by its role in transmitting feelings between human beings. Furthermore, he argues that the quality of art is not assessed by the pleasure it gives, but whether the feelings the art evokes align with the meaning of life revealed by a given society’s religious perception. In line with his spiritual views set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy argues that the proper purpose of art is to transmit feelings of human unity and “to set up, in place of the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God, i.e. of love, which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life.” Tolstoy makes a number of unconventional aesthetic judgments in the course of the book, dismissing such works as Wagner’s operas, Romeo and Juliet, and his own past works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina as “bad art.” In turn, he praises such works as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Hugo’s Les Misérables as “examples of the highest art, flowing from the love of God and the love of man.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Betty Zane

Author: Zane Grey

Description: Betty Zane, published in 1903, was Zane Grey’s first novel. It tells the romanticized story of Grey’s great-great-aunt, who made a miraculous dash under fire to save a frontier fort from Indian attack. Fort Henry sat on the site of present-day Wheeling, West Virginia. One of a series of fortifications built to protect frontier settlers, it was commanded by Colonel Ebenezer Zane, and was the center of a small community where Colonel’s brothers and his sister Betty lived. The fort survived two sieges by Native Americans, first in 1777 and again in 1782. In the 1782 siege the attacking tribes were joined by British soldiers; and it is this siege, and the events leading up to it, that are recounted in Betty Zane. Grey claimed to derive the facts in his story from the personal notebook, preserved in his family, of his great-grandfather Ebenezer Zane, but it’s impossible for readers to distinguish historical fact, the supposed contents of the notebook, and the Grey’s own imagination. Certainly some aspects of the tale, like Betty’s romantic involvements, are entirely fictionalized. But equally certainly, other major aspects of the tale, in particular Betty’s heroism during the siege, come straight from the pages of history.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Magician

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: In Paris, surgeon Arthur Burdon and his fiancé are introduced to Oliver Haddo, a wealthy Englishman from an old family who claims to be a magician trained in the occult. At first they are unconvinced and irritated by Haddo’s boasts; however he soon demonstrates his powers in more and more fateful ways. The character of Oliver Haddo is an unflattering caricature of the English occultist Alistair Crowley, whom Maugham had met while living in Paris. Crowley himself wrote a review in Vanity Fair in which he accused Maugham of plagiarizing various other novels, signing off as “Oliver Haddo.” Most critics dismissed these allegations.

Subjects: horror, mystery

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Title: Framley Parsonage

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series. Originally a serial, it was first published as a book in 1861, and it has since been praised for its unsentimental depiction of the lives of middle-class people in the mid-Victorian era. As with the other books in the series, Framley Parsonage is set in the fictious English county of Barsetshire, and deals with the doings of a variety of families and characters who live in the region, several of whom have appeared in the previous books; but it primarily concerns the young Reverend Mark Robarts. Robarts has been appointed as vicar of the parish of Framley through the patronage of Lady Lufton of Framley Court, the mother of his long-time friend Ludovic, now Lord Lufton. After he and his wife Fanny take up residence in Framley Parsonage, Robarts is led into the society of some loose-living aristocrats through his friendship with Ludovic. Robarts eventually finds himself weakly consenting to his name being included on a bill for a loan to one of his new connections, Sowerby. By so doing, he becomes liable for debts he cannot possibly satisfy. An important secondary thread involves Mark Robarts’ sister Lucy, who after their father’s death comes to live with her brother’s family at the parsonage. Through them, she becomes acquainted with Lady Lufton and her son Ludovic, and romantic complications ensue. Framley Parsonage was originally published anonymously in serial form in Cornhill Magazine, and such was its popularity that during its publication a hysterical young woman apparently tried to gain notoriety in her country town by claiming to be its author. “The real writer,” we are told, “dealt very gently with the pretender.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Growth of the Soil

Author: Knut Hamsun

Description: Growth of the Soil was published in 1917 to universal acclaim. A mid- to late-career work for Hamsun, it was celebrated for its then-revolutionary use of literary techniques like stream of consciousness, and for its unadorned depiction of pastoral life. Its focus on the quotidian lives of everyday people has led scholars to classify it as a novel of Norwegian New Realism. Isak, a man so strong and so simple that he echoes a primitive, foundational “everyman,” finds an empty plot of land in turn-of-the-century Norway, and builds a small home. He soon attracts a wife, Inger, whose harelip has led her to be ostracized from town life but who is nonetheless a hard and conscientious worker. Together the two earthy beings build a farm and a family, and watch as society and civilization grows and develops around them. Isak and Inger’s toils sometimes bring them up against the burgeoning modernity around them, but curiously, the novel is not one driven by a traditional conflict-oriented plot. Instead, the steady progression of life on the farm, with its ups and downs, its trials and joys, makes the people and their growth the novel’s main propellant. While the humble, homespun protagonists occasionally come into conflict with the awe-inspiring forces of civilization, more often than not, those forces are portrayed as positive and symbiotic companions to the agrarian lifestyle. Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil, one of the rare instances in which the Nobel committee awarded a prize for a specific novel, and not a body of work. It has since come to be regarded as a classic of modernist, and Norwegian, literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Thief in the Night

Author: E. W. Hornung

Description: “Bunny” Manders is drawn to fill the void left by A. J. Raffles’ absence at the end of The Black Mask with untold stories of the past adventures. These tales are perhaps ones that Bunny is most ashamed of, but among the regrets lie threads of future happiness. The public popularity of Raffles, fuelled by stage and film adaptations in the intervening years, lead to this continuation of his saga in 1905. A Thief in the Night, with the exception of the last two stories, is set in the same period as the events of The Amateur Cracksman.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: His Family

Author: Ernest Poole

Description: Roger Gale, a media-monitoring business owner nearing retirement, observes life in early 20th century New York City through the eyes of his three daughters. The youngest, Laura, is a social butterfly always going to the latest excitements the city can offer. The middle, Edith, is a mother to four children, on whom she dotes. The oldest, Deborah, cares for her own “family,” tenement children and the poor trying to make it the new country they have made their home. Through each daughter, he sees the changing social order of New York in a new way.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Ambassadors

Author: Henry James

Description: A middle-aged man named Lambert Strether is sent to Paris by his wealthy wife-to-be in order to convince her son Chad to return home to America and take over the lucrative family business. This turns out to be much easier said than done, as Strether finds Chad much better adapted to European life than anyone expected. James’ characteristically dense prose is matched by a cast of subtly realized characters who rarely say exactly what they mean. Widely regarded as one of James’ best novels, The Ambassadors explores themes of love, duty, and aging, all told through the eyes of a man who wonders if life hasn’t passed him by. This ebook follows the 1909 New York Edition, with one important exception: Since 1950, it has been generally agreed that the New York Edition had incorrectly ordered the first two chapters of Book XI. This text follows the convention of most printings since then, and the chapters have been returned to what is believed to have been James’ intended order.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Captain Jinks, Hero

Author: Ernest Howard Crosby

Description: A biting satire of late 19th-century American imperialism, Captain Jinks, Hero was written by the American pacifist Ernest Howard Crosby. Crosby, who corresponded with Leo Tolstoy and advocated Tolstoy’s pacifist ideals in the United States, lambasts the American military and its involvement in the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion through the character of Captain Jinks, a jingoistic officer who embarks on a tragicomic quest to become a “perfect soldier.” The novel also satirizes the role of industrial and media interests in promoting war through the character of Jinks’s friend and companion Cleary, a yellow journalist who feeds sensational stories back to the home front at the behest of editors and monopolists.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: The Black Mask

Author: E. W. Hornung

Description: After the events of The Amateur Cracksman A. J. Raffles is missing, presumed dead, and “Bunny” Manders is destitute but free after a stretch in prison for his crimes. So when a mysterious telegraph arrives suggesting the possibility of a lucrative position, Bunny has little option but to attend the given address. Raffles was a commercial success for E. W. Hornung, garnering critical praise but also warnings about the glorification of crime. The Black Mask, published two years after his first collection of Raffles stories, takes a markedly more downcast tone, with the high-life escapades of the earlier stories curtailed by Raffles’ purported death.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Amateur Cracksman

Author: E. W. Hornung

Description: A. J. Raffles and his friend “Bunny” Manders are the quintessential rich young socialites; but behind the high-living façade, they’ve exhausted their funds. There’s only one way to pay the bills: a secret double-life as criminals. Raffles was E. W. Hornung’s biggest literary success, with the Raffles stories proving perennially popular. This volume was dedicated to his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle, and in Raffles and Manders there is a clear relation to Holmes and Watson. The character’s popularity helped kickstart the “gentleman thief” genre, and it’s easy to see parallels to the later stories of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: All’s Well That Ends Well

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: All’s Well That Ends Well was not popular during Shakespeare’s time, and is still considered to be a play without renown even today. It’s also one of the three “problem plays,” in that it deals with controversial social issues. Although it remains unloved by the public, productions have featured star-studded casts, including actresses like Dame Judi Dench and Claudie Blakley. Helena, daughter of a skilled doctor and adopted child of the Countess of Rousillon, is in love with Bertram, the Countess’s son. Helena cures the King of France and is rewarded with a husband of her choice, so she selects Bertram. He contests the legitimacy of their marriage, and insists on demanding that she complete two tasks before he can consider their marriage legitimate: She must wear his family ring, and provide him an heir. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: On a Chinese Screen

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: On a Chinese Screen was first published in 1922 by Heinemann Publishers, London. Its 58 short vignettes are based on Maugham’s travels along the Yangtze River from 1919 to 1920. Although later editions of the book added the subtitle “Sketches of Life in China,” there are actually only a few descriptions of the places he visited and the local Chinese people he met; rather, Maugham focuses on relaying his encounters with a range of Europeans living and working in the country. Maugham is quite critical of many of them and their lack of interest in, and sometimes disdain, for the country and its people, except for the extent to which their careers and pockets could benefit. His sketches highlight the difficulties that many expatriates encounter while living in a foreign culture.

Subjects: shorts, travel

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Title: Sister Carrie

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Description: Caroline Meeber, known as Sister Carrie to her family, moves to Chicago at the tender age of eighteen to try to make something of herself. Living with her sister and brother-in-law, she quickly finds that life, and work, are hard in the big city. She soon takes up with a traveling salesman she met on the train into town. Months later her eye is turned by one of the salesman’s acquaintances, George Hurstwood, and vice-versa. A series of events lead Carrie and Hurstwood to New York City, where both struggle to live out the aspirations that brought them there. Theodore Dreiser was one of the earliest naturalist writers, but he wrote Sister Carrie while the United States was still very Victorian in its morals. The book therefore caused a stir from the beginning: Carrie Meeber was clearly, even in the disguised language of the time, a sexually active, unmarried female, who wasn’t made to suffer for her indiscretion to the extent considered necessary at the time. Dreiser’s depiction of rough language merely added to the controversy. The first printing sold only 456 copies in two years; it was to be another five years before Dreiser could convince another publisher to carry the book. Today it’s considered a classic and one of the “greatest of all American urban novels.” The text of Sister Carrie was unchanged until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new version with 36,000 words restored. The edition was not without controversy: the cuts were originally made before the first printing at the suggestion of Dreiser’s wife, or his friend Arthur Henry, and Dreiser had approved all of them. Although the new Pennsylvania Edition, as it is called, made a good case for restoring the changes, it is the 1907 text that remains the most widely available today, and it is that text in this edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: James Joyce

Description: Though James Joyce earned his literary fame mostly through his short stories and novels, he also published several short books of poetry. In fact Chamber Music, a collection of thirty-six short love poems, was his first major independent publication. The title of Chamber Music is said to have come from the sound of urine tinkling into a chamber pot—though this was actually a story made up by Joyce after the fact. As he grew older, he came to dislike the title, saying that it was too complacent. Though the story of the title’s genesis suggests the poems are bawdy and raw, in fact they’re each gentle and lyrical love poems, strictly rooted in the romantic tradition. Though the poems didn’t sell well, they met with some critical acclaim from the likes of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. “Gas from a Burner” is a short broadside published by Joyce in 1912. He composed it as he was preparing to leave his home, Ireland, for the last time, before embarking on a new life of exile on the continent. Its targets are his publishers, who for almost a decade stalled the publication of his short story collection Dubliners. They frustrated him to such an extent that he thought they were actively conspiring against him to prevent his controversial manuscript from ever seeing the light of day. “Gas from a Burner” crystallizes the rage he felt at that pious, hypocritical, and prudish establishment. Pomes Penyeach is a collection of poems Joyce wrote over the course of twenty years. Initially rejected for publication by Ezra Pound, it was eventually published by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1927. The title puns on the French pommes (apples), offering them at a price in either language. Like Chamber Music, the poems have an often-romantic sentimentality to them. It was the penultimate publication in his lifetime, followed by Finnegans Wake over a decade later.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Aleksandr Kuprin

Description: Aleksandr Kuprin was one of the most celebrated Russian authors of the early twentieth century, writing both novels (including his most famous, The Duel) and short fiction. Along with Chekhov and Bunin, he did much to draw attention away from the “great Russian novel” and to make short fiction popular. His work is famed for its descriptive qualities and sense of place, but it always centers on the souls of the stories’ subjects. The themes of his work are wide and varied, and include biblical parables, bittersweet romances, spy fiction, and farce, among many others. In 1920, under some political pressure, Kuprin left Russia for France, and his later work primarily adopts his new homeland for the setting. This collection comprises the best individual translations into English of each of his short stories and novellas available in the public domain, presented in chronological order of their translated publication.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Jade God

Author: Alan Sullivan

Description: riter Jack Derrick and his sister Edith move into a suspiciously inexpensive countryside manor. They quickly discover the reason for their luck—two years earlier an unsolved murder had taken place in the study. Jack is extremely sensitive and feels that both the house and the deceased former owner are communicating with him. But to what end? Alan Sullivan was the winner of Canada’s Governor General Award for English-language fiction in 1941 for his novel Three Came to Ville Marie. In The Jade God he blends mystery, mysticism, and romance to create a chilling but ultimately uplifting story of obsession gone wrong.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Robert Sheckley

Description: Robert Sheckley was one of science fiction’s most prolific short story writers. Though less known today than he was in his heyday, he was a giant of his time and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Even though many of his stories deal with serious topics, they are most widely remembered for their comedic wit. His writing was compared to that of Douglas Adams, who held Sheckley in high regard: “He’s a very, very funny writer. He’s also a stylist. Very few science fiction writers write English well. Robert Sheckley can.” Sheckley was also well-respected by Kingsley Amis who, in his book New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, included Sheckley in a list with Frederik Pohl and Arthur C. Clarke, and said their volumes should “be reviewed as general fiction, not tucked away, as one writer has put it, in something called ‘Spaceman’s Realm’ between the kiddy section and dog stories.” Sheckley wrote about and pioneered many science fiction concepts, such as in his story “Watchbird,” where he explores the ability to detect murder before it happens—three years before Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report.” Or in “Ask a Foolish Question,” a story about an all-knowing Answerer to whom people pose the ultimate question of life—twenty-six years before Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Alongside these two stories, this collection includes all of his public domain short fiction ordered by date of first publication.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Round the Moon

Author: Jules Verne

Description: This sequel to From the Earth to the Moon narrates the eventful journey to the Moon of three passengers—Impey Barbicane, president of the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl, Barbicane’s rival and then collaborator, and Michel Ardan, a French scientist—aboard a hollow cannonball. They orbit the Moon and perform geographical observations, but the projectile fails to land, propelling them instead toward the Earth. They’re rescued at sea and widely celebrated as the first humans to leave Earth.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: English as She Is Spoke

Author: Pedro Carolino

Description: In 1855 Pedro Carolino set out to write an English phrasebook for Portuguese travelers visiting England. The only problem was that he couldn’t speak English. Undeterred by this minor setback, Carolino decided to base his guide on a respected Portuguese–French phrasebook written by José da Fonseca. He took the French translations of Portuguese, and used a French–English dictionary to translate those to English. The result was an unintentional comedy of literal translation, as English phrases like “the walls have ears” became “the walls have hearsay” (via the Portuguese as paredes têm ouvidos), and “waiting for someone to open the door” became “to craunch the marmoset” (via a ridiculous misreading of archaic English, and the shape of the grotesque door knockers popular at the time). The entire guide was quite large, and not only was it of no practical use as an actual phrasebook, but its length made it too much of a slog to appeal as a comedy. But its legend slowly grew, until in 1883 it was republished in an abridged form as a book of humor titled English as She Is Spoke (a phrase which, incidentally, doesn’t appear in the book itself). The abridged edition, taking the comedic highlights from the long and tedious original, is the edition that became famous. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on that abridgment. The book’s absurd mistranslations were said to have made Lincoln laugh aloud when read to him by his secretary John Hay, and Mark Twain said that “nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.”

Subjects: comedy

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Title: The Wealth of Nations

Author: Adam Smith

Description: The Wealth of Nations is economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus and the foundational text of what today we call classical economics. Its publication ushered in a new era of thinking and discussion about how economies function, a sea change away from the older, increasingly irrelevant mercantilist and physiocratic views of economics towards a new practical application of economics for the birth of the industrial era. Its scope is vast, touching on concepts like free markets, supply and demand, division of labor, war, and public debt. Its fundamental message is that the wealth of a nation is measured not by the gold in the monarch’s treasury, but by its national income, which in turn is produced by labor, land, and capital. Some ten years in the writing, The Wealth of Nations is the product of almost two decades of notes, study, and discussion. It was released to glowing praise, selling out its first print run in just six months and going through five subsequent editions and countless reprintings in Smith’s lifetime. It began inspiring legislators almost immediately and continued to do so well into the 1800s, and influenced thinkers ranging from Alexander Hamilton to Karl Marx. Today, it is the second-most-cited book in the social sciences that was published before 1950, and its legacy as a foundational text places it in the stratosphere of civilization-changing books like Principia Mathematica and The Origin of Species.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Survivors of the Chancellor

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Desiring a more romantic crossing of the Atlantic, Englishman J. R. Kazallon decides to forgo a steamship and instead sets sail on the Chancellor, a large three-mast sailing ship. What follows is a classic nautical adventure, told in the form of a series of diary entries and filled with tragedy, suffering, and even horror. Despite the grim subject matter, Jules Verne still finds space to include ample descriptions of geology, biology, and meteorology.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Author: Lord Dunsany

Description: The people of the obscure village Erl demand to be ruled by a magic lord, so their ruler sends his son Alveric to Elfland to wed the elfin princess Lirazel. He brings her back to Erl and the couple have a son, but Lirazel has trouble integrating with human society. When a scheme by her father spirits her away and Elfland vanishes, Alveric begins a mad quest to find where Elfland went. The King of Elfland’s Daughter is written in the pseudo-archaic prose style for which Dunsany is known. Some contemporaries thought the style did not suit a novel-length work, but contemporary Irish writer George Russell called the book “the most purely beautiful thing Lord Dunsany has written.” The book touches on a range of themes, including the longing for fantastical things lost, the perception of time, sanity and madness, the fear of the unknown, and being careful what you wish for. Large passages are also devoted to hunting; the original edition even featured an illustration of a unicorn hunt opposite the title page. Neil Gaiman wrote an introduction to the 1999 edition, and Christopher Lee was a featured vocalist on a 1977 progressive rock album based on the book.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Description: hen it was first published in 1903, W. E. B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk represented a seismic shift in the discussion of race in the United States. Earlier African-American authors had broken ground with memoirs and autobiographical novels—narrative works that portrayed the African-American experience through the stories of particular individuals. What Du Bois envisioned was a work that portrayed the experience of African Americans as a people. As a professor of sociology, Du Bois naturally gravitated toward a scientific and scholarly approach. But he was also becoming, to his own surprise, a political activist, and found himself increasingly disenchanted with purely intellectual arguments when his fellow African Americans were being lynched, starved, and driven from their land. What emerged from this tension between scholarly rigor and righteous indignation was a book that became a seminal text for both sociology and for the civil rights movement. The fourteen essays in this book weave together historical research, sociological analysis, first-hand reportage, political argument, and an enduring, aspirational belief in the possibility of America. Many of the ideas that Du Bois introduced in the book have become mainstays of modern discourse, including the “veil of race” and the concept of double consciousness. These insights, originally rooted in race, have proven resonant to a wide range of other marginalized groups and have provided a useful framework for understanding the nature of oppression and the path to liberation.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Doctor Thorne

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Doctor Thorne is the third book in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which is set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, somewhere in England’s West Country. Unlike the two earlier novels in the series, Doctor Thorne isn’t set in the cathedral city of Barchester, but in the small village of Greshamsbury and the estate of the local squire, Greshamsbury Park. Doctor Thorne is a middle-aged medical practitioner in Greshamsbury, a friend of the local squire Mr. Gresham, who is deeply in debt because of ill-advised attempts to gain a seat in Parliament. Doctor Thorne not only provides medical advice to the Greshams, but also assists Mr. Gresham in obtaining financial loans from a local self-made entrepreneur, Sir Richard Scratcherd. When Mr. Gresham’s son Frank comes of age, it is impressed on the young man that he must “marry money” to overcome the debts of the estate. Doctor Thorne is regarded highly among Trollope’s works, with one prominent critic, Michael Sadleir, writing in 1927 of “the sensational perfection of Doctor Thorne.” A television adaptation of the book was produced by ITV and aired in March 2016, with a script written by Julian Fellowes, the writer of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey

Subjects: fiction

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Title: From the Earth to the Moon

Author: Jules Verne

Description: In search of an occupation after the end of the Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club undertakes the design and construction of a cannon capable of launching a projectile to the Moon. The three main protagonists—Impey Barbicane, president of the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl, Barbicane’s rival and then collaborator, and Michel Ardan, a French scientist—board the hollow cannonball en route to the Moon. The story concludes in Autour de la Lune, the sequel published four years later. De la Terre à la Lune, number 4 in the Voyages Extraordinaires collection, is one of Jules Verne’s best-known novels. It inspired numerous adaptations, from movies to theme parks to video games.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Resurrection

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: Resurrection, the last full-length novel written by Leo Tolstoy, was published in 1899 after ten years in the making. A humanitarian cause—the pacifist Doukhobor sect, persecuted by the Russian government, needed funds to emigrate to Canada—prompted Tolstoy to finish the novel and dedicate its ensuing revenues to alleviate their plight. Ultimately, Tolstoy’s actions were credited with helping hundreds of Doukhobors emigrate to Canada. The novel centers on the relationship between Nekhlúdoff, a Russian landlord, and Máslova, a prostitute whose life took a turn for the worse after Nekhlúdoff wronged her ten years prior to the novel’s events. After Nekhlúdoff happens to sit in the jury for a trial in which Máslova is accused of poisoning a merchant, Nekhlúdoff begins to understand the harm he has inflicted upon Máslova—and the harm that the Russian state and society inflicts upon the poor and marginalized—as he embarks on a quest to alleviate Máslova’s suffering. Nekhlúdoff’s process of spiritual awakening in Resurrection serves as a framing for many of the novel’s religious and political themes, such as the hypocrisy of State Christianity and the injustice of the penal system, which were also the subject of Tolstoy’s nonfiction treatise on Christian anarchism, The Kingdom of God Is Within You. The novel also explores the “single tax” economic theory propounded by the American economist Henry George, which drives a major subplot in the novel concerning the management of Nekhlúdoff’s estates.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Henry VIII

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Henry VIII is one of the few of Shakespeare’s plays thought to have been written with a collaborator. It was initially published in the First Folio under Shakespeare’s name only, but in 1850 James Spedding, an English author and expert on the works of Francis Bacon, suggested that the play was a collaboration with John Fletcher, a playwright who later replaced Shakespeare in the King’s Men acting company. Modern scholars mostly tend to agree, though the theory is still controversial as it’s based on textual analysis and not any historical mention of a collaboration. The play is also famous for having burned down the Globe Theatre in 1613 during one of its early performances, when a cannon shot special effect lit the theater’s thatched roof on fire. In the play, King Henry’s closest advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, is hated by the citizens of England. Wolsey has imposed unfair taxes and unpopularly executed the Duke of Buckingham for treason. While at a party, the King falls madly in love with Anne Bullen and plans to divorce his current wife, Katherine of Aragon. Wolsey is asked to help his King in this endeavor, all the while becoming even more hated by the English and their Queen. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Child of the Cavern

Author: Jules Verne

Description: The Child of the Cavern follows engineer James Starr as he receives a letter from an old friend and co-worker, Simon Ford, requesting that he revisit a depleted coal mine in Scotland that he used to manage. Upon arriving, Starr finds the entire Ford family living in the mine, and Ford explains that a new coal vein has been located. Soon after Starr’s return, however, strange events start to occur, which seem to be supernatural. After a startling discovery, the characters continue to investigate these occurrences over the course of several years.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: New Grub Street

Author: George Gissing

Description: Grub Street is the name of a former street in London synonymous with pulp writers and low-quality publishers. New Grub Street takes its name from that old street, as it follows the lives and endeavors of a group of writers active in the literary scene of 1880s London. Edwin Reardon is a quiet and intelligent writer whose artistic sensibilities are the opposite of what the London public wants to read. He’s forced to write long, joyless novels that he thinks pop publishers will want to buy. These novels are draining to write, yet result in meager sales; soon Edwin’s increasingly small bank account, and his stubborn pride, start to put a strain on his once-happy marriage. His best friend, Biffen, lies to one side of Edwin’s nature: as another highly educated writer, he accepts a dingy, lonely, and hungry life of abject poverty in exchange for being able to produce a novel that’s true to his artistic desires but is unlikely to sell. On the other side lies Jasper Milvain, an “alarmingly modern” writer laser-focused on earning as much money as possible no matter what he’s made to write, as he floats through the same literary circles that Edwin haunts. The intricately told tale follows these writers as their differing outlooks and their fluctuating ranks in society affect them and the people around them. Gissing, himself a prolific writer intimately familiar with the London literary scene, draws from his own life in laying out the characters and events in the novel. He carefully elaborates the fragile social fabric of the literary world, its paupers and its barons both equal in the industry but unequal in public life. Though the novel is about writers on the face, the deep thread that runs through it all is the brutality of the modern social structure, where the greedy and superficial are rewarded with stability and riches, while the delicate and thoughtful are condemned to live on the margins of respectable society in grimy poverty, robbed not only of dignity, but of love.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Mutual Aid

Author: Peter Kropotkin

Description: Peter Kropotkin initially published the chapters of Mutual Aid as individual essays in the intellectual periodical The Nineteenth Century over the course of six years. In 1902 the essays were published as a book. In it, Kropotkin explores the role of mutually beneficial cooperation across both animal and human societies. He begins by outlining how animals, both within and across species, thrive not through individual fitness, but rather through mutual cooperation. He then extends the breadth of his study to ancient human societies across generations and nations, until arriving at modern society, which he suggests has largely dispensed with the ancient benefits of mutual aid in favor of private property, capitalism, and social Darwinism. Though more of a philosophical work than a scientific work, many of Kropotkin’s observations of the animal kingdom are considered to be scientifically accurate today, with Douglas H. Boucher calling Mutual Aid a precursor to the theory of biological altruism. As a philosophical work Mutual Aid, along with his other work The Conquest of Bread, is recognized as a foundational text of the anarcho-communist political philosophy.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Little Dorrit

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Little Dorrit, like many of Charles Dickens’ novels, was originally published in serial form over a period of about 18 months, before appearing in book form in 1857. The novel focuses on the experiences of its protagonist Arthur Clenham, who has spent some twenty years in China helping his father run the family business there. After his father dies, Arthur returns home to London. His mother gives him little in the way of welcome. She is a cold, bitter woman who has brought Arthur up under a strict religious regime concentrating on the punitive aspects of the Old Testament. Despite this upbringing, or perhaps in reaction to it, Arthur is a kind, considerate man. He is intrigued by a slight young woman he encounters working as a part-time seamstress for his mother, whom his mother calls simply “Little Dorrit.” Arthur senses some mystery about her mother’s employment of Little Dorrit, and proceeds to investigate. There are several subplots and a whole host of characters. Compared to some of Dickens’ work, Little Dorrit features a good deal of intrigue and tension. There are also some strong strands of humor, in the form of the fictional “Circumlocution Office,” whose sole remit is “How Not To Do It,” and which stands in the way of any improvement of British life. Also very amusing are the rambling speeches of Flora, a woman with whom Arthur was enamored before he left for China, but whose shallowness he now perceives only too well. Little Dorrit has been adapted for the screen many times, and by the BBC in 2010 in a limited television series which featured Claire Foy as Little Dorrit, Matthew Macfayden as Arthur Clenham, and Andy Serkis as the villain Rigaud.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Ray Bradbury

Description: Ray Bradbury is a giant of science fiction and fantasy. His childlike imagination, yearning for Mars, and love of all that is scary, horrible, and mysterious, reverberate throughout modern speculative fiction and our culture as a whole. He has received countless awards including the Sir Arthur Clark Award, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, an Emmy Award, and a National Medal of Arts. Along with terrestrial honorary street names, there are many extraterrestrial locations named in Bradbury’s honor such as Bradbury Landing, the landing site of the Mars Curiosity rover. Some of his first published stories appear in Futuria Fantasia, a fanzine he created when he was 18 years old. All of his stories published in Futuria Fantasia are included in this collection. This collection also includes stories written well into his career, like “Zero Hour,” a story that was later republished in his famous collection The Illustrated Man.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Country Wife

Author: William Wycherley

Description: The Country Wife was first performed in January 1672 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It traces several plot lines, the principal of which follows notorious rake Harry Horner’s attempt to carry on affairs by spreading a rumor that he is now a eunuch and no longer a threat to any man’s wife. It was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time, having several notorious scenes filled with extended sexual innuendo and women carousing, singing riotous songs, and behaving exactly like their male counterparts. ith the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the eighteen year ban on theater imposed by the Puritans was lifted. Charles II’s time in France had nurtured a fascination with the stage and, with his enthusiastic support, Restoration drama was soon once again a thriving part of the London culture—but it provided a completely different experience from Jacobean theater. Christopher Wren’s newly built Theatre Royal provided a modern stage that accommodated innovations in scenic design and created a new relationship between actors and the audience. Another novelty, imported from France, was the presence of women on stage for the first time in British history. Restoration audiences were fascinated and often aghast to see real women perform, matching their male counterparts both in their wit and use of double entendre. Wycherley had spent some of the Commonwealth years in France and become interested in French drama. Borrowing extensively from Molière and others, he wrote several plays for this new theater, with his last two comedies, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, being the most famous. At the time, The Country Wife was considered the bawdiest and wittiest play yet seen on the English stage. It enjoyed popularity throughout the period but, as mores shifted and became more strict, the play was eventually considered too outrageous to be performed at all and between 1753 and 1924 was generally replaced on the stage by David Garrick’s cleaned-up, bland version.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Edward III

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The authorship of Edward III has been up for debate ever since it was first published in 1596. Its publisher, Cuthbert Burby, published it without listing an author, and any records that might have shed light on the author’s name (or names) were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. In the 1760s, the acclaimed scholar Edward Capell was one of the first to claim that William Shakespeare might have been the author. Many other academicians support this claim, or at least suggest Shakespeare partially wrote it, as certain archaic or obscure words and phrases found in the canonical Shakespearean plays also appear in this one. Others argue that Shakespeare would never write something so historically inaccurate; suggestions of possible alternative playwrights include Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. While the legitimate authorship may never come to light, Edward III has become accepted as part of Shakespeare’s canon of plays. After the King of France passes away, a new heir must take the throne; without any brothers or sons in the direct line, the crown falls to his nephew, King Edward of England. French nobles refuse to hand over France to the English, claiming that the right of succession should never have passed through his mother Isabel, and order Edward to acknowledge King John as the rightful successor. These disputed claims to the kingdom of France launch the Hundred Years’ War. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on G. C. Moore Smith’s 1897 edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Song of the Lark

Author: Willa Cather

Description: The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather’s third novel, was written in 1915. It is said to have been inspired by the real-life soprano Olive Fremstad, a celebrated Swedish-American singer who, like the protagonist, was active in New York and Europe during the time period depicted in the novel. The work explores how an artist’s early life influences their work. In the novel, Thea Kronborg discovers her talent as a singer, and goes on to achieve great fame and success once she leaves her tiny village of Moonstone. Cather eschewed depicting rural life as being idyllic, instead focusing on the conservative, restricted, patriarchal structures that its inhabitants live by. Her work is thus considered to be one of the earliest so-called “Revolt Novels.” She depicts a time at the end of the 19th century when the American West was expanding rapidly and Americans were gaining sophistication in their understanding of culture and artists, particularly compared to Europe. The title of the novel comes from the name of a 1884 painting by Jules Breton, which is described and considered in the book itself.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk

Author: Black Hawk

Description: Black Hawk, so named after the sacred medicine bag he carried with him, was a warrior and a leader of a tribe of Sauk Native Americans in the American Midwest circa 1800. He rose to leadership during a tumultuous time for his people, as they were pressed on all sides by the warlike British, the ruthlessly expansionist Americans, and the grudges and jealousies of neighboring tribes. He lived as a warrior for much of his early life, when the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans forced the Sauk to take sides and enter the fray. Angered by the Americans’ demands they sign shaky treaties to cede their land, the tribe fought for the British until the toll of the war forced the tribe to bow out. After the war, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty with the Americans, but a series of misunderstandings once again brought tensions between the Sauk and the Americans to a head. When a group of under-trained Illinois militia mistakenly opened fire on the Sauk, Black Hawk began what is known as the Black Hawk War, leading raids against American forts and settlements in an effort to reclaim their ancient land. Even though Black Hawk managed to convince other tribes to join his cause, the war was quickly lost and Black Hawk captured. He was then taken on a tour of the vast East Coast cities in an attempt to impress upon him America’s overwhelming might. Despite his status as a former enemy, he was treated with dignity and respect by his captors before they granted him a small house and plot of land in Iowa to live out the rest of his days. His autobiography was dictated to a translator, Antoine Le Clair, and written down by his amanuensis and publisher, J. B. Patterson. The story Black Hawk tells is a vivid one of life on the prairie, rich with tradition and meaning, but riven equally by war and bloodshed. As he reminisces about the bucolic life he and his ancestors once led and compares it with the hardships his people are facing, his sorrow becomes palpable; and as his days draw to a close, the reader sees that even to Black Hawk, the fate of his people appears inevitable.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: A Sicilian Romance

Author: Ann Radcliffe

Description: A Sicilian Romance begins when a tourist meets a local monk at the crumbling ruins of the castle Mazzini. The monk invites her to the monastery to view a manuscript that records the mysterious happenings that occurred hundreds of years ago in the once-great castle. The manuscript tells of the plight of two sisters, Julia and Emilia Mazzini, who, after the return of their tyrannical father, witness supernatural phenomena around the castle’s neglected southern wing. Radcliffe was viewed as the greatest writer of the Gothic literary style by most early 19th century critics and literary historians despite Horace Walpole seemingly “inventing” the genre in The Castle of Otranto. A Sicilian Romance was first published anonymously in 1790, making it the second of her published works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Topsy-Turvy

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Two decades after Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club returns with its sights on the North Pole’s rich coal deposits. Access to the area would be facilitated under a more temperate climate, which, the team believes, can be achieved by slightly altering the Earth’s axis of rotation. This climate change would affect every region of the globe to various degrees, thus creating anxiety and opposition worldwide. Sans Dessus Dessous, number 34 in the Voyages Extraordinaires collection, appeared in French in 1889 and was published in English the following year by J. G. Ogilvie as Topsy-Turvy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: O Pioneers!

Author: Willa Cather

Description: Cather’s O Pioneers! was first published in June of 1913 by Houghton Mifflin to high praise. Cather was immensely proud of the work and considered it her first “true” novel, having discovered her own form and subject. Told in five parts, O Pioneers! follows the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants farming the prairie of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. After the death of her father, heroine Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm, using her insight to transform it from a precarious enterprise to a prosperous one over the following decade. As the Nebraskan farming community grows and her older brothers build families and comfortable lives, Alexandra remains independent, attached only to the land, her youngest brother, Emil, and her neighbor, Marie Shabata. These three central characters navigate duty, familial pressures, tragedy, and uncertain romance. ith its independent, entrepreneurial female main character, O Pioneers! can be read as a deeply feminist novel that nevertheless upholds American ideals of national destiny through pastoral settlement.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Jew of Malta

Author: Christopher Marlowe

Description: Christopher Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta at the height of his career, and it remained popular until England’s theaters were closed by Parliament in 1642. Many have critiqued it for its portrayal of Elizabethan antisemitism, but others argue that Marlowe criticizes Judaism, Islam, and Christianity equally for their hypocrisy. This antisemitism debate continues on to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written about ten years later and which some consider to be directly influenced by The Jew of Malta. The play focuses on a wealthy Jewish merchant named Barabas who lives on the island of Malta. When the island’s governor strips Barabas of all his wealth in order to pay off the invading Turks, Barabas plots and schemes to get his revenge, killing all who get in his way and ultimately pitting Spanish Christians against Ottoman Muslims in an attempt to punish them all. Scholars dispute the authorship of the play, with some suggesting that the last half was written by a different author. Though the play is known to have been performed as early as 1594, the earliest surviving print edition is from 1633, which includes a prologue and epilogue written by another playwright for a planned revival.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Conquest of Bread

Author: Peter Kropotkin

Description: The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Tartuffe

Author: Molière

Description: The first three acts of Molière’s Tartuffe were first performed for Louis XIV in 1664, but the play was almost immediately suppressed—not because the King disliked it, but because the church resented the insinuation that the pious were frauds. After several different versions were written and performed privately, Tartuffe was eventually published in its final five-act form in 1669. A comic tale of man taken in by a sanctimonious scoundrel, the characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among some of the great classical theater roles. As the family strives to convince the patriarch that Tartuffe is a religious fraud, the play ultimately focuses on skewering not the hypocrite, but his victims, and the hypocrisy of fervent religious belief unchecked by facts or reason—a defense Molière himself used to overcome the church’s proscriptions. In the end, the play was so impactful that both French and English now use the word “Tartuffe” to refer to a religious hypocrite who feigns virtue. In its original French, the play is written in twelve-syllable lines of rhyming couplets. Curtis Hidden Page’s translation invokes a popular compromise and renders it into the familiar blank verse without rhymed endings that was popularized by Shakespeare. The translation is considered a seminal one by modern translators.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Richard III

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: After the bloody battle at Tewksbury and the second dethroning of Henry VI, England and its citizens are finally able to enjoy peace under the reign of Edward IV. The remaining Lancastrian leaders are either killed or scattered to the four winds. Within the kingdom, not everyone is happy with their new king—and when Edward falls ill, his power-hungry brother Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, sees his chance and prepares to kill anyone who stands between him and the throne. Richard puts into play numerous schemes to eradicate the line of succession and control the court. The first victim is King Edward’s other brother, Clarence. Rumors lead to Clarence’s imprisonment in the Tower of London, and Richard sends two murderers to stab him to death. This causes Edward’s health to worsen, and the title of Protector falls to the remaining brother. Next on Richard’s hit list is Lord Hastings, the loudest voice to object to Richard’s accession, and who is promptly arrested and executed for treason. As Richard orchestrates murder after murder, the deaths start coming back to haunt him. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: P. G. Wodehouse was an incredibly prolific writer who sold short stories to publications around the world throughout his career. The settings of his stories range from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the dance halls of New York, often taking detours into rural English life, where we follow his wide variety of distinctive characters and their trials, tribulations and follies. The stories in this volume consist of most of what is available in U.S. public domain, with the exception of some stories which were never anthologized, and stories that are collected in themed volumes (Jeeves Stories, Golf Stories, Ukridge Stories, and School Stories). They are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: The Middle Temple Murder

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: Spargo, reporter extraordinaire for the Watchman, stumbles over a murdered man in London’s Middle Temple Lane, and, based on a journalistic hunch, decides to investigate. As the circle of interest widens, strange connections start to emerge; connections that lead towards an unsuspected conspiracy of twenty years before. The Middle Temple Murder is one of the prolific J. S. Fletcher’s most popular works. It builds on his earlier short story “The Contents of the Coffin,” and was published in 1919 as one of three novels he wrote that year. President Woodrow Wilson publicly praised the work, which helped Fletcher earn U.S. acclaim and eventually a publishing deal.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Author: Mark Twain

Description: The essential facts regarding Joan of Arc are well known. A young teenage girl hears voices that tell her she will deliver France from England’s oppression during the Hundred Years War. She manages to take her message to the dauphin, who after some persuasion places her at the head of his army. That army promptly lifts the siege of Orléans, throws the English out of the Loire valley, hands them another significant defeat at Patay, and marches all the way to Reims, where the dauphin is crowned King Charles VII. After an ill-advised and short-lived truce, Joan is captured by the Burgundians—French nobility who have aligned themselves with the English—and they try her for heresy and burn her at the stake. Twain first became fascinated with Joan as a teenager. When he finally decided to write a book about her, he researched it for a dozen years and spent two more years writing it. It was, in his words, “the best of all my books,” and became his last finished novel. Although a work of fiction, Twain’s research was time well spent: the known facts of Joan’s life, and especially the trial, are very accurate in their depiction. To tell Joan’s story, Twain invented a memoirist, Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of her real-life page, Louis de Contes. Twain has the fictional de Conte grow up with Joan, and so he is able to tell her story from her early childhood all the way through the trial and execution. The result is the story of one of the great women in history told by one of history’s great storytellers.

Subjects: biography, fiction

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Title: Thus Spake Zarathustra

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Description: Thus Spake Zarathustra was Friedrich Nietzsche’s favorite of the books he wrote, and has been his most popular amongst general readers. Yet some scholars dislike it because of its unphilosophical nature: it eschews jargon and the scaffolding of arguments, which engage only the intellect, in favor of an artistic approach that engages the whole mind. After ten years of solitude in a cave high in the mountains, Zarathustra wishes to share with humanity the wisdom he has accumulated during this time. He reaches the nearest town and addresses the crowd on the marketplace. He tells them of the Overman: the next step in human evolution, a being who creates their own values, freed from the weight of tradition and morality, and who takes responsibility for their own successes and failures. But the crowd doesn’t understand him; his discourse is met only with rude ignorance. Zarathustra then decides to gather a small group of disciples and share his wisdom with them. The bulk of the book is Zarathustra’s speeches on topics such as morality, society, individualism, religion, and how suffering and its overcoming are what give meaning to our existence. While already wiser than most, Zarathustra still learns from those he talks to, re-evaluating his thoughts as he deals with disappointment (such as when his disciples prove to be mere followers), and confronting his own doubts. His greatest challenge, though, comes when he faces the existential test of the eternal recurrence of the same: the thought that our lives could repeat indefinitely without the minutest of change. The inspiration for Zarathustra came to Nietzsche during one of the long hikes he often indulged in despite his failing health. It was a decade of solitude: his physical condition had worsened to the point of forcing him to retire from his position at the University of Basel, and each change of season prompted him to relocate to kinder climes in Switzerland, France, or Italy. The book took two years to write. Each of its four parts was written in a ten-day period of creative effervescence followed by months of gloom, plagued by terrible, debilitating migraines. Zarathustra was initially received with indifference at best and frustration at worst. It’s a work of philosophy as much as aesthetics: the language is modeled after the Luther Bible and contains numerous references to Homer, Heraclitus, Plato, Goethe, Emerson, and Wagner, to name a few. Later Nietzsche attempted to address the book’s lack of popularity by framing the same concepts in a more traditional, approachable manner in his following book, Beyond Good and Evil, but that book also struggled to find an audience. ith his health steadily deteriorating, Nietzsche’s mind broke down in 1889 and never recovered. His body would live on for 11 more years, and he ended up in the care of his sister, Elisabeth. A stalwart nationalist and anti-Semite, she saw in her brother’s illness the opportunity to turn him into a German hero. Despite her brother’s firm opposition to nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, she perverted his work by promoting it for her own ends. Scores of commentators partook in her lie and enthusiastically used Nietzsche’s work to buttress their own contrary views. Doing so requires one to selectively ignore half the content of the book: Zarathustra’s discourses regularly touch on a priori dark and violent themes, but they also clearly state that these are to be directed towards oneself. Reaching the Overman requires us to know ourselves, and such introspection, given the darker side of human nature, leads to contempt. This contempt for ourselves, says Nietzsche, should be embraced as the first step towards awareness of what we could be. Cruelty, likewise, stems from that knowledge as a necessity to hammer ourselves into the proper shape. Such commentators also conveniently ignored Zarathustra’s many remarks about love: love for ourselves, he says, is what can prevent us from spreading resentment around us during this difficult process of change. The first English translation of Zarathustra was by Alexander Tille, a German scholar who had emigrated to Scotland. English wasn’t his first language and his work suffered from it. Thomas Common, a Scottish scholar, used Tille’s work as the base for his own translation. Bringing Zarathustra to the English-speaking world was no easy task given Nietzsche’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. Just like Nietzsche, Common took risks: because the book is written in the style of the Luther Bible, Common decided to emulate the style of the King James Bible; he also tried to reproduce the musicality of the language and the new words coined by Nietzsche, some of which have been updated over time—e.g. Common’s “Superman” is nowadays known as “Overman.” While his choices have been controversial, he produced a landmark translation that faithfully tried to convert the unique flavor of Zarathustra into English. Published in 1909, it would take four decades until the next translation by Walter Kaufman in 1954. But Zarathustra didn’t find its scholarly fame limited to Europe: soon after its publication, it reached Asia, where it was received with enthusiasm, particularly in China and Japan where it influenced the famous Kyoto School. Zarathustra has also received special attention from the music world. Nietzsche loved music and poetry, and it was his wish that this book be taken as music. No fewer than 87 pieces have been inspired by the book, in part or as a whole. The best known are Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: An Antarctic Mystery

Author: Jules Verne

Description: An Antarctic Mystery follows Mr. Jeorling, a wealthy American naturalist whose research has led him to the remote Kerguelen Islands, located in the southern Indian Ocean. Jeorling begins his adventure on the Halbrane after being admitted aboard by the reluctant captain Len Guy, who believes the events in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to be true. In that novel, Pym persuades Len Guy’s brother, William Guy, to lead a voyage to the Antarctic. But the expedition ends in failure when William Guy, his crew, and his ship, the Jane, disappear under mysterious circumstances. Captain Len Guy convinces Jeorling to aid in the search for his brother, and the two embark on an expedition south to the Antarctic in search of the previous voyage’s survivors. Despite the fact that Jules Verne’s work was published over fifty years after Pym, the events in the novel take place only one year after the disappearance of the Jane.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Imitation of Christ

Author: Thomas à Kempis

Description: The Imitation of Christ is a Christian devotional book dating to the early 15th century, originally written anonymously but popularly attributed to Thomas à Kempis. A popular piece of religious literature since it was first circulated, the Imitation is divided into four books that instruct the reader to forego worldly goods, to follow Christ, and to receive the sacrament of Communion, all in order to attain spiritual peace. Admired by numerous Christian theologians and mystics throughout the course of centuries, it is today considered to be the most-read Christian devotional work besides the Bible, going through over 745 printings before 1650. The Imitation even found an audience in India with the 19th-century Hindu philosopher-monk Ramakrishna, who cherished it along with the Bhagavad Gita as one of his favorite books.

Subjects: spirituality

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Title: Lavengro

Author: George Borrow

Description: Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, published in 1851, is a heavily fictionalized account of George Borrow’s early years. Borrow, born in 1803, was a writer and self-taught polyglot, fluent in many European languages, and a lover of literature. The Romany Rye, published six years later in 1857, is sometimes described as the “sequel” to Lavengro, but in fact it begins with a straight continuation of the action of the first book, which breaks off rather suddenly. The two books therefore are best considered as a whole and read together, and this Standard Ebooks edition combines the two into one volume. In the novel Borrow tells of his upbringing as the son of an army recruiting officer, moving with the regiment to different locations in Britain, including Scotland and Ireland. It is in Ireland that he first encounters a strange new language which he is keen to learn, leading to a life-long passion for acquiring new tongues. A couple of years later in England, he comes across a camp of gypsies and meets the gypsy Jasper Petulengro, who becomes a life-long friend. Borrow is delighted to discover that the Romany have their own language, which of course he immediately sets out to learn. Borrow’s subsequent life, up to his mid-twenties, is that of a wanderer, traveling from place to place in Britain, encountering many interesting individuals and having a variety of entertaining adventures. He constantly comes in contact with the gypsies and with Petulengro, and becomes familiar with their language and culture. The book also includes a considerable amount of criticism of the Catholic Church and its priests. Several chapters are devoted to Borrow’s discussions with “the man in black,” depicted as a cynical Catholic priest who has no real belief in the religious teachings of the Church but who is devoted to seeing it reinstated in England in order for its revenues to increase. Lavengro was not an immediate critical success on its release, but after Borrow died in 1881, it began to grow in popularity and critical acclaim. It is now considered a classic of English Literature. This Standard Ebooks edition of Lavengro and The Romany Rye is based on the editions published by John Murray and edited by W. I. Knapp, with many clarifying notes.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Pelle the Conqueror

Author: Martin Andersen Nexø

Description: Pelle is still just a young boy when his father decides to move them from Sweden to the Danish island of Bornholm in search of riches. Those riches—of course—being nonexistent, they fall into the life of farm laborers. As Pelle grows up among the other lowly and poor residents of the island, their cares and worries seep into him, and he finds himself part of a greater struggle for their dignity. Pelle the Conqueror has been compared to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in its themes and scope. Nexø had become involved in the Social Democratic movement in Denmark that flourished after the turn of the 19th century, and this work closely follows his journalistic observations of the struggles of the people. It was published in four books between 1906 and 1910, and was immensely popular; the first book in particular is still widely read in Danish schools, and was made in to an award-winning 1987 film starring Max von Sydow as Father Lasse. In this Standard Ebooks edition books one and four are translated by Jesse Muir, while books two and three are translated by Bernard Miall.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Twenty Years at Hull House

Author: Jane Addams

Description: Jane Addams was a famous social activist living in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. She’s perhaps most famous for introducing the Settlement movement to the United States and for founding Hull House, a hugely influential settlement house in Chicago. Settlement houses were founded on the idea of uplifting the poor working class by quartering the rich and poor together in close proximity. By living together under the guidance of settlement workers, the poor would have access to communal education, healthcare, day care, food, and shelter, allowing them to improve their positions in society instead of being ground under heel by the privations of poverty and the brutality of workhouses. Immigrants in particular could take advantage of the settlement’s safety net, helping them naturalize more easily in their new country as they struggled to find stability while both working and raising children. Hull House, named after the house’s original owner, was Addams’ life work. It brought together the urban poor—mostly recently settled immigrants—together into a vast thirteen-building complex near the heart of Chicago’s downtown. In this book Addams describes the house, its founding, and its operations; because running the house was such a major part of her life, she considered this book to be her autobiography of sorts. Hull House remained open until 2012, operating continuously for over 120 years. For her work at Hull House and for her involvement in the Peace Movement of World War I, Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the award’s first American woman recipient. At the time of her death she was the most well-known female public figure in America.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Henry IV, Part II

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: As the dust settles on the battlefield at Shrewsbury, news spreads that the rebel forces fighting against King Henry IV have suffered a terrible defeat. Their leader, Harry “Hotspur” Percy, was killed by Prince Hal. The rebel troops quickly abandon the fight after seeing their leader die. Two powerful cohorts, the Earl of Worcester and Douglas, are taken as prisoners by the King’s men. The Earl of Northumberland vows to avenge his son’s death and plans to seek support from the Archbishop of York. Meanwhile, the Archbishop has convened his group of allies—Thomas Mowbray, Lord Hastings, and Lord Bardolph—to plan the next battle against King Henry. If they want a chance of winning, they fight on three separate fronts: one to fight King Henry’s forces, one to fight the Welsh rebels led by Owen Glendower, and one to maintain the fight in France. They decide to follow this plan regardless of whether or not Northumberland lends them his army. As the Prince’s merry team of misfits return to London, Falstaff continues to create mischief wherever he goes. After hearing that his father has fallen sick, Hal starts to regret the days when he used to drink and steal with Falstaff. If he is to be the next king, he must leave behind his past along with his partners in crime. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: One of Ours

Author: Willa Cather

Description: Claude Wheeler is the son of a successful Nebraskan farmer and a very devout mother. He’s sent to a private religious college because his mother feels it’s safer, but he yearns for State college where he might be able expand his knowledge of the real world. Claude doesn’t feel comfortable in any situation, and almost every step he takes is a wrong one. While he’s struggling to find his way in a questionable marriage, the U.S. decides to enter World War I, and Claude enlists. He’s commissioned as a lieutenant, and he and his outfit are deployed to France in the waning months of the war. There Claude finds the purpose he’s been missing his whole life. One of Ours is Cather’s first novel following the completion of her Prairie Trilogy, which she finished before the U.S. had entered the war. Cather’s cousin Grosvenor had grown up on the farm next to hers, had many of the traits she gave to Claude, and, like her protagonist, went with the Army to France towards the end of the war. After the war was over, she felt compelled to write something different than the novels she had become known for, saying that this one “stood between me and anything else.” Although today it’s not considered her best work, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Henry IV, Part I

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Henry IV’s plan to lead a crusade to Jerusalem is put on hold after he hears about skirmishes along England’s Welsh and Scottish borders. The Welsh rebel Glendower has fought off the English forces and has managed to capture Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. Meanwhile, Harry Percy’s fight is successfully keeping the Scottish rebels, led by Douglas, at bay. Percy, better known as Hotspur, has taken numerous political prisoners, including Douglas’s son Mordake. The king is also concerned about his son Hal. During this time of political unrest, Hal has been spending most of his time drinking with criminals and highwaymen in taverns on the poor side of London—behavior unbefitting a future king. His closest friend and partner in crime is Sir John Falstaff, a fat old drunk and a charismatic thief. When the king calls for his wild son to return to court, Falstaff and his street-smart group of friends are ready to support their prince on the battlefront. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Ticket No. 9672

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Hulda, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Norwegian countryside, is engaged to Ole, a fisherman. When Ole fails to return, Hulda fears him dead, until she receives a message that he has scribbled on the back of a lottery ticket. Newspapers broadcast the story, fueling excitement and speculation ahead of the lottery drawing. The novel, based in part on the Verne’s travel through Scandinavia in 1861, belongs to the collection Voyages Extraordinaires which contains some of his best-known works, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days. Un Billet de Loterie appeared first in installments in the magazine Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, followed immediately by a book edition published by Hetzel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Richard II

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Against the advice of his counselors, Richard II has been taking money from England’s coffers and spending it on fashion and close friends. In order to continue his wasteful spending, he raises taxes on the commoners and leases portions of English land to wealthy noblemen. He also sees an opportunity to seize more land and money after hearing news of John of Gaunt’s failing health. King Richard arrives at Windsor Castle to settle a dispute between Henry Bolingbroke, the Duke of Hereford and son of John of Gaunt, and Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk. Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of numerous counts of treason: embezzling funds for Richard’s soldiers, conspiring against the king for the past eighteen years, and murdering the Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denies these charges and claims to have repented for any wrongs he has caused in the past. John of Gaunt tries to convince the two to reconcile, but his attempts fall on deaf ears. Richard determines that a trial by combat will settle the matter. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: An American Tragedy

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Description: Clyde Griffith’s parents are poor street-preachers, but Clyde doesn’t “believe,” and finds their work demeaning. At fifteen he gets a job and starts to ease out of their lives, eventually landing in some trouble that causes him to flee the town where they live. Two years later, Clyde meets his well-off uncle, who owns a large factory in upstate New York. Clyde talks his way into a job at the factory, and soon finds himself supervising a roomful of women. All alone, generally shunned by his uncle’s family, and starved for companionship, he breaks the factory’s rules and begins a relationship with a young woman who works for him. But Clyde has visions of marrying a high-society woman, and fortune smiles on him in the form of the daughter of one of his uncle’s neighbors. Soon Clyde finds himself in a love triangle of his own making, and one from which he seems incapable of extracting himself. A newspaperman before he became a novelist, Theodore Dreiser collected crime stories for years of young men in relationships with young women of poorer means, where the young men found a richer, prettier girl who would go with him, and often took extreme measures to escape from the first girl. An American Tragedy, based on one of the most infamous of those real-life stories, is a study in lazy ambition, the very real class system in America, and how easy it is to drift into evil. It is populated with poor people who desire nothing more than to be rich, rich people whose only concern is to keep up with their neighbors and not be associated with the “wrong element,” and elements of both who care far more about appearances than reality. It offers further evidence that the world may be very different from 100 years ago, but the people in it are very much the same.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Winesburg, Ohio

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Description: Winesburg, Ohio, is set in a fictional town in early 1900s America based on Anderson’s boyhood memories of his hometown of Clyde, Ohio. The novel is actually a series of interconnected short stories, with each one focusing on the life of a different resident of the sleepy, pre-industrial town. Though each story peers into the personal life of a different character, the common threads running through all of them are George Willard, the young reporter for the Winesburg Eagle—and a pervasive sense of loneliness, even despair. As the stories obliquely trace George’s coming of age, he becomes a symbol of the hope the town holds for the future as its citizens struggle against the oppressive smallness of their existence and their paradoxical inability to form meaningful bonds with each other in such a small community. The stories in Winesburg, Ohio are of a decidedly melancholy nature, but their real beauty lies in the vivid characterization of the big personalities living in the small town. The simplicity of Anderson’s plain-styled prose paints a rich picture, with each character precisely portrayed in all of their dusty down-to-earth physicality. One can almost picture the narrator as the whiskey-soaked voice of Tom Waits, rolling each syllable around in his mouth as the summer heat lies heavy in the twilight air. Atmosphere aside, the stories are also unique in that Anderson creates narrative tension not with plot development, but with insights into the psychology of the kinds of people who choose, or don’t choose, to live in Winesburg. This makes the novel one of the earliest examples of literary modernism. It was praised by its contemporaries on publication, with H. L. Mencken stating that the novel “embodies some of the most remarkable writing done in America in our time.” It remained both acclaimed and widely read throughout the 1930s, when its popularity waned with the author’s own. In the 1960s critics reevaluated it, firmly placing it in the canon of modern American classics.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: King John

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: An ambassador sent by King Philip of France delivers an ominous threat: King John must relinquish his throne to its rightful heir, his nephew Arthur of Bretagne, or France will declare a “fierce and bloody war.” John refuses. After receiving this news, Philip orders his forces to prepare an attack on the English-controlled French town of Angiers, and the citizens must then swear allegiance to Arthur or die. King John also must deal with a dispute over land ownership between the Faulconbridge brothers. Their father knew that the older son was not his, and before his death, he bequeathed all of his lands to the younger son. John rules that the bastard son rightfully owns the lands regardless of who is his true father. John’s mother, Elinor, sees that the bastard son resembles Richard the Lionheart and proposes that he renounce his claim to the Faulconbridge land in exchange for a knighthood. He agrees and becomes Sir Richard Plantagenet. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class

Author: Thorstein Veblen

Description: 1899 was the tail end of the Gilded Age, a time in America of rapid economic expansion that caused a select few to become ultra-wealthy, while millions of commoners struggled in abject poverty. It was against this backdrop that Veblen, an economist and sociologist at the University of Chicago, wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, a book that brought the phrase “conspicuous consumption” into the modern vocabulary. Veblen’s thesis centers on the definition of what he calls the “leisure class,” the upper social class consisting of wealthy individuals who are socially exempt from productive work. Their work instead becomes what he calls “conspicuous consumption”: spending their wealth in increasingly ostentatious ways in order to preserve their class status. Meanwhile, the lower and middle classes are the ones actually engaged in work that is productive to society—manufacturing and industry—with the goal of eventually being able to emulate the social status afforded by the conspicuous consumption of their leisure class masters. Along the way, Veblen links these behaviors with social strictures left over from feudal society, arguing that contemporary human society has not evolved far beyond our medieval peasant-and-lord forefathers. In those ancient societies, productive labor came to be viewed as disreputable and dirty; thus, status is won not by accumulating wealth, but by displaying the evidence of wealth. He argues that many of what some would consider society’s ills are linked to this fundamental concept: for example, the mistreatment of women—forcing them into constricting clothing, preventing them from participating in independent economic life—is a way for their husbands to show off their unemployed status as a kind of conspicuous leisure; or society’s obsession with sports, celebrity, and organized religion, all forms of conspicuous leisure that bring no productive benefit to society, and on the contrary waste time and resources, but whose practitioners—superstars and clergy—maintain a high social status. Though it was written over a hundred years ago when industrial society was just getting its footing, Veblen’s thesis predicts much of the social stratification we recognize today. Practical labor continues to be viewed as basically demeaning, while people struggle in vain to chase a glimmer of the vast wealth that celebrities, investors, bankers, hedge fund managers, and C-suite dwellers—the conspicuously consuming leisure class of today—openly flaunt. As such, The Theory of the Leisure Class might be one of the most prescient and influential books of economic and social science of the 20th century.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Twelfth Night

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: A storm has caused a terrible shipwreck off the Illyrian coast. Two siblings, Viola and her brother Sebastian, become separated, each believing the other has drowned. Viola washes ashore and meets a friendly sea captain who offers to help her find work for Duke Orsino—but first she must disguise herself as a man named Cesario. There is news that Duke Orsino is planning to propose to Countess Olivia. As Viola, disguised as Cesario, meets them both, a love triangle quickly forms. Shakespeare’s ability to weave love, confusion, mistaken identities, and joyful discovery shines through in this timeless romantic comedy. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: As You Like It

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: In a French duchy, the old Duke has been usurped by his younger brother, Frederick. A young man named Orlando is mistreated by his elder brother, against their dead father’s wishes. Rosalind, the old Duke’s daughter, has been allowed to remain in court only because she is the closest friend of Celia, Duke Frederick’s daughter. When Rosalind is banished from court, she flees to the Forest of Arden with Celia and Touchstone, the court fool; meanwhile, Orlando also escapes to the forest, fleeing his brother. In the Forest of Arden, the old Duke holds court with exiled supporters, including the melancholy Jaques. There, Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede and offers advice to a group of would-be lovers: Orlando, who has taken to posting love poems dedicated to Rosalind on trees, and Silvius and Phebe, two young shepherds. Shakespeare is thought to have written As You Like It around 1599; while stylistic analysis has not conclusively established its place in the canon, it was certainly completed by August 1600 and was published in the First Folio in 1623. There are no certain dates of performance until the 17th century, but it may have been performed in 1599 or 1603. The play includes a number of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches, including Jaques’ monologue, “All the world’s a stage.” This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Germinal

Author: Émile Zola

Description: Germinal, named after the spring month in the French Republican Calendar, is often considered to be Zola’s masterpiece. The book follows Étienne Lantier, a young man whose career as a railway worker is abruptly cut short after he attacks a superior. He arrives in Montsou, a coal mining town in the north of France, to begin a new life in a different industry. And the only industry around is mining coal. Étienne quickly befriends the locals as he embraces his new life in the mines, but the abject poverty of the miners shocks him, and he soon begins reading about socialism. When the owners of the mine conspire to lower the miners’ wages, Étienne seizes the opportunity and convinces the town to strike. Zola’s depiction of the mining town is shockingly bleak in its detail. He spent months researching the conditions of real-life miners, even going so far as to pose as a government official so that he could descend into a mine personally. His encounter with a mining horse—brought underground as a foal to haul coal, never to see the light of day again—affected him so much that he wrote the animal into the plot. Montsou itself is a fully realized town, with families and characters leading interconnected and nuanced lives across generations: lives so destitute, grueling, and filthy that Zola had to repeatedly defend his work against claims of hyperbole. Ultimately, the novel was a rallying cry for the workers of the world in an era when communist and socialist ideas were beginning to spread amongst the impoverished working class. The shabby but good-hearted inhabitants of Montsou, so blatantly oppressed by the bourgeois mine owners, are a blank slate for workers of any industry to identify with, and identify they did: Germinal inspired socialist causes for decades after its publication, with crowds chanting “Germinal!” at Zola’s funeral.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Domnei

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: Domnei by James Branch Cabell is the fourth installment in his Biography of the Life of Manuel series, which follows the lives of Dom Manuel and his descendants in the fictional French county of Poictesme. It was initially published as The Soul of Melicent in 1913 under the erroneous advice of Cabell’s publisher, who suggested that the title would help sell more copies. But only 493 copies were sold of the original print run. In 1920 the book was republished as Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship, Cabell’s original vision for the title. The story follows Perion de la Forêt, fugitive leader of a mercenary troop, and his unbridled passion for his newly wed and newly distant lover, the Princess Melicent, daughter of Dom Manuel. The tale takes us to many locations in Middle-Ages Europe as we witness to what extent men will go to pursue a woman’s love.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Humbugs of the World

Author: P. T. Barnum

Description: “Humbug … I won’t believe it,” is Scrooge’s response when confronted by the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, and just as surely as Dickens knows that ghosts are humbugs, so too does P. T. Barnum, writing a generation later. For Barnum, humbug begins in the Garden of Eden with the temptation of Eve, and permeates all of history, through every age and in every nation, right down to his own time, where the “Great Spirit Postmaster” publishes ghost letters from veterans recently perished in the Civil War. Barnum himself was often called the “Prince of Humbugs,” but he was no cynic. In this book he sets out to make his fellow citizens a little wiser via a catalog of colorful characters and events, and mocking commentaries about how a sensible person should be more skeptical. He goes after all kinds of classic humbugs like ghosts, witches, and spiritualists, but he also calls humbug on shady investment schemes, hoaxes, swindlers, guerrilla marketers, and political dirty tricksters, before shining a light on the patent medicines of his day, impure foods, and adulterated drinks. As a raconteur, Barnum is conversational and avuncular, sharing the wisdom of his years and opening an intimate window into the New England of the mid-19th century.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Divine Comedy

Author: Dante Alighieri

Description: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is considered one of the greatest works in world literature, and it established the standardized Italian language that is used today. Writing between 1308 and 1320, Dante draws from countless subjects including Roman Catholic theology and philosophy, the struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, Greek mythology, and geocentric cosmology to answer the age-old question: what does the afterlife look like? Dante’s vision of the answer, this three-volume epic poem, describes in great detail the systematic levels in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The poem opens with its author wandering in a dark forest. Blocked from climbing towards the bright light by a she-wolf, a leopard, and a lion, he is forced to walk further into the darkened valley and towards the gates of Hell. Dante and his guides must then travel through the nine circles of Hell, seven terraces of Purgatory, and nine spheres of Heaven to experience divine justice for earthly sins so that he may reach the Empyrean and receive God’s love. On his journey, he will learn that one must be consciously devoted to the path of morality and righteousness, else one find oneself on a path towards sin. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s blank verse translation. Longfellow succeeds in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s internal rhymes and hypnotic patterns while also retaining accuracy. It is said that the death of his young wife brought him closer to the melancholy spirit of Dante’s writing, which itself was shaped by his wounding exile from his beloved Florence in 1302.

Subjects: fiction, poetry, spirituality

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Title: Hudibras

Author: Samuel Butler

Description: The knight-errant Hudibras and his trusty (and somewhat more grounded) squire Ralph roam the land in search of adventure and love. Never the most congenial of partners, their constant arguments are Samuel Butler’s satire of the major issues of the day in late 17th century Britain, including the recent civil war, religious sectarianism, philosophy, astrology, and even the differing rights of women and men. Butler had originally studied to be a lawyer (which explains some of the detail in the third part of Hudibras), but made a living variously as a clerk, part-time painter, and secretary before dedicating himself to writing in 1662. Hudibras was immediately popular on the release of its first part, and, like Don Quixote, even had an unauthorized second part available before Butler had finished the genuine one. Voltaire praised the humor, and although Samuel Pepys wasn’t immediately taken with the poem, it was such the rage that he noted in his diary that he’d repurchased it to see again what the fuss was about. Hudibras’s popularity did not fade for many years, and although some of the finer detail of 17th century talking points might be lost on the modern reader, the wit of the caricatures (and a large collection of endnotes) help bring this story to life.

Subjects: fiction, poetry

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Title: The Rainbow

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Description: The Rainbow is an epic tale spanning three generations of Brangwens, a family of farmers living in Nottinghamshire around the time of the Industrial Revolution. The tale begins with Tom Brangwen, the very epitome of a rural English farmer leading the old way of life. We follow him as a youth easing in to the rhythm of rural existence. He soon falls in love with Lydia, a Polish immigrant he had hired as a housekeeper, and despite their vast cultural differences, the two marry. Their relationship is, in a word, satisfactory: the two face a language and culture barrier that prevents their minds from ever truly meeting, but they learn to be more or less content with their place in society and in raising their children. Lydia’s child by her first marriage, Anna, becomes the focus of the next part of the novel. She was born in England, and has a fiery and demanding temperament. She falls in love with Will, a nephew of Tom, and the two begin a rocky and difficult marriage. Will, a craftsman and not a farmer, is self-absorbed, and wants nothing more than for them to live their lives only for each other. But Anna wants to strike out in the world and become a part of society. The two must reconcile their clashing personalities and desires as they raise their many children. The oldest of their children, Ursula, becomes the focus of the last third—and perhaps most famous—part of the novel. Ursula is a deeply sensual being born in to the Victorian era, a time restrained in morality but exploding in energy and possibility, now worlds away from her grandfather Tom Brangwen’s quiet, traditional farming life. She leads a life unimaginable to her rural ancestors: indulging in travel abroad, waiting for marriage and pursuing her physical desires, and even taking on a career—a concept both new and frightening to her family, who are just a generation removed from the era when a woman’s life was led at home. Her unhappiness with the contradiction in this new unbridled way of living and the strict social mores of the era becomes the main theme of this last part of the book. The entire novel takes a frank approach to sexuality and physical desire, with sex portrayed unashamedly as a natural, powerful, pleasurable, and desirable force in relationships. In fact Ursula’s story is the most famous part of the novel not just because of her unrestrained physicality and lust, but because she also experiments with a candidly realized homosexual affair with one of her teachers. This unheard-of treatment of deeply taboo topics was poorly received by Lawrence’s Edwardian contemporaries, and the book quickly became the subject of an obscenity trial that resulted in over 1,000 copies being burned and the book being banned in the U.K. for eleven years. Though its charged portrayal of sexuality is what the book is remembered for, sexuality is only one of the themes Lawrence treats. The novel stands solidly on its rich description of both rural and city life, its wide-angled view of change over generations, and its exploration of hope for the human spirit in societies that heave not gently but quickly and violently into new eras.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Eleventh Virgin

Author: Dorothy Day

Description: Though Dorothy Day may be best known today for her religious peace activism and her role in founding the Catholic Worker movement, she lived a bohemian youth in the Lower West Side of New York City during the late 1910s and early 1920s. As an editor for radical socialist publications like The Liberator and The Masses, Day was involved in several left-wing causes as well as the Silent Sentinels’ 1917 protest for women’s suffrage in front of the White House. The Eleventh Virgin is a semi-autobiographical novel told through the eyes of June Henreddy, a young radical journalist whose fictional life closely parallels Day’s own life experiences, including her eventual disillusionment with her bohemian lifestyle. Though later derided by Day as “a very bad book,” The Eleventh Virgin captures a vibrant image of New York’s radical counterculture in the early 20th century and sheds a light on the youthful misadventures of a woman who would eventually be praised by Pope Francis for her dream of “social justice and the rights of persons” during his historic address to a joint session of Congress in 2015.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Story of My Life

Author: Helen Keller

Description: Helen Keller was just nineteen months old when, in 1882, she was struck with an illness that rendered her deaf, blind, and unable to communicate beyond basic signs. When she was seven, the arrival of Anne Sullivan, a partially blind teacher, catalysed Helen’s learning and created a completely new way of teaching deafblind children. In The Story of My Life, written when Helen was twenty-three, Helen recounts her childhood and the wonders of a blossoming understanding of the world around her, along with her efforts to become the first deafblind person to earn a B.A. degree. This volume also contains many of her letters, and is substantiated by Anne Sullivan’s own writing and correspondence on Helen’s tuition, along with numerous other accounts. The story was later adapted for both theater and film on multiple occasions as The Miracle Worker, a title bestowed on Anne Sullivan by Mark Twain.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Essays

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Description: Though perhaps most famous for Walden, Henry David Thoreau was also a prolific essayist. Many of his essays touch on subjects similar to his famous book: long walks through nature, things found in moonlight that are invisible and unheard during the day, his preference for wild apples over domestic ones. In many ways he prefigured environmentalism, expressing his love for untouched nature and lamenting what the encroachment of man and cities were doing to it. He also had strong opinions on many other subjects. One of his most famous essays, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” was written as a result of his going to jail for refusing to pay several years’ worth of poll taxes. One of the primary reasons for his refusal was his holding the government in contempt for its support of slavery, and several of his other essays express support and admiration for John Brown, who thought to start a slave revolt when he attacked Harper’s Ferry in 1859. hether discussing trees in a forest, slavery, or the works of Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau’s essays are deeply personal and full of keen observations, often in poetic language. They give a sense of the man expressing them as being much more than the views being expressed.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: Macbeth

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Duncan’s closest generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have just defeated two invading armies and the Irish rebel Macdonwald. Out across the misty moor, they encounter three witches who reveal to Macbeth a powerful prophecy: “All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis! All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!” They not only claim that Macbeth will eventually become King of Scotland, but that Banquo will father a line of Scottish kings—though ominously, Banquo will never be king himself. This shocking tragedy—a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake—is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Hedda Gabler

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Description: Hedda, the proud and willful daughter of General Gabler, newly married to George Tesman, returns from her honeymoon to Norway. She chafes at the prospect of a dull life in a loveless marriage until a former lover, Eilert Løvborg, returns and throws their financial future into disarray. The appearance of Hedda’s old schoolmate Thea, who wants to reform Løvborg, and Judge Brack, who wants Hedda in his power, leave her struggling to build the life she wants. Hedda Gabler was first performed in Munich in 1891, and within months there were productions in Berlin, Copenhagen, London, and New York. It was Ibsen’s first play to be translated from proofs before performance or publication. Productions of the play have won two Olivier Awards and been broadcast in multiple countries; since 1917, it has been adapted into more than a dozen feature films in almost as many languages.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Age of Reason

Author: Thomas Paine

Description: The Age of Reason is an important work in the American Deist movement. Paine worked on it continually for more than a decade, publishing it in three parts from 1794 through 1807. It quickly became a best-seller in post-Revolution America, spurring a revival in Deism as an alternative to the prevailing Christian influence. In clear, simple, and often funny language, Paine attempts to dissect the Bible’s supposed inaccuracies and hypocrisies. He portrays the Bible as a human construct, full of illogic, errors, and internal inconsistencies, as opposed to it being a text born of divine inspiration. On those arguments he pivots to decrying not just Christianity, but organized religion as a whole, as a human invention created to terrorize and enslave. Instead of accepting organized religion, he states that “his mind is his own church” and that man must embrace reason. hile these arguments weren’t new to the wealthy and educated class of the era, they were new to the poor masses. The book was at first distributed as cheap unbound pamphlets, making it easily accessible to the poor; and Paine’s simple language was written in way the poor could understand and sympathize with. This made the powerful very nervous, and, fearing that the book could cause a potential revolution, Paine and his publishers were suppressed. Paine wrote The Age of Reason while living in Paris. In France, its thesis wasn’t revolutionary enough for the bloodthirsty Jacobins; he was imprisoned there for ten months and only escaped execution through a stroke of luck. Meanwhile in Britain, the government considered the pamphlets seditious. British booksellers and publishers involved in printing and distributing the pamphlets were repeatedly tried for seditious and blasphemous libel, with some even receiving sentences of hard labor. Paine began writing Part III after escaping France for America, but even the American elite thought the book too scandalous, with Thomas Jefferson—himself a Deist—advising Paine not to publish. Paine listened to Jefferson’s advice and held off publishing Part III for five years before publishing extracts as separate pamphlets. For that reason, Part III is not a concrete publication, but rather an arrangement of several loosely related pamphlets organized at the discretion of an edition’s editor. Once it was in the hands of Americans, it sparked a revival in Deism in the United States before being viciously attacked from all sides. Paine earned a reputation as an agitator and blasphemer that stuck to him for the rest of his life. Despite The Age of Reason’s harsh reception—or perhaps, because of it, and the controversy and discussion it caused—it achieved a popularity in England, France, and America that gave it incredible influence in those nation’s perspectives on organized religion.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Author: Olaudah Equiano

Description: In the mid 1700s, around the age of eleven, Olaudah Equiano and his sister were kidnapped from their village in equatorial Africa and sold to slavers. Within a year he was aboard a European slave ship on his way to the Caribbean. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published by the author in 1789 and is part adventure story, part treatise on the corrupting power of slavery, and part tract about the transformative powers of Christianity. Equiano’s story takes him from Africa to the Americas, back across the Atlantic to England, into the Mediterranean, and even north to the ice packs, on a mission to discover the North-East passage. He fights the French in the Seven Year’s War, is a mate and merchant in the West Indies, and eventually becomes a freedman based in London. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first popular slave narratives and was reprinted eight times in the author’s lifetime. While modern scholars value this account as an important source on the life of the eighteenth-century slave and the transition from slavery to freedom, it remains an important literary work in its own right. As a valuable part of the African and African-American canons, it is still frequently taught in both English and History university courses.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Crome Yellow

Author: Aldous Huxley

Description: Denis, a young writer and poet, travels to an English countryside manor to spend the summer alongside a cast of outlandish leisure class intellectuals. The younger guests of the manor grapple with navigating love and sex within a post-Victorian society. Older guests and inhabitants obsess over trivialities from their vast libraries, eager to give a show of their knowledge to each other. The novel uses these interactions to paint a scathing representation of their insecurities and world views. Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley’s first published novel. His inspiration for many of the characters came from his time spent at Garsington Manor, a haven for many writers and poets of the time.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Author: Mark Twain

Description: The Autobiography of Mark Twain is a collection of reminiscences and reflections. Twain began dictating them in 1870, and in 1906 he published Chapters from My Autobiography in twenty-five installments in the North American Review. He continued to write stories for his autobiography, most of which weren’t published in his lifetime due to a lack of access to his papers, or their private subject matters. After Twain’s death, numerous editors have tried to organize this collection of published and unpublished autobiographical works, producing various differing editions. The most recent attempt is by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, which published a three-volume edition; but, through what many consider legal trickery, the University of California, Berkeley has claimed copyright on that edition until 2047—137 years after Twain’s death. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on Harper and Brothers’ 1924 collection, compiled by Albert Bigelow Paine.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication. The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to full novellas like “Family Happiness.” Readers who are familiar with Tolstoy’s life and religious experiences—as detailed, for example, in his spiritual memoir A Confession—may be able to trace the events of Tolstoy’s life through the changing subjects of these stories. Some early stories, like “The Raid” and the “Sevastopol” sketches, draw from Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasian War and the Crimean War when he served in the Imperial Russian Army, while other early stories like “Recollections of a Scorer” and “Two Hussars” reflect Tolstoy’s personal struggle with gambling addiction. Later stories in the collection, written during and after Tolstoy’s 1870s conversion to Christian anarcho-pacifism (a spiritual and religious philosophy described in detail in his treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You), frequently reflect either Tolstoy’s own experiences in spiritual struggle (e.g. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch”) or his interpretation of the New Testament (e.g. “The Forged Coupon”), or both. Many later stories, like “Three Questions” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” are explicitly didactic in nature and are addressed to a popular audience to promote his religious ideals and views on social and economic justice.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The American Crisis

Author: Thomas Paine

Description: The American Crisis is a collection of articles by Thomas Paine, originally published from December 1776 to December 1783, that focus on rallying Americans during the worst years of the Revolutionary War. Paine used his deistic beliefs to galvanize the revolutionaries, for example by claiming that the British are trying to assume the powers of God and that God would support the American colonists. These articles were so influential that others began to adopt some of their more stirring phrases, catapulting them into the cultural consciousness; for example, the opening line of the first Crisis, which reads “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Rights of Man

Author: Thomas Paine

Description: Thomas Paine wrote the first part of The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to the furious attack on the French Revolution by the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, published the previous year. Paine carefully dissects and counters Burke’s arguments and provides a more accurate description of the events surrounding the revolution of 1789. He then reproduces and comments on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens” promulgated by the National Assembly of France. The manuscript of The Rights of Man was placed with the publisher Joseph Johnson, but that publisher was threatened with legal action by the British Government. Paine then gave the work to another publisher, J. S. Jordan, and on the advice of William Blake, Paine went to France to be out of the way of possible arrest in Britain. The Rights of Man was published in March 1791, and was an immediate success with the British public, selling nearly a million copies. A second part of the book, subtitled “Combining Principle and Practice,” was published in February 1792. It puts forward practical proposals for the establishment of republican government in countries like Britain. The Rights of Man had a major impact, leading to the establishment of a number of reform societies. After the publication of the second part of the book, Paine and his publisher were charged with seditious libel, and Paine was eventually forced to leave Britain and flee to France. Today The Rights of Man is considered a classic of political writing and philosophy.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Orthodoxy

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics, had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern philosophy with Christian theology, he realized that he was “the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.” Thus, Orthodoxy is a work of Christian apologetics, where Chesterton tries to show that Christianity is a universal answer to the everyday needs of humanity, and not just an arbitrary philosophy handed down from on high.

Subjects: philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Five Weeks in a Balloon

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Five Weeks in a Balloon tells the tale of three Englishmen who attempt to cross Africa, from east to west, in a balloon. Dr. Ferguson is the rational scientist leading the trio, accompanied by loyal sidekick Joe and the doctor’s sporting friend Kennedy. The three embark on many adventures: They encounter natives and dangerous animals, experience problems with their ballooning technology, and struggle with the winds and the weather. Throughout the novel, the author liberally sprinkles descriptions of flora, fauna, and geography, as seen through nineteenth century eyes. Though this is Verne’s first published book, he already demonstrates much of the formula that drive his later works: the well-defined characters led by a rational scientist, the focus on science and technology, and of course the adventure-filled plot. The novel, first published in 1863, was topical for its time, as European interest in African exploration was strong. At the time the book was published, David Livingstone was midst-exploration in south-east Africa, and Burton and Speke had recently returned from exploring the Great Lakes region. The novel itself contains many references to actual expeditions that would have been current or recent for the original readers of the novel.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Essays

Author: Thomas Paine

Description: Thomas Paine was an American political commentator and activist in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His writing covered a wide range of subjects, but were centered on his core beliefs of republicanism and the inherent rights of people. An early pamphlet of his, “Common Sense,” was written soon after he arrived in America from Great Britain; with its focus on the ills of colonialism and the King’s veering between rational debate and righteous outrage, it has been cited as one of the major catalysts for the American Revolution. Later work attempted to correct the mistakes he perceived in post-revolution French government—written from experience after his election to the French National Convention—and even suggested a costed plan for a universal basic income funded by an inheritance tax. Collected here are his essays and pamphlets written between 1776 and 1797, including the aforementioned “Common Sense” and other influential works like “The Republican Proclamation” and the “Declaration of Rights.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Life of Buffalo Bill

Author: William F. Cody

Description: The popular history of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody remains more myth than anything else, yet it’s undeniable that he was a central figure in the American Old West. Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, soldier, bison hunter, scout, showman—his résumé reads like the quintessential record of all that makes up the Old West mythology, and it’s all documented in this, his original 1879 autobiography. hile The Life of Buffalo Bill is rife with the dramatic stylings of the dime novels and stage melodramas so popular at the time, in it Cody presents his version of his life: from his boyhood settling in the newly opened Kansas territory, to his early life as a frontiersman. It was written when Cody was only thirty-three years old, just after he started his career as a showman and a few years before he created his world famous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Originally titled The Life of Hon. William F. Cody Known as Buffalo Bill the Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography, it is an arguably more accurate account of both his life and the American West than the later 1917 autobiography The Great West That Was: “Buffalo Bill’s” Life Story which was ghostwritten by James Montague and published after his death. Although it makes many claims that are disputed today, The Life of Buffalo Bill reveals much about both the historical William F. Cody and the Buffalo Bill of American legend, and gives insight into the history of the American West.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: The Federalist Papers

Author: Alexander Hamilton

Description: In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution. hen Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, reaction was swift: in newspapers throughout each state, columnists were quick to condemn the radical reworking of the nation’s formative document. In New York State, a member of the convention decided to launch into the fray; he and two other men he recruited began writing their own anonymous series defending the proposed Constitution, each one signed “Publius.” They published seventy-seven articles in four different New York papers over the course of several months. When the articles were collected and published as a book early the following year, the authors added another eight articles. Although many at the time guessed the true identities of the authors, it would be a few years before the authors were confirmed to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, Hamilton and Madison both being delegates at the convention. Although the articles’ influence on the Constitution’s ratification is debated—newspapers were largely local at the time, so few outside New York saw the articles—their influence on the interpretation of the Constitution within the judiciary is immense. They are a window not only into the structure and content of the document, but also the reasons for the structure and content, written by men who helped author the document. Consequently, they have been quoted almost 300 times in Supreme Court cases. They remain perhaps the best and clearest explanation of the document that is the cornerstone of the United States government.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Daniel Deronda

Author: George Eliot

Description: Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was George Eliot’s last novel. It deals with two major characters whose lives intersect: One is a spoiled young woman named Gwendolen Harleth who makes an unwise marriage to escape impending poverty; the other is the titular character, Daniel Deronda, a wealthy young man who feels a mission to help the suffering. During her childhood Gwendolen’s family was well-off. She lived in comfort and was indulged and pampered. But the family’s fortune is lost through an unwise investment, and she returns to a life of near-poverty, a change which she greatly resents both for herself and for her widowed mother. The only escape seems to be for her to marry a wealthy older man who has been courting her in a casual, unemotional way. The marriage turns out to be a terrible mistake. Daniel Deronda has been raised by Sir Hugo Mallinger as his nephew, but Daniel has never discovered his true parentage, thinking it likely that he is Sir Hugo’s natural son. This consciousness of his probable illegitimacy moves him to kindness and tolerance towards anyone who is suffering from disadvantage. One evening, while rowing on the river Thames, he spots a young woman about to leap into the water to drown herself. He persuades her instead to come with him for shelter to a family he knows. The young woman turns out to be Jewish, and through his trying to help her find her lost family, Deronda comes into contact with Jewish culture—and in particular with a man named Mordecai, who has a passionate vision for the future of the Jewish race and who sees in Daniel a kindred spirit. The paths that Gwendolen and Daniel follow intersect often, and Daniel’s kindly nature moves him to try to offer her comfort and advice in her moments of distress. Unsurprisingly, Gwendolen misinterprets Daniel’s attentions. In Daniel Deronda Eliot demonstrates considerable sympathy towards the Jewish people, their culture, and their aspirations for a national homeland. At the time this was an unpopular and even controversial view. A foreword in this edition reproduces a letter Evans wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending her stance in this regard. Nevertheless, the novel was a success, and was translated almost immediately into German and Dutch. It is considered to have had a positive influence on Zionist thinkers. Daniel Deronda has been adapted both for film and television, with the 2002 B.B.C. series winning several awards.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Cane

Author: Jean Toomer

Description: Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer. Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer conceived Cane as a mosaic of intricately connected vignettes, poems, stories, songs, and even play-like dialogues. Drawing on both modernist poetry and African-American spirituals, Toomer imbues each form with a lyrical and often experimental sensibility. The work is structured in three distinct but unnamed parts. The first is set in rural Georgia and focuses on the lives of women and the men who desire them. The second part moves to the urban enclaves of the North in the years following the Great Migration. The third and final part returns to the rural South and explores the interactions between African-Americans from the North and those living in the South. Although sales languished in the later years of Toomer’s life, the book was reissued after his death and rediscovered by a new generation of American writers. Alice Walker described Cane as one of the most important books in her own development as a writer: “I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”

Subjects: fiction, poetry

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Title: The Servile State

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Description: In The Servile State, British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc makes a provocative case that capitalism will inevitably move toward the reestablishment of slavery. The thesis in this book forms the backbone of Belloc’s life-long effort as an advocate for reform to the existing socioeconomic system in the direction of what he terms as “distributism.” As a critic of both socialism and capitalism, and a fervent Catholic, Belloc lays out a history of Europe where, over generations, the pagan slavery of the Roman Empire was transformed into a “distributive” model of the Middle Ages. But, he argues, this model was broken by the rise of capitalism in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Ever since, capitalism has been moving ever closer towards the servile state: the restoration of status in the place of contract, and a vast proletariat of wage-earners with few incredibly wealthy owners.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Twelve Years a Slave

Author: Solomon Northup

Description: In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free black man, married with three children and living in upstate New York, when he was tricked into going to Washington DC. There, he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a plantation in the Red River area of Louisiana. For twelve years he experienced and witnessed the arbitrary beatings and whippings, around-the-clock back-breaking work, and countless other degradations that came with being enslaved in the antebellum south. Through the sympathetic ear of a white man and with miraculous timing, he was eventually freed and returned home. He then wrote this memoir and contributed to the abolitionist movement before disappearing from the pages of history. Like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to the era’s bucolic propaganda that the enslaved in the south were well treated, well provided for, and made “part of the family.” As a first-hand account, it exposes slavery for what it is: barbaric, dehumanizing, and evil.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Three Sisters

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: The sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina live with their brother Andrey in a provincial Russian town, and plan to return to Moscow, where they grew up, as soon as they’re able. Olga doesn’t want to continue working at the school where she’s a teacher and occasional headmaster; Masha is disillusioned in her marriage; Irina hopes to find her true love; and Andrey shows promise of becoming a professor. Also stationed in their town is a battery of soldiers that provide them with a social life. When Andrey falls in love with Natasha, their hopes for change are dashed, bit by bit. First performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre, Three Sisters is considered one of Chekhov’s best plays. While critical reception at the time was mixed, the show was popular enough to become a part of the company’s repertoire, and is still commonly staged and adapted today.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Nibelungenlied

Author:

Description: The Nibelungenlied was Germany’s first heroic epic put into writing. Thomas Carlyle considered it “a precious national possession, recovered after six centuries of neglect, [which] takes undisputed place among the sacred books of German literature.” Due to a lack of interest in copying the manuscripts, the work was forgotten, only faintly remembered as an influence in other German writing. Today, a total of 36 manuscripts have been unearthed. Many of these are only poem fragments, but three manuscripts have been viewed as the most complete and authentic versions to exist: these manuscripts are referred to as “A,” “B,” and “C.” “A” follows most of the original written forms, but is the shortest manuscript of the three. “C” is the most altered edition, as it was changed to suit later cultural tastes. Manuscript “B” is considered the gold standard since it shows signs of minimal alterations and is of intermediate length. Alice Horton has used manuscript “B” as the foundation of her English edition, creating a work that is accurate in translation and with its lyrical quality preserved. It portrays an epic adventure that grabs and holds the reader’s attention. Siegfried, the knighted prince of Netherland, has plans to marry the beautiful Princess Kriemhilda of Burgundy. He visits Worms to bargain with the three kings and Kriemhilda’s brothers: Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher. Famed for his impenetrable skin and inhuman strength after bathing in dragon’s blood, Siegfried may be the perfect man to help them. To marry their sister and receive her wealth, Siegfried must convince the ruler beyond the sea and the mighty maiden warrior to be Gunther’s wife. This queen has sworn only to marry a man who can beat her three challenges, at the risk of beheading if he should fail.

Subjects: adventure, poetry

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Title: The Story of the Amulet

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: In this conclusion to the Psammead Trilogy, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane are reunited with the cantankerous Sand-fairy. While the old creature can’t grant them wishes anymore, it points them towards an old Egyptian amulet that can grant their hearts’ desire—in this case the return of their parents and baby brother. While their amulet is only half of a whole, it still acts as a time portal which they use to visit locales like Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, and even a utopian future in search of the missing other half. Perhaps one of E. Nesbit’s most personal works, The Story of the Amulet benefited from her interest in the ancient world, particularly Egypt. With the help of A. E. Wallis Budge, to whom the book is dedicated—then Head of the Assyrian Departments of the British Museum and translator of the Egyptian Book of the Dead—she conducted extensive research on the topic and is thus able to bring an exquisite attention to detail. For example, the titular amulet is shaped after the tyet, an Egyptian symbol also known as the “knot of Isis.” Likewise, the inscription at the back of the amulet is written in authentic Egyptian hieroglyphs. A staunch supporter of democratic socialism and a founding member of the Fabian Society, E. Nesbit cultivated friendships with other like-minded writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, whose influence on this book is easy to notice. She practiced what she preached, so much so that despite her literary successes, her acts of charity brought her close to bankruptcy. These political beliefs are prominently displayed in the book. The children encounter memorable characters during their adventures, chief among them the Queen of Babylon, who causes quite a stir when she later pays them a call in their contemporary London. When the visiting Queen witnesses the squalid living conditions of the London working class, she’s amazed at how poorly they’re treated compared to the slaves of her own Babylon. Likewise, the utopian future—which features a wink to her friend H. G. Wells, the “great reformer”—is a striking contrast in terms of the happiness, care, and education of the general populace. The book’s legacy can be found in the works of other writers. Most notably, C. S. Lewis incorporated several elements in his Chronicles of Narnia: the Calormene civilization of The Horse and His Boy draws heavily from The Amulet’s Babylon, and the episode in The Magician’s Nephew where Jadis, the White Witch, causes chaos during her short stay in London is also a direct homage to the aforementioned visit from the Queen. The format of these stories, where a group of people take their audience on adventures through time and space to learn about distant cultures, is an uncanny precursor to the popular British TV series Doctor Who.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Selma Lagerlöf

Description: Selma Lagerlöf was a Swedish author, who, starting in 1891 with The Story of Gösta Berling, wrote a series of novels and short stories that soon garnered both national and international praise. This led to her winning the 1909 Nobel Prize in Literature “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterize her writings,” the first woman to do so. She happily wrote for both adults and children, but the same feeling of romantic infatuation with the spiritual mysteries of life runs through all of her work, often anchored to her childhood home of Värmland in middle Sweden. The collection brings together the available public domain translations into English, in chronological order of their original publication. The subjects are many, and include Swedish folk-stories, Biblical legends, and tales of robbers, kings and queens, fishermen, and saints. They were translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach, Jessie Brochner, and Velma Swanston Howard.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Arms and the Man

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: In the middle of the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian war, an enemy soldier escapes a cavalry charge by climbing up a drainpipe into Raina Petkoff’s room. Raina is the daughter of one Major and engaged to another, but she chooses to save the soldier’s life by concealing him. Arms and the Man, named after the opening lines of Virgil’s The Aeneid, is a play that humorously deals with the hypocrisy of humanity and the stupidity of war. It was among George Bernard Shaw’s first commercial successes, and was included in a collection of plays he referred to as Plays Pleasant, along with Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny. Having coined the term “chocolate soldier,” the play has been staged multiple times in London’s West End and on Broadway, and has been adapted into operetta and film.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: My Reminiscences

Author: Rabindranath Tagore

Description: Rabindranath Tagore, sometimes referred to as the Bard of Bengal, was a poet, composer, and artist active in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. His poetry had a profound impact on Bengali literature—so much so that in 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Today Tagore is recognized for transforming Bengali art, moving it away from its classical forms by embracing the Bengal Renaissance. Though his artistic output spanned many disciplines, his most famous is perhaps Gitanjali, his collection of poems that he himself later translated to English. His impact on Indian and Bengali letters can be exemplified by the fact that two of his compositions were chosen as national anthems—“Jana Gana Mana” for India, and “Amar Shonar Bangla” for Bangladesh—and that the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. In these autobiographical sketches Tagore gives us windows into his childhood, his youth, and his blossoming as a writer and as a lyricist. He stresses that this is not an autobiography, but more like a palimpsest of memories: glimmers and shadows that illustrate his artistic development, not a strict record of his life.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Author: Linda Brent

Description: Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina, but, in her words, didn’t realize it until her father died when she was six years old. Six years later, when her mistress died, she was bequeathed to the mistress’ granddaughter, thereby coming into the household of the mistress’ lecherous son. Several years later she escaped, only to have to hide for seven years in a cramped garret that did not allow her to stand or sit up. She was finally able to make her way north, where she was reunited with her children. Many years later, after narrowly avoiding capture multiple times due to the Fugitive Slave Law, her employer purchased her freedom. Jacobs, writing as Linda Brent, tells the riveting story of her life in the South as a slave. She brings an unflinching eye to “good” masters and mistresses who nevertheless lie to, steal from, and continually break promises to their slaves, and to bad masters who beat and kill their slaves for no particular reason. Even in the North, after her escape, she is disappointed to find prejudice and degrading treatment for blacks. After having been convinced to write down her story, it took years to find a publisher who would print it. It was finally made available to the public just a few months before the shots at Fort Sumter that began the Civil War.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: Indian Fairy Tales

Author: Joseph Jacobs

Description: Although many readers might associate the term “fairy tales” with the Germanic or Celtic folk tale tradition—like in the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm—countries like India have their own rich history of fairy tales. Many of these tales, infused with a local flavor, bear a striking structural and thematic similarity to those with which Western readers are accustomed: moral allegories, talking animals, gambling incidents, and the like. Joseph Jacobs has carefully selected 29 fairy tales from the Jatakas, the Fables of Bidpai, the Tales of the Sun, the Baluchi Folktales, the Folktales of Kashmir, and other Sanskrit sources. These stories are a humorous and imaginative showcase of India’s rich fairy tale tradition. Joseph Jacobs was an Australian folklorist who devoted most of his career to collecting fairy tales from around the world. His collections on English fairy tales have immortalized stories such as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “Jack the Giant Killer” and “The History of Tom Thumb.”

Subjects: children’s, shorts

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Title: An Ideal Husband

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: Sir and Lady Chiltern are the picture of responsibility: he a member of the House of Commons, she a member of the Women’s Liberal Association. When Mrs. Cheveley arrives in London, she brings with her a letter that threatens to ruin Sir Chiltern forever—his whole life threatens to come crumbling down. The following twenty-four hours are filled with theft, blackmail, farce, and biting social commentary. An Ideal Husband was first performed in 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre, and it was immediately successful. On April 6th, the same day it transferred to the Criterion Theatre, Oscar Wilde was arrested for gross indecency, and his name was removed from the play. Wilde revised the play for publication in 1899, taking steps to add written stage directions and character descriptions in order to make the work more accessible to the public. Today it’s Wilde’s second most popular play, after The Importance of Being Earnest.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Chessmen of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth installment in the Martian series, was originally serialized in six parts in Argosy All-Story Weekly before being published as a novel in 1922. It introduces Tara, Princess of Helium, the headstrong daughter of John Carter, the Warlord of Mars. Just like the rest of the novels in the series, this one is packed with imaginative characters and locations. In true Barsoomian fashion, Burroughs regales us with an action-packed adventure: planet-shaking storms, daring swordfights, horrific dungeons, complex alien cultures, and wild escapes. While the story may be considered a standard pulp adventure, it also introduces a bit of philosophy by exploring the connection between the mind and the body. Of special note is Jetan, or Martian chess, which holds a central place in the storyline. Burroughs includes an appendix so that interested readers may play the game themselves.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Robbery Under Arms

Author: Rolf Boldrewood

Description: Robbery Under Arms, subtitled A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia, was published in serial form in the Sydney Mail newspaper between July 1882 and August 1883. It was published under the name of Rolf Boldrewood, a pseudonym for Thomas Alexander Browne, a police magistrate and gold commissioner. Robbery Under Arms is an entertaining adventure story told from the first person point of view of Richard “Dick” Marston. The story is in the form of a journal written from jail where he’s waiting to be hanged for his crimes. Marston and his brother Jim are led astray as young men by their father, who made money by cattle “duffing,” or stealing. They are introduced to their father’s associate, known only as Captain Starlight, a clever and charming fraudster. After a spell in jail, from which he escapes, Marston, his brother, and father are persuaded by Starlight to operate as bank robbers and bushrangers. They embark on a life continually on the run from the police. Despite this, Dick and Jim also manage to spend a considerable time prospecting for gold, and the gold rush and the fictitious gold town of Turon are described in detail. The character of Captain Starlight is based largely on the real-life exploits of bushrangers Harry Redford and Thomas Smith, the latter known as “Captain Midnight.” Regarded as a classic of Australian literature, Robbery Under Arms has never been out of print, and has been the basis of several adaptations in the form of films and television serials. This Standard Ebooks edition is unabridged, and restores some 30,000 words from the original serialization which were cut out of the 1889 one-volume edition of the novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Negro Explorer at the North Pole

Author: Matthew Henson

Description: When Robert Peary’s team was the first to reach the North Pole, he was the only white man in the picture. Accompanying him were four Eskimos and Matthew Henson, a black man who had been with Peary on all his expeditions for the previous twenty years. Henson tells the story of that last expedition with candor and warmth, making neither too much nor too little of the conditions the team endured, including travelling on foot and sled in temperatures reaching 50° and more below zero. Henson’s story is a testament to fortitude in the face of debilitating conditions.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Black Opal

Author: Katharine Susannah Prichard

Description: Katharine Susannah Prichard was born in 1883 to Australian parents then living in Fiji, but she grew up in Tasmania, lived for a while in both Melbourne and London before finally settling in Western Australia. She was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Australia in 1921, and her status as a communist and a female writer led to her being frequently under surveillance and harassment by the Australian police and other government authorities. She wrote The Black Opal in 1921, and the novel focuses on the very close-knit opal-mining community living and working on Fallen Star Ridge, a fictitious location set in New South Wales, Australia. Life is hard for the miners as their fortunes rise and fall with the amounts and quality of black opal they can uncover. Black opal is a beautiful mineral with fiery gleams of color, much valued for jewelry. Finding productive seams of such opal is a matter of both hard work and good luck. The novel is a well-drawn study of the relationships of the people living on the Ridge, and the two main characters are portrayed with clarity: Michael Brady, an older man much respected by the other miners for this knowledge and ethical approach, and Sophie Rouminof, a beautiful teenage girl who is the darling of the camp but who abruptly runs away to America after being disappointed in love. Despite the difficulties the individual miners face, there is a community spirit and an agreement on basic values and principles of behavior at the Ridge. But this community of shared endeavor is eventually jeopardized by the influence of outsiders, in particular an American who wishes to buy up the individual mines, operate them under a company structure, and simply pay the miners a salary. This conflict between capitalism and honest manual labour becomes one of the most important themes of the work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Women and Economics

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Description: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, most famous for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wrote Women and Economics in 1898, at a time when the roles of women in society were already undergoing radical change: women were entering the work force in large numbers, the suffrage movement was agitating for the vote, and young women were looking for a new definition of their place other than as a wife or mother. The book takes the position that humans are the only species in which the female depends on the male for her survival, and that this arrangement must change for the human race to continue to be successful. Gilman argues for the evolution of marriage, family, home life, and what she calls the sexuo-economic relationship between men and women. Although she was in demand as a lecturer and writer, Women and Economics was the first book-length work to consolidate her views. As a feminist text, it’s significant not necessarily for its profundity or for its appeal for women’s rights, but rather for its application of social Darwinism, espousing the theory that the roles played by women inevitably evolve and that the gendered division of labor produces warped human beings of both sexes. Its popularity was also helped by its accessibility—as one of her critics stated, “it stirs no deep reverberations of the soul … but you can quote it, and remember its points.” As suffragism progressed and first wave feminism began to fade, Gilman’s ideas were somewhat forgotten. But as feminism resurged in the 1960s, her work was rediscovered and interest rebounded in this groundbreaking feminist who played an important role in shaping public opinion, disseminating radical ideas, and encouraging women (and men) to change their thinking about gender roles.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Ben Hur

Author: Lew Wallace

Description: Judah and Massala are close friends growing up, though one is Jewish and the other Roman. But when an accident happens after Massala returns from five years in Rome, Massala betrays his childhood friend and family. Judah’s mother and sister are taken away to prison, and he is sent to a galley-ship. Years later, Judah rescues a ship’s captain from drowning after a ship-to-ship battle, and the tribune adopts him in gratitude. Judah then devotes himself to learning as much as he can about being a warrior, in the hopes of leading an insurrection against Rome. He thinks he’s found the perfect leader in a young Nazarite, but is disappointed at the young man’s seeming lack of ambition. Before writing Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace was best known for being a Major General in the American Civil War. After the war, a conversation with an atheist caused Wallace to take stock of how little he knew about his own religion. He launched into what would be years of research so that he could write with accuracy about first-century Israel. Although Judah Ben-Hur is the novel’s main character, the book’s subtitle, “A Tale of the Christ,” reveals Wallace’s real focus. Sales were only a trickle at the beginning, but it soon became a bestseller, and went on to become the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. It has never been out of print, and to date has inspired two plays, a TV series, and five films—one of which, the 1959 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer epic, is considered to be one of the best films yet made.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit

Author: S. M. Mitra

Description: In Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit S. M. Mitra has collected and transcribed in English various fables and short stories from across the Sanskrit tradition. The stories’ characters range from kings to mice and they find themselves in all manner of situations, from the mundane to the magical. Regardless of the setting, there is a common thread of moral choices, whether personal or for family and friends, that runs through the collection. Siddha Mohana Mitra was an Indian author and political commentator, who was most famous at the time for his numerous books and articles for the British market on the colonial rule of India. This collection, edited by the author and translator Nancy Bell, was published in 1919, and was designed to be both appealing as a set of fairy tales and useful as a teaching tool for children’s moral perception of the world.

Subjects: children’s, fiction, shorts

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Title: Gladiator

Author: Philip Wylie

Description: Gladiator, first published in 1930, tells the story of Hugo Danner, who is given superhuman speed, endurance, strength, and intelligence by his father as an experiment in creating a better human. We follow Hugo throughout his life viewed from his perspective, from childhood, when Hugo first discovers he’s different from others, to adulthood, as Hugo tries to find a positive outlet for his abilities around the time of the first World War. Gladiator has been made into a 1938 comedy movie, and is thought to be the inspiration for the Superman comic books—though this has not been confirmed.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Devil’s Dictionary

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Description: “Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” Bierce’s groundbreaking Devil’s Dictionary had a complex publication history. Started in the mid-1800s as an irregular column in Californian newspapers under various titles, he gradually refined the new-at-the-time idea of an irreverent set of glossary-like definitions. The final name, as we see it titled in this work, did not appear until an 1881 column published in the periodical The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp. There were no publications of the complete glossary in the 1800s. Not until 1906 did a portion of Bierce’s collection get published by Doubleday, under the name The Cynic’s Word Book—the publisher not wanting to use the word “Devil” in the title, to the great disappointment of the author. The 1906 word book only went from A to L, however, and the remainder was never released under the compromised title. In 1911 the Devil’s Dictionary as we know it was published in complete form as part of Bierce’s collected works (volume 7 of 12), including the remainder of the definitions from M to Z. It has been republished a number of times, including more recent efforts where older definitions from his columns that never made it into the original book were included. Due to the complex nature of copyright, some of those found definitions have unclear public domain status and were not included. This edition of the book includes, however, a set of definitions attributed to his one-and-only “Demon’s Dictionary” column, including Bierce’s classic definition of A: “the first letter in every properly constructed alphabet.” Bierce enjoyed “quoting” his pseudonyms in his work. Most of the poetry, dramatic scenes and stories in this book attributed to others were self-authored and do not exist outside of this work. This includes the prolific Father Gassalasca Jape, whom he thanks in the preface—“jape” of course having the definition: “a practical joke.” This book is a product of its time and must be approached as such. Many of the definitions hold up well today, but some might be considered less palatable by modern readers. Regardless, the book’s humorous style is a valuable snapshot of American culture from past centuries.

Subjects: satire

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Title: The Plastic Age

Author: Percy Marks

Description: The Plastic Age can be read as an exposé on the moral failings of undergraduates in Jazz Age New England, as described through the four-year experience of a young man at the fictional Sanford College. Students enroll at Sanford to “acquire culture,” and do so at an age when they are “plastic” in the sense that they are changeable and meant to be transformed by the experience. But, not all of the lessons of a college education are in the curriculum. To a student reader of the 1920s, Marks’ novel would have looked more like a moral tale, critique, and guide to navigating the challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities of higher education. Marks was an English instructor at Brown University at the time of publication but also had experience teaching at MIT and Dartmouth from which to draw his descriptions of campus life. The book was popular, the second best selling novel of 1924. It inspired two motion pictures. But it was also controversial. The novel was banned in Boston and Marks was removed from his teaching position at Brown the next year. College administrators saw the novel’s setting as a thinly veiled version of their own school and the novel’s portrayal of college life hit too close to home. A Sanford English instructor seems to convey the author’s view when he says: “Some day, perhaps, our administrative officers will be true educators; … our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; … our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth.” But what Marks sees instead are uninspired teaching and advising, superficial learning, pervasive smoking, prohibition-era drinking, vice, gambling, billiards, institutionalized hazing, excessive conformity, and a campus life that molds its students into less serious people. The author seeks elevation but sees regression. Some of the norms and expectations of the 1920s may seem dated to the modern reader, but important themes endure. Marks went on to write 19 additional books and late in his career, returned to teaching literature at the University of Connecticut.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lilith

Author: George MacDonald

Description: Lilith, first published in 1895, tells the story of Mr. Vane, the owner of a library that seems to be haunted by a raven—the ghost of the library’s former owner. Mr. Vane eventually follows this strange figure through a mirror and into another world, the “region of seven dimensions.” There Vane meets a number of characters, including Biblical characters like Adam and his first wife Lilith. Thus begins a battle of good versus evil that reverberates through dimensions. The narrative is heavy with Christian allegory, and MacDonald uses the world to expound on his Christian universalist philosophy while telling a story of life, death and ultimately salvation. Critics consider Lilith to be one of MacDonald’s darker works, but opinion on it is divided. Despite this, some critics praise it for its rich imagery, with scholar Neil Barron claiming that the novel is the “obvious parent of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus,” itself a highly influential work of fantasy.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: A Doll’s House

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Description: In 1870s Norway, Nora Helmer struggles to be her own person within her marriage and a society that limits the opportunities of women. When decisions made to protect her husband come back to haunt her, Nora must fight for her family and for her own place in the world. Since its first theatrical run, in which every performance was sold out, A Doll’s House has inspired admiration, controversy, and discussion. First published by Ibsen in 1879 in Danish, the official language of Danish-ruled Norway, A Doll’s House sold out its first two printings within months. It first premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen within a month of publication, and the play was performed in Germany in 1880 and London in 1884. Initial translations changed the play, particularly the ending, to be more sympathetic and acceptable. Ibsen considered these changes to be a “barbaric outrage.” It wouldn’t be until 1889 that the play was performed as written in London and Broadway. Ibsen’s work pioneered realistic depictions of middle class families and social themes. He claimed that he didn’t have feminist intentions in the writing of A Doll’s House, instead aiming for “the description of humanity,” but the play is widely considered an essential feminist work and has had a real lasting impact: as recently as 2006, it was the most performed play in the world.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Man and Superman

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Following the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the ward of Jack Tanner and Roebuck Ramsden; Jack is a childhood friend, author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook, and descendant of Don Juan, while Roebuck Ramsden is a respectable friend of her father’s entirely opposed to Jack’s philosophy. Also in mourning are Octavius Robinson, who is openly in love with Ann, and his sister Violet, who is secretly pregnant. So begins a journey that will take them across London, Europe, and to Hell. George Bernard Shaw wrote Man and Superman between 1901 and 1903. It was first performed in 1905 with the third act excised; a part of that third act, Don Juan in Hell, was performed in 1907. The full play was not performed in its entirety until 1915. Shaw explains that he wrote Man and Superman after being challenged to write on the theme of Don Juan. Once described as Shaw’s most allusive play, Man and Superman refers to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. It combines Nietzsche’s argument that humanity is evolving towards a “superman” with the philosophy of Don Juan as a way to present his conception of society: namely, that it is women who are the driving force behind natural selection and the propagation of the species. To this end, Shaw includes as an appendix The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion as written by the character Jack Tanner.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The World Set Free

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: After learning of atomic physics, H. G. Wells began to think of its potential impact on human society. In The World Set Free, atomic energy causes massive unemployment, shaking the already fragile social order. The ambitious powers of the world decide to seize the opportunity to compete for dominance, and a world war breaks out, echoing the looming Great War about to ignite in 1914. Waking to the catastrophe, humanity begins the hard search for a way into a better future. The novel traces a soldier, an ex-king, a despot, and a sage through a profound transformation of human society, and we gain a window into Wells’ own thoughts and hopes along the way. ith one prophetic stroke, Wells gives the first detailed depiction of atomic energy and its potential destructive power, and predicts the use of the air power in modern warfare. He may have even directly influenced the development of nuclear weapons, as the physicist Leó Szilárd, shortly after reading the novel in 1932, then conceived of harnessing the neutron chain reaction critical to the development of the atom bomb.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Phoenix and the Carpet

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Like other E. Nesbit stories, The Phoenix and the Carpet was initially published in The Strand Magazine. While The Railway Children or Five Children and It proved more popular, Phoenix has still been adapted into three BBC TV series and a film. The story picks up some time after the events of Five Children and It. The children are back in London and encounter another ancient, magical creature: this time a noble, beautiful, arrogant, and vain Phoenix. He comes with a magic carpet which the gang uses to go on adventures around the world. Some things don’t go as planned, but there are still opportunities to make others happy. As a female British author of children stories, E. Nesbit was not a typical early 20th century woman. Described as tomboy during her childhood, she grew up a staunch supporter of democratic socialism in a time when many were crushed under poverty. She was a founding member of the Fabian Society, and dedicated herself to charity work, so much so that she almost ended up in poverty. Nesbit’s stories continue to fascinate readers. Her dry wit and respect with which she engages children ensures that adults can also enjoy her tales. Her depiction of magic—how it follows rules which must be taught or learned, and the painful consequences when they are forgotten—has influenced the works of other writers such as P. L. Travers, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Author: James Joyce

Description: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first novel, published after the previous success of his short story collection Dubliners. The novel is written in a modernist style, with dialog and narration blending together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness meant to invoke the blurriness of memory. Joyce originally planned writing a realist autobiographical novel of 63 chapters titled Stephen Hero. He abandoned the attempt halfway through, and refocused his efforts on Portrait, a shorter, sharper work in the modernist style. His alter-ego remained Stephen Dedalus, named after Daedalus, the mythological Greek craftsman and father of Icarus. Portrait was written while he was waiting for Dubliners to be published, a process that took eight years and so frustrated Joyce that he once threw the manuscript of Portrait into a fire, causing his family to run to save it. The novel closely traces Joyce’s early years. Like his alter-ego Stephen, Joyce was born into a middle-class family and lived in Dublin as they descended into poverty; he rebelled against his Irish Catholic upbringing to become a star student at Dublin University, and put aside thoughts of priesthood or medicine, the other careers offered him, to become a writer. Joyce doesn’t shy away from sensitive topics, presenting the discoveries of youth in all of their physical detail, including Stephen’s teenage visits to prostitutes (which also mirror Joyce’s youth, and were how he probably contracted the suspected syphilis that plagued his vision and tortured his health for the rest of his life), and the homosexual explorations of children at a Jesuit school. The writing is in the free indirect style, allowing the narrator to both focus on Stephen and present characters and events through his eyes, until the last chapter, where Stephen’s first-person diary entries suggest he’s finally found his voice. As the novel progresses, the syntax and vocabulary also grow in complexity, reflecting Stephen’s own development. Of Joyce’s three novels, Portrait is the most straightforward and accessible. But it remains just as rich and complex as any masterpiece, with critics across generations hailing it as work of unique beauty and perception.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Four-Day Planet

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: Reminiscent of old whaling stories, Four-Day Planet follows the story of Walter Boyd, a scrappy 17-year-old reporter working for his father at the Port Sandor Times. Walt gets tied up in the adventures of the sea-monster hunters on Fenris—a barely habitable planet with a 2,000-hour day. The prized—and only—commodity on Fenris is tallow-wax, a miraculous material harvested from the dangerous seas of the planet. hile being set in a grand sci-fi universe, the book packs in more about intrigue, betrayal, and the grit required to survive on a backwater planet of the Federation. The book was later re-published as a “two-for-one” with Lone Star Planet (originally titled A Planet for Texans).

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: M. R. James

Description: Montague Rhodes James was a respected scholar of medieval manuscripts and early biblical history, but he is best remembered today as a writer of ghost stories. His work has been much esteemed by later writers of horror, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. The stereotypical Jamesian ghost story involves a scholar or gentleman in a European village who, through his own curiosity, greed, or simple bad luck, has a horrifying supernatural encounter. For example, in “ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’ ” a professor finds himself haunted by a mysterious figure after blowing a whistle found in the ruins of a Templar church, and in “Count Magnus,” a writer’s interest in a mysterious and cruel figure leads to horrific consequences. Other stories have the scholar as an antagonist, like “Lost Hearts” and “Casting the Runes,” where study of supernatural rites gives way to practice. James’ stories find their horror in their atmosphere and mood, and strike a balance in their supernatural elements, being neither overly descriptive nor overly vague. This collection includes all the stories from his collections Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories, A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories.

Subjects: horror, shorts

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Title: Iola Leroy

Author: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Description: As the Civil War bears down on a small North Carolina town, a tight-knit community of enslaved men and women is preparing for the coming battle and the possibility of freedom. Into this ensemble cast of characters comes Iola Leroy, a young woman who grew up unaware of her African ancestry until she is lured back home under false pretenses and immediately enslaved. Amidst a backdrop of battlefield hospitals and clandestine prayer meetings, this quietly stouthearted novel is a story of community, integrity, and solidarity. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was already one of the most prominent African-American poets of the nineteenth century when—at age 67—she turned her focus to novels. Her most enduring work, Iola Leroy, was one of the first novels published by an African-American writer. Although the book was initially popular with readers, it soon fell out of print and was critically forgotten. In the 1970s, the book was rediscovered and reclaimed as a seminal contribution to African-American literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Sanine

Author: Mikhail Artsybashev

Description: Vladimir Sanine has arrived back to the family home where his mother and younger sister live, after several years away. While deciding what to do with his life, he meets up with a circle of friends and acquaintances, old and new, and spends his time as many carefree young adults do: in a whirl of parties, politics, picnics, and philosophical talk. But the freedoms of early twentieth century Russia are still held back by the structures of historical conduct, and their carefree attitudes erode when put in conflict with society’s expectations. In Sanine, Artsybashev describes a group of young adults in a time of great uncertainty, with ongoing religious and political upheaval a daily occurrence. A big focus of the critical response when it was published was on the portrayal of sexuality of the youths, something genuinely new and shocking for most readers. Artsybashev considered his writing to be influenced by the Russian greats (Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy) but also by the individual anarchism of the philosopher Max Stirner. Sanine was originally written in 1903, but publication was delayed until 1907 due to problems with censorship. Even publication didn’t stop Artsybashev’s problems, as by 1908 the novel was banned as “pornographic.” This edition is based on the 1915 translation by Percy Pinkerton.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Hamlet

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Not only was Hamlet one of William Shakespeare’s most popular works during his lifetime, it is also considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature. “To be, or not to be,” a line from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies, is one of the most widely known quotes in modern English and has been referenced in countless works of literature, theater, film, and music. During a dark winter night Horatio and a pair of watchmen encounter a ghost that resembles the late King of Denmark, the father of Prince Hamlet. After failing to converse with the ghost, Hamlet is brought to the site of the encounter. The ghost tells the story of his death. He was murdered by King Claudius, the dead king’s brother and Hamlet’s new stepfather. Hamlet swears to avenge him and kill Claudius. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Night and Day

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book’s deeper concerns are resolutely subversive. The main characters—a quartet of friends and would-be lovers—come together, pull apart, and struggle to reconcile socially prescribed norms of love and marriage with their own beliefs and ambitions.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Uneasy Money

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Affable and honourable, Lord Dawlish is the second poorest peer in England, relying on his income as a club secretary. Claire Fenwick, his beautiful fiancée, will not marry him until he has some money, so he draws up plans to travel to New York and make his fortune. When he unexpectedly comes into an inheritance, he attempts to give it to the person he believes is the more deserving recipient. This, however, proves more difficult than expected. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the twentieth century. After leaving school, he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early writing mostly consisted of school stories, but he later switched to writing comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years, such as Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: Pollyanna Grows Up

Author: Eleanor H. Porter

Description: In Pollyanna Grows Up we follow the titular character as she “grows up” through a story told in two connected parts. The first part takes place in Boston when she is age 13, having just been rehabilitated from severe injuries sustained in an automobile accident. As she leaves the hospital, she is sent to stay with a nearby dowager, who has long withdrawn into grief, pining for her lost nephew. Pollyanna is to be her “cure.” After leaving Boston, Pollyanna leaves the country with her Aunt Polly and doesn’t return to Vermont until she is 20 years old. hile in Boston, Pollyanna observes her host’s isolation and depression, which sits in stark contrast with the opulence of her home and her material wealth. Meanwhile, naive, relentlessly positive, literal-minded Pollyanna, often oblivious to the structure of society around her, slowly comes to understand the dire, grinding poverty, isolation, and alienation that turn-of-the-century Boston was also home to. Human connection is a central theme of the book and Pollyanna begins to engage with broader cultural and moral questions of her society before departing the country. In the second half of the book, Pollyanna acts as host to the friends she made in Boston. As such, she reconnects with them and puts them in touch with her friends and family in Vermont. As a part of growing up, Pollyanna must now address questions of how these relationships might change as her age and social status change. She must reconcile the sense of obligation she feels with her desires, and with the wants and needs of those around her. Old relationships are expanded, and new relationships are formed (or revealed) with each, in the end, more connected to all.

Subjects: children’s

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Title: Clarissa

Author: Samuel Richardson

Description: Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady is one of the longest novels in the English language. Written by Samuel Richardson over a period of several years and published in 1748, it is composed entirely of letters. Though this may seem daunting, the novel is highly regarded and is considered by many critics as one of the greatest works of English literature, appearing in several lists of the best British novels ever written. The novel tells the story of the young Clarissa Harlowe, eighteen years of age at the start of the novel. She is generally regarded by her family, neighbors, and friends as the most virtuous and kind young woman they know. But she is drawn into correspondence with Richard Lovelace, a well-born, rich young man regarded as something of a rake, when she attempts to reconcile a dispute between Lovelace and her rash brother. Lovelace, imagining this indicates her love for him, carries out a series of stratagems which result in him essentially abducting her from her family, from whom Clarissa then becomes estranged. Much of the correspondence consists of the letters between Clarissa and her close friend Anna Howe, and between Lovelace and his friend Jack Belford, to whom he confesses all of his stratagems and “inventions” in his assault on Clarissa’s honor. The novel is thus a fascinating study of human nature. Much of Lovelace’s actions and attitudes towards women are regrettably only too familiar to modern readers. And while Clarissa herself may be a little too good to be true, nevertheless she is shown as having some flaws which lead to a tragic outcome. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the 9-volume Chapman and Hall edition of 1902.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Count of Monte Cristo

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Description: Edmond Dantès is a young man about to be made captain of a cargo vessel and marry his sweetheart. But he is arrested at his pre-wedding feast, having been falsely accused of being a Bonapartist. Thrown into the notorious Château d’If prison, he eventually meets an ancient inmate who teaches him language, science, and passes hints of a hidden fortune. When Edmond makes his way out of prison, he plots to reward those who stood by him (his old employer, for one), and to seek revenge on the men who betrayed him: one who wrote the letter that denounced him, one that married his fiancée in his absence, and one who knew Dantès was innocent but stood idly by and did nothing. The Count of Monte Cristo is another of Alexandre Dumas’ thrilling adventure stories, possibly more popular even than The Three Musketeers. Originally serialized in a French newspaper over the course of a year-and-a-half, it was enormously popular after its publication in book form, and has never been out of print since. Its timeless story of adventure, historical drama, romance, revenge, and Eastern mystery has been the source of over forty movies and TV series.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Subjection of Women

Author: John Stuart Mill

Description: Known primarily for his work in political philosophy, ethics, and economics, John Stuart Mill is perhaps less well known as an early feminist thinker. Published in 1869, The Subjection of Women was ahead of its time. Motivated by the conviction that the subordination of women was “one of the chief obstacles to human improvement,” Mill argued not merely for women’s suffrage, but for “a principle of perfect equality”—the complete social, political, and legal equality of the sexes. Mill credited his late wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, with many of the important ideas put forth in the book.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The School for Scandal

Author: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Description: One of the most celebrated English comedies of manners, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal was first produced in 1777 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It opened just a year after Sheridan succeeded the famous actor/manager David Garrick as manager and, after Garrick had read the play, he even volunteered to write the prologue—lending his much desired endorsement to the production. The School for Scandal was extremely well received by its audiences as well as by many contemporary critics. The plot revolves around members of London’s Georgian society who delight in rumor and gossip and the infelicities and flaws of others. Although they draw their victims from their own membership, they let no action go un-noted or uncriticized. But as the plot unfolds events don’t always prove quite so titillating, and not a few find themselves victims of their own love of scandal. The comedy of manners was a staple of Restoration theatre with William Congreve and Molière being its most famous proponents. After it fell out of favor it was revived in the later part of the 1700s when a new generation of playwrights like William Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan took up writing them again. Praised for its tight writing and razor wit, The School for Scandal skewered high-society with such spirited ridicule and insight that it earned Sheridan the epithet of “the modern Congreve.”

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Heretics

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: G. K. Chesterton was an English writer, journalist, philosopher, poet and lay theologian. He delighted in standing conventional wisdom on its head in order to expose what he considered to be the lack of substance in the “vague modern.” In Heretics, he touches on a range of topics, including social Darwinism, eugenics, nihilism and atheism, while enumerating the flaws he finds in the work of his intellectual contemporaries such as Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Poetry

Author: James Weldon Johnson

Description: This collection contains the poems written by James Weldon Johnson between 1899 and 1927. During this period of Johnson’s life, he worked as a Broadway songwriter with his brother John Rosamund in the early 1900s, served as a United States Consul in Venezuela from 1906 to 1908 and in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1913, and was appointed as the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920. Johnson’s work arose in the milieu of the 1920s “Harlem Renaissance,” a term which Johnson personally refused to use, favoring “the flowering of Negro literature” instead. Perhaps among the most notable works anthologized in this collection are the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a hymn originally written as a poem by Johnson in 1899. Having been dubbed “The Black National Anthem,” the hymn has taken on the significance of a rallying cry for black Americans and is a frequent inclusion in Christian hymnals.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Aeneid

Author: Virgil

Description: Virgil’s epic poem begins with Aeneas fleeing the ruins of Troy with his father Anchises and his young son Ascanius, with a plan to make a home in Italy. Because of a prophecy foretelling that the descendants of Aeneas will one day destroy Carthage, Juno’s favorite city, Juno orders the god of the winds to unleash a terrible storm. The ships are thrown off course and arrive at an African port. As Aeneas makes his way towards his new home he encounters Dido, Carthage’s queen, and falls deeply in love. Although Charles W. Elliot stated that “the modern appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey has tended to carry with it a depreciation of the Aeneid,” this epic poem continues to inspire artists, writers, and musicians centuries after its first telling. John Dryden’s translation captures the musicality of the original Latin verses while avoiding the stumbling of an English translation forced into dactylic hexameter.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Beautiful and Damned

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Description: Anthony Patch, the grandson of a wealthy businessman, spends his youth in idle relaxation expecting to inherit his grandfather’s fortune. But when he meets Gloria, a vibrant young flapper, the two feel an irresistible attraction and quickly get married despite their clashing personalities. The two embark on a lifestyle of Jazz Age living: hard partying, profligate spending, and generally living the high life. But Anthony’s prohibitionist grandfather soon finds out and disowns Anthony, sending their lifestyle crashing down from its former heights to intolerable indignity. Like Fitzgerald’s previous novel, This Side of Paradise, and his next novel, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned documents the life of the idle rich in America’s Jazz Age. Both Anthony and Gloria’s characters explore the problem of what one is left to do when one has no other purpose in life. Because Anthony’s expecting a large inheritance, his ambition is muzzled and he feels no need to embark on a career or participate in the betterment of society. Gloria’s main purpose in life was to find a husband; once she’s done that, what’s left except spending money and partying? The relationship between Anthony and Gloria is the explosive propellant that drives the plot. The two are clearly a poor match for each other. While Anthony is an aimless aesthete who expects to inherit wealth and power, Gloria is a self-absorbed socialite mostly banking on her undisputed beauty. Their mutual selfishness leads to constant conflict, and eventually, to mutual dislike. But despite that, the two remain together, locked in to their self-absorption, lack of ambition, and obsession with the past, as Anthony descends into alcoholism and Gloria into desperate middle age. Anthony and Gloria are fairly transparent fictionalizations of Fitzgerald himself and his wife Zelda. Their relationship was famously tumultuous, and parallels Anthony and Gloria’s highs and lows. Fitzgerald himself was born to upper-middle-class wealth and led a aimless youth before turning to the army and to writing; in his later years, he considered himself nothing more than a middling success and turned to writing for Hollywood before totally embracing the alcoholism he had courted since his college days, and that would finally kill him. Zelda, for her part, was a socialite and the canonical “flapper.” Beautiful and bubbly, she enabled the legendarily hard-partying lifestyle that fueled their bitter fights. Her mercurial disposition later led her to being committed to an asylum for schizophrenia. Even the cover illustration of the book’s first edition features a couple meant to resemble Fitzgerald and Zelda. Today, The Beautiful and Damned is not just a glittering record of Jazz Age excess, it’s a nuanced character study of how expectation can ruin ambition, and how relationships aren’t always easy to endure—or to dissolve.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lord Jim

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Lord Jim was first published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine between October 1899 and November 1900. The first edition of the complete book was published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1900. The story begins when the young British seaman Jim, one of the crew of the steamer Patna, abandons the ship while it’s in distress. The resulting censure prevents Jim from finding stable employment, until a captain named Marlow suggests he find his future in Patusan, a small village on a remote island in the South Seas. There he’s able to earn the respect of the islanders and is dubbed “Lord Jim.” The abandoning of the Patna by its crew is said to have been based on the real-life abandoning of the S.S. Jeddah in 1880. Lord Jim explores issues of colonialism, dreams of heroism, guilt, failure, and redemption. The book is remarkable for its unusual nested narrative structure, in which Captain Marlow and a number of other characters provide multiple perspectives of the protagonist. The gradual build-up of their richly described viewpoints imparts glimpses of Jim’s inner life, yet ultimately leaves him unknowable.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: R. A. Lafferty

Description: Though often packed into the genre of science fiction, R. A. Lafferty might fit better into a category of the bizarre. Through a blend of folk storytelling, American tall tales, science fiction, and fantasy, all infused with his devout Catholicism, he has created an inimitable, genre-bending, sui generis style. Lafferty has received many Hugo and Nebula Award nominations and won the Best Short Story Hugo in 1973. Collected here are all of his public domain short stories, all of which were originally published in science fiction pulp magazines in the 1960s.

Subjects: fantasy, science fiction, shorts

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Title: Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades. This is a novel to read and cherish, if only to marvel at Woolf’s linguistic acrobatics. Words and phrases swoop and soar like swallows. Woolf’s sentences are magnificent: sinuous, whirling, impeccably detailed. As narrative perspective shifts from character to character—sometimes within a single sentence—readers come to understand the oh-so-permeable barrier between self and other. Through Clarissa we meet Septimus Warren Smith, his wife Rezia, and a cast of dozens more, all connected by the “leaden circles” of Big Ben marking the passage of every hour, by the pavements of Bloomsbury that lead everywhere and nowhere. Modernist London has never been portrayed more sublimely: replete with birdsong and flowers, resplendent in sunshine, youthful yet eternal—and even in the aftermath of war and pandemic, resilient. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s attempt to express that which may be inexpressible. It offers a close examination of how difficult it is, even when our hearts are brimming, to say what we really feel; and it examines the damage we inflict through our reticence with words, our withholding of love. It is a novel of the soul, and a work of immense beauty.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Psmith, Journalist

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Growing bored while accompanying his Cambridge chum Mike on a cricket tour of the United States, Psmith seeks adventure in New York City. He finds it in the form of the weekly newspaper Cosy Moments, a completely bland and inoffensive publication at which, through charm and sheer force of personality, Psmith appoints himself an unpaid subeditor, fires the entire contributing staff, and embarks on a crusade against the slumlords, gangs, and boxing managers of his holiday destination. Psmith, Journalist is the third of Wodehouse’s Psmith novels, and is a marked departure from the author’s usual settings and themes. It presents a very strong social justice theme with direct, harsh condemnation of exploitation, corruption, racism, and inequality in early twentieth century America, and its themes continue to resonate with readers a century later. The story first appeared in The Captain magazine from October 1909 to February 1910, and was first published as a book, including eight illustrations, by A C Black in 1915. This Standard Ebook is based on the 1923 edition by the same publisher.

Subjects: comedy

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Title: Memoirs of Arsène Lupin

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: In the process of writing his memoirs, Arsène Lupin takes us back to his early twenties and his first love: Clarice d’Etigues. Although forbidden by her father to meet, that doesn’t stop Ralph d’Andresy—Lupin’s nom du jour—from wooing Clarice. But when he finds evidence on the d’Etigues estate of a conspiracy to murder a woman, he cannot help but be drawn into the ensuing three-way race to a legendary treasure. Memoirs of Arsène Lupin was originally published in France in 1924 under the name La Comtesse de Cagliostro; this English translation was published the following year. Maurice Leblanc was not the only author to call on the myth of Cagliostro as a framing device: both Goethe and Dumas had written famous novels on the subject. This story showcases a Lupin who is growing into his abilities, and with the swings between outright confidence and self-doubt that would be expected of so comparatively young a protagonist.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Henry VI, Part III

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The first battle of St. Alban’s is over and the White Rose faction is victorious. They have captured Henry VI and, after having threatened him with violence, secured the king’s promise of passing the crown to Edward Plantagenet after his death. Not willing to accept her son’s disinheritance, Queen Margaret decides to take matters into her own hands and declares war on the Yorkists. Margaret’s forces invade Wakefield Castle, home to the Duke of York and his sons, and successfully capture York. The queen and Clifford taunt York and eventually stab him to death. York’s sons Edward and Richard receive news of their father’s death, vow to get their revenge, and plan to place Edward on the English throne. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Othello

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Othello was written in 1603 and first performed in 1604. The underlying story is based on “A Moorish Captain,” one of the stories in Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, written in 1565. Othello is a Moorish black general in Venice, known for his military prowess. He elopes with Desdemona, a noble Venetian lady, who is the daughter of Brabantio, a senator. When Othello promotes Cassio to be his lieutenant over Iago, his ensign, the evil Iago gets his revenge by alleging an affair between Cassio and Desdemona, sowing doubt in the mind of Othello. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Arrowsmith

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Description: Martin Arrowsmith, the titular protagonist, grows up in a small Midwestern town where he wants to become a doctor. At medical school he meets an abrasive but brilliant professor, Gottlieb, who becomes his mentor. As Arrowsmith completes his training he begins a career practicing medicine. But, echoing Lewis’s Main Street, small-town life becomes too insular and restricting; his interest in research and not people makes him unpopular, and he decides to work in a research laboratory instead. From there Arrowsmith begins a career that hits all of the ethical quandaries that scientists and those in the medical profession encounter: everything from the ethical problem of research protocol strictness versus saving lives, to doing research for the betterment of mankind versus for turning a profit, to the politics of institutions, to the social problems of wealth and poverty. Arrowsmith struggles with these dilemmas because, like all of us, he isn’t perfect. Despite his interest in helping humanity, he has little interest in people—aside from his serial womanizing—and this makes the path of his career an even harder one to walk. He’s surrounded on all sides by icons of nobility, icons of pride, and icons of rapaciousness, each one distracting him from his calling. Though the book isn’t strictly a satire, few escape Lewis’s biting pen. He skewers everyone indiscriminately: small-town rubes, big-city blowhards, aspiring politicians, doctors of both the noble and greedy variety, hapless ivory-towered researchers, holier-than-thou neighbors, tedious gilded-age socialites, and even lazy and backwards islanders. In some ways, Arrowsmith rivals Main Street in its often-bleak view of human nature—though unlike Main Street, the good to humanity that science offers is an ultimate light at the end of the tunnel. The novel’s publication in 1925 made it one of the first serious “science” novels, exploring all aspects of the life and career of a modern scientist. Lewis was aided in the novel’s preparation by Paul de Kruif, a microbiologist and writer, whose medically accurate contributions greatly enhance the text’s realist flavor. In 1926 Arrowsmith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis famously declined it. In his refusal letter, he claimed a disinterest in prizes of any kind; but the New York Times reported that those close to him say he was still angered over the Pulitzer’s last-minute snatching of the 1921 prize from Main Street in favor of giving it to The Age of Innocence.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Pimpernel and Rosemary

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: Rosemary, the former love of Peter Blakeney, is about to be married to one of Peter’s friends. A famous journalist, she is asked to come to Transylvania and report on the Romanian occupation following the first World War, having travelled there many times in her childhood with Peter’s mother. She agrees to move up her wedding so that her fiancé can travel with her. Soon after they get there, Peter’s nephew and girlfriend are arrested for treason, and Rosemary is given a terrible choice—all while Peter arrives in the country as well, seemingly working against his own family. Just as she went back several generations in previous entries in the series, this time the Baroness Orczy goes forward several, to the years immediately following World War I. Having grown up in Hungary, she sets the story in an area of the world very familiar to her, weaving her fictional characters into the real-world history of the time.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Thuvia, Maid of Mars moves the focus of Burroughs’ Martian series to Carthoris, the son of the human John Carter and Martian Dejah Thoris and the prince of Helium. Princess Thuvia of Ptarth and Prince Carthoris of Helium are in love. Fate, however, is against them: the princess is promised to another, the Jeddak of Kaol, Kulan Tith. So when the princess is kidnapped, suspicion falls on Carthoris, who sets out as his father would have to rescue the damsel and clear his name. As the great airborne navies of Mars’ military powers charge inexorably towards a needless war, Carthoris pursues the imperiled princess across borders and battlefields, making new enemies and allies along the way on a journey which traverses far and forgotten corners of Barsoom. Thuvia, Maid of Mars presents many familiar themes from Burroughs’ books, such as damsels in distress, fantastical adventures, chivalry, and derring-do, set against a backdrop of looming war and political intrigue. But it also introduces new elements, such as psychic armies and new flight technologies, as well as bringing entirely new races and settings to the series. It was originally published in 1916 as three serialized parts in All-Story Weekly, and published as a novel in 1920.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: At one of Robespierre’s “Fraternal Suppers,” a young man denounces Robespierre but is saved by an asthmatic vagabond. The young man flees to the home of his friend Theresia Cabarrus, who is engaged to one of the most important men in the government, and who is also desired by Robespierre himself. When the young man disappears from her home, allegedly at the hands of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the ever-present Chauvelin enlists her help in trying to capture the elusive Pimpernel. Events lead to the Pimpernel’s wife being kidnapped, and once again the Pimpernel has to use all of his wits to escape Chauvelin’s clutches with his life, and wife, intact. As she has done throughout the series, Baroness Orczy weaves the Scarlet Pimpernel into the threads of the history of the Revolution. In this entry, it is the Pimpernel’s interactions with the leading players of the day that eventually leads to Robespierre’s downfall.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: At the scene of Marat’s death, in an infamous cabaret in the old section of Paris, in an old abandoned château on the outskirts of the city, in a prison in the midst of the September massacres—the Scarlet Pimpernel and his League may be in all of these places, or they may be in none of them. In these eleven stories Chauvelin, Robespierre, and several other officials each make their attempts to catch the Pimpernel as he intervenes on the side of the innocent and helpless. The question in these stories is not really whether they will snare him, but how he will make his escape—and in some cases, whether he’s there at all.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: Mansfield Park

Author: Jane Austen

Description: At the age of 10, Fanny Price, the daughter of a poor Portsmouth family, is sent to live with her wealthy uncle’s family, the Bertrams, at the country estate of Mansfield Park. The Bertrams treat her cruelly at first, and Fanny has trouble fitting in. Her female cousins, Maria and Julia, are fashionable and vapid, and her elder male cousin, Tom, is a drunk. The only family member she feels a connection to is the younger Edmund, who is preparing for life in the clergy. hen her uncle leaves to manage business in Antigua, Henry and Mary Crawford, siblings from the region, come to live at Mansfield Park as well. Their arrival begins a series of romantic engagements that strains the entire family’s relationships. Mansfield Park is unusual in that despite it being a great public success, with the first edition selling out in six months and a second edition selling out two years later, it wasn’t publicly reviewed until 1821, seven years after it was first published. Contemporary reviews were generally good, praising the novel’s morality. Modern reviews are more mixed, making it one of Austen’s more controversial works. Modern critics have called it everything from eccentric and difficult to thoughtful and profound, with any number of interpretations possible depending on the lens one views the work through.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Enormous Room

Author: E. E. Cummings

Description: In Great War–era France, E. E. Cummings is lifted, along with his friend B., from his job as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross, and deposited in a jail in La Ferté Macé as a suspected spy. There his life consists of strolls in the cour, la soupe, and his mattress in The Enormous Room, the male prisoners’ communal cell. It’s these prisoners whom Cummings describes in lurid detail. The Enormous Room is far from a straightforward autobiographical diary. Cummings’ descriptions, peppered liberally with colloquial French, avoid time and, for the most part, place, and instead focus on the personal aspects of his internment, especially in the almost metaphysical description of the most otherworldly of his compatriots: The Delectable Mountains. During his imprisonment, Cummings’ father petitioned the U.S. and French authorities for his liberty. This, and his eventual return home, are described in the book’s introduction.

Subjects: autobiography, fiction

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Title: The Duchess of Malfi

Author: John Webster

Description: John Webster was a later contemporary of Shakespeare, and The Duchess of Malfi, Webster’s best known play, is considered among the best of the period. It appears to have been first performed in 1612–13 at the Blackfriars before moving on to the larger and more famous Globe Theatre, and was later published in 1623. The play is loosely based on a real Duchess of Amalfi, a widow who marries beneath her station. On learning of this, her brothers become enraged and vow their revenge. Soon the intrigue, deceit, and murders begin. Marked by the period’s love of spectacular violence, each character exacts his revenge, and in turn suffers vengeance at the hands of others. Coming after Shakespeare’s equally sanguine Hamlet and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi brings to a close the era of the great Senecan tragedies of blood and revenge. As the Jacobean period progressed, the spectacle became more violent and dark, reflecting the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of King James’ court.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The First Sir Percy

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: Set a mere three months after The Laughing Cavalier, the titular first Sir Percy is set to wed his love Gilda in a double wedding with her brother and his intended. The attendees include many of the rich and famous, including the Stadtholder himself. But immediately after the ceremony, bad news arrives, and Percy, A.K.A. Diogenes, is tasked with rushing to get messages to two of the Stadtholder’s divisions that are in peril from the enemy. But there are unknown enemies about as well as known ones, and Diogenes will soon face the darkest hours and direst threats of his young life. In the seventh published novel in the series, Baroness Orczy returns again to early seventeenth-century Netherlands, but with a darker tone than The Laughing Cavalier. This time she turns her focus to the antagonist and his henchmen, and once again puts her hero in an untenable position. This time the nation’s life is at stake, as well as his own.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Henry VI, Part II

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Suffolk returns from France bringing the new Queen of England, Margaret of Anjou, and a peace treaty. The Duke of Gloucester discovers that the French forces are allowed to keep the territories of Anjou and Maine in a trade for Margaret; he foresees that England will lose what little control remains over France. Because Gloucester heavily influences King Henry VI’s decisions and is highly respected amongst his peers, he is seen as a major target. Cardinal Beaufort, Gloucester’s main rival, mentions to Buckingham and Somerset his interest in removing Gloucester. The Duke of York sees Gloucester’s death as an opportunity to grab the English throne for himself. The French are also in favor of removing Gloucester from power. For Queen Margaret and the Duke of Suffolk to manipulate the king and help France, Henry’s most loyal advisor must not stand in their way. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: National Avenue

Author: Booth Tarkington

Description: National Avenue, originally titled The Midlander, is Booth Tarkington’s final entry in his Growth Trilogy. Like the previous entries in the series, National Avenue addresses the rapid industrialization of small-town America at the turn of the century, and the socioeconomic changes that such change brings with it. Dan Oliphant and his brother Harlan are the children of a wealthy small-town businessman. Harlan is a traditional upper-class man—affecting an accent, dressing for dinner, and contemplating beauty and culture—while Dan is boisterous and lively, eager to do big things. Dan sees the rise of industry in America’s east as a harbinger for his own Midwestern town, and sets his mind on building an industrial suburb, Ornaby Addition, next to his city’s downtown. Dan’s idea is met with scorn and mockery from not only his family, but also his fellow townspeople. Dan persists nonetheless, and soon the town must contend with his dream becoming a reality: noisy cars, smoky factories, huge, unappealing buildings, and the destruction of nature and the environment become the new normal as Dan’s industrial dream is realized. here The Turmoil focuses on industrialization’s effect on art and culture, and The Magnificent Ambersons focuses on industry’s destruction of family and of small-town life, National Avenue focuses on the men and women who actually bring that change about. Dan is portrayed sympathetically, but Tarkington makes it clear that his dreams and choices lead to a deeply unhappy family life and the ruination of the land around him. But can Dan really be faulted for his dream, or is industry inevitable, and inevitably destructive?

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Verses on Various Occasions

Author: John Henry Newman

Description: Verses on Various Occasions is a collection of poems written by John Henry Newman between 1818 and 1865. This period of Newman’s ecclesiastical career saw his ordination as an Anglican priest in 1825, his involvement in the High Church “Oxford Movement” in the 1830s, his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and his founding of the Birmingham Oratory, a Catholic religious community, in 1849. The poems in this collection span a range of Christian subjects, including piety, biblical prophets, Church Fathers, and Newman’s evolving views on the Catholic Church. Some noteworthy inclusions are “The Pillar of the Cloud,” which has been set to music as the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light,” and “The Dream of Gerontius,” which relates a man’s journey into the afterlife, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Subjects: poetry, spirituality

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Title: Henry VI, Part I

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Henry V has suddenly died, and the kingdom is in chaos. In England, noblemen are fighting amongst themselves. Loyalties are divided into two factions: the White Roses (York) and the Red Roses (Lancaster). The Duke of Gloucester, Henry VI’s Protector, is accused by Cardinal Beaufort of seizing the throne for himself. Meanwhile in France, the Dauphin Charles has been crowned the new king. English-held land once conquered by Henry V is quickly being recaptured by French forces. In one of these battles, the English hero Talbot is imprisoned. A French woman named Joan la Pucelle—also known as Joan of Arc—has been having visions that reveal to her how to defeat the English Army. The only thing that unifies the two countries is their pessimism towards the new English monarch. It is now Henry VI’s turn to rule over England, or die trying. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Wings of the Dove

Author: Henry James

Description: The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the most well-received of Henry James’s novels. First published in 1902, it follows Kate Croy and Merton Densher, an engaged couple in late-Victorian London, who meet Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress. Milly, though young and lively, is burdened with a fatal disease. She wishes to spend her last days on happy adventures through Europe, and her sparkling personality, still bright despite her looming death, quickly makes her a hit in the London social scene. As she plans an excursion to Venice, Kate and Merton, who are too poor to marry and still maintain their social standing, scheme to trick Milly out of her inheritance. The character of Milly is partly based on Minny Temple, James’ cousin who died young of tuberculosis. He later wrote that the novel was his attempt to immortalize her memory, and that he spent years developing the core of the book’s conceit before committing it to the page. The novel is James at his peak: dizzyingly complex prose weaves rich, impressionistic character studies, heavy in symbolism and allusion, amid the glamorous backdrops of high-society London and decaying Venetian grandeur.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Adventures of Pinocchio

Author: Carlo Collodi

Description: The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story that has reached many people across the globe since it was first penned by Carlo Collodi in 1883. The adventures were originally published in serial format in an Italian weekly magazine for children. In 1940, Disney released an animated film adaptation of the story that has solidified the fable in popular culture. A wooden puppet is crafted out of a magical piece of wood by Geppetto, a humble woodworker. To Geppetto’s surprise, the puppet comes to life. Thus begins the adventures of this magical puppet, Pinocchio. Geppetto takes the role of father to Pinocchio, and tries to stress the importance of his education. Pinocchio, however, is drawn into many mischievous adventures by his peers and others.

Subjects: children’s

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Title: Leave It to Psmith

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Psmith, down on his luck, takes out a newspaper advertisement to undertake a job, and the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, younger son of Lord Emsworth, enlists Psmith to steal his Aunt Constance’s diamond necklace. Psmith inveigles himself into Blandings Castle, posing as a Canadian poet. He falls in love with Eve Halliday and has to survive the suspicious and Efficient Baxter. In the meantime, others in Blandings Castle are also after the necklace. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the twentieth century. After leaving school, he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years. Leave It to Psmith was originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the U.S. and in Grand Magazine in the U.K. in 1923. It is the sequel to Psmith, Journalist.

Subjects: comedy

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Title: Harding’s Luck

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Harding’s Luck, published in 1909, is the sequel to The House of Arden by E. Nesbit. Rather darker and more serious in tone than the previous book, this novel is set in England’s Edwardian era, when there was no government-supported welfare and the poor still sometimes starved to death. It centers on young Dickie Harding, a poor, lame orphan boy who is enticed to run away with a disreputable tramp, Mr. Beale. Beale intends to use him to help carry out burglaries (a plot device not dissimilar to that of Oliver Twist). Nevertheless Beale becomes a substitute father-figure to Dickie and a strong mutual affection develops. The story then introduces a magical device which sends Dickie back in time to the early reign of King James I, where he inhabits the body of the son of the lord of a castle. Despite this new, very comfortable existence, where he is a member of a rich, respected family and no longer lame, Dickie selflessly forces himself to return to his present day because of a promise he had made to Beale and a desire to help Beale lead a more honest life. Nesbit was a member of the socially progressive Fabian Society and a friend of H. G. Wells, and it shows in her stories. While Harding’s Luck is primarily a children’s novel, it touches on many deeper themes and comments seriously on the social conditions of the author’s time.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Summer

Author: Edith Wharton

Description: Edith Wharton’s controversial novel Summer is the story of Charity Royall, an ambitious young woman trapped in a stifling small town by both her gender and her social class. When a visiting stranger arrives in town, Charity is awakened to a wider world of possibilities and to the realities that constrain her. Published in 1917, the novel was both attacked and ignored for openly acknowledging female sexuality and its many inequities. Later generations of critics have come to regard the book as an important turning point in Wharton’s work and a spiritual companion to her classic novel, Ethan Frome.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: No More Parades

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: No More Parades is the second in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End series. The book, released just a few years after the close of the war, is based on Ford’s combat experiences as an enlisted man in World War I, and continues the story first begun in Some Do Not …. Christopher Tietjens, after recovering from the shell shock he suffered in Some Do Not …, has returned to the edge of the war as a commanding officer in charge of preparing draft troops for deployment to the front. As the “last true Tory,” Tietjens demonstrates talent bordering on genius as he struggles against the laziness, incompetence, and confusion of the army around him—but his troubles only begin when his self-centered and scandalous wife Sylvia appears at his base in Rouen for a surprise visit. Unlike Some Do Not …, which was told in a highly modernist series of flash-backs and flash-forwards, Parade’s End is a much more straightforward narrative. Despite this, the characters continue to be realized in an incredibly complex and nuanced way. Tietjens, almost a caricature of the stiff, honorable English gentleman, stoically absorbs the problems and suffering of those around him. Ford simultaneously paints him as an almost Christlike character and an immature, idealistic schoolboy, eager to keep up appearances despite the ruination it causes the people around him. Sylvia, his wife, has had her affairs and scandals, and is clearly a selfish and trying personality; but her powerful charm, and her frustration with both her almost comically stiff-lipped husband and the war’s interruption of civilization, lends her a not-unsympathetic air. The supporting cast of conscripts and officers is equally well-realized, with each one portraying a separate aspect of war’s effect on regular, scared people simply doing their best. The novel was extremely well-reviewed in its time, and it and the series it’s a part of remain one of the most important novels written about World War I.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Description: The Great Gatsby is a novel that needs no introduction for a certain generation of American readers. Long taught as required reading in American schools, critics have consistently held it up alongside Moby Dick, Huck Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird as perhaps the quintessential Great American Novel. Nick Carraway is a young Midwestern man freshly arrived in New York to make his fortune. He rents a shabby apartment in Long Island next door to a sumptuous mansion: the home of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Carraway spends time catching up with his distant cousin Daisy and her industry-baron husband Tom before being invited to one of Gatsby’s wildly lavish weekend parties. There he meets Jordan, a flapper and a golf star, and an intricate web of romances and betrayals begins to unfold. The novel is a colorful study of America’s Jazz Age—a term said to be coined by Fitzgerald himself—complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he’s already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city? Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-league school who went to live on Long Island. Despite his meager finances he hobnobbed with socialites, and spent his career struggling for money to maintain the grand style his romantic interests were accustomed to. The cover art, titled Celestial Eyes, was commissioned from Francis Cugat, who completed it before the novel was finished. The huge eyes gazing down on the blazing city so moved Fitzgerald that he wrote them into the story. Fitzgerald saw the novel as a purely artistic work, free of the pulp pandering required by his shorter commissions—but despite that, contemporary reviews were mixed, and it sold poorly. Fitzgerald thought it a failure, and died believing the novel to be fatally obscure. Only during World War II did it come back to the public consciousness, buoyed by the support of a ring of writers and critics and printed as an Armed Service Edition to be sent to soldiers on the front. Now it is an American classic.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lord Tony’s Wife

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: In the midst of the French Revolution, Pierre, a young firebrand, convinces a group of rabble to rise up against the local duc. Coming across the carriage of the duc’s daughter on their march, Pierre assaults her, is run over by the carriage, and disappears. Looking to punish someone for the uprising, the duc has Pierre’s father hanged. Years later, Pierre has changed his name, gathered some wealth, and ingratiated himself with the duc (who does not know him). Pierre has plans to avenge his father’s death against both the duc and his daughter, and he has enlisted the aid of Chauvelin, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s avowed enemy. The Pimpernel will have all he can handle if he is to foil Pierre’s plans. Although published a few years after El Dorado, this sixth published book in the series is set prior to it in the timeline.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Children’s Stories

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: Early in his literary career Oscar Wilde published two collections of children’s stories and fairy tales. This edition contains the stories from both The Happy Prince and Other Tales, published in 1888, and A House of Pomegranates, published in 1891. The two books present two slightly different sensibilities, and though stories like “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant” have grown into timeless children’s classics, the darker tales told in A House of Pomegranates remain less well known and were, as Wilde said, “intended neither for the British child nor the British public.” hile Wilde is best known as a playwright and celebrated for his wit and aphorisms, his early writings contain the seeds of his biting criticism of late Victorian society. And this was true no more so than in these fairy stories which explore the ideals of friendship, love, kindness and charity; the stories both celebrate these attributes and show how they are too often twisted or ignored by the very societies that espouse them.

Subjects: children’s, shorts

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Title: McTeague

Author: Frank Norris

Description: McTeague is an enormously strong but dim-witted former miner now working as a dentist in San Francisco towards the end of the nineteenth century. He falls in love with Trina, one of his patients, and shortly after their engagement she wins a large sum in a lottery. All is well until McTeague is betrayed and they fall into a life of increasing poverty and degradation. This novel is often presented as an example of American naturalism where the behavior and experience of characters are constrained by “nature”—both their own heredity nature, and the broader social environment. McTeague was published in 1899 as the first of Norris’s major novels.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: An Outback Marriage

Author: Banjo Paterson

Description: The posh, English daughter of an Australian pastoralist is sent to Kuryong station to learn the ropes. At the same time, a search is underway across the desolate innards of regional New South Wales for the lost son of a wealthy uncle. These stories collide to give a humorous take on the values of family, marriage and hard work, set in the beautiful backdrop of the Australian Outback. This was Banjo Paterson’s first novel after a string of widely celebrated poems written in the late 1800s.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Yama

Author: Aleksandr Kuprin

Description: Yama (The Pit) recounts the lives of a group of prostitutes living and working in Anna Markovna’s brothel in the town of K⸺. The women, subject to effective slavery through the removal of their papers and onerous debts, act out a scene of easy affability every evening for the part ignorant, part monstrous clients, while keeping secret their own pasts and wished-for futures. The book was Kuprin’s attempt to denormalize the cultural ambiguity of the legal brothels of the time. His dedication—“to mothers and youths”—expresses his desire that there should no longer be a silent acceptance of the actions of the “fathers, husbands, and brothers.” The novel was notable for portraying the inhabitants of the brothels as living, breathing people with their own hopes and desires, not purely as a plot point or scenario. The critical response was mixed: many found the subject matter beyond the pale. Kuprin himself placed his hopes on a favourable review from Leo Tolstoy, which didn’t come; but there was praise for Yama as both social commentary and warning, and an appreciation for Kuprin’s attempt to detail the everyday lives of his subjects. The novel had a troubled genesis, with the first part taking nine years between initial proposal and first publication; the second and third parts followed five years later. It was a victim of the Russian censors who, tellingly, disapproved more of scenes involving officials visiting the brothels, than the brothels themselves. It was only later during preparations for an anthology of his work that an uncensored version was allowed to be released. This edition is based on the translation to English by Bernard Guilbert Guerney of that uncensored version, and was first published in 1922.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Laughing Cavalier

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: A young woman in 17th century Holland inadvertently overhears the details of a plot to kill a political figure. The principal figures in the plot, one of whom is her brother and another her former lover, hire an insolent English mercenary to kidnap her to get her out of the way until their deeds are done. From there very little goes according to plan. For her fifth published novel in the series, Baroness Orczy uses Franz Hals’ famous painting titled The Laughing Cavalier to build an elaborate backstory for the ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: El Dorado

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: In the Scarlet Pimpernel’s fourth outing, he and his league want to free the orphaned Dauphin of France from his captors. But someone else has the same idea, although for very different, and selfish, reasons. In addition to trying to outflank his rival, the Pimpernel also has to deal with a member of his inner circle whose romance has caused him to disobey orders and put the entire plan in jeopardy. Completing his mission while once again escaping the clutches of his arch-enemy Chauvelin will push the Pimpernel to the breaking point.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The House of Arden

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Edith Nesbit was a popular children’s author of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras in Britain. Though she was writing more than a century ago, her books nevertheless remain popular and are generally still in print. The House of Arden was published in 1908. Like her other, perhaps better known tales, such as Five Children and It, the story takes quite ordinary children of the time and plunges them into fantastical adventures. In this book, two children, with the interesting Saxon names of Edred and Elfrida, aged 10 and 12 respectively, discover that due to the death of a distant relative, young Edred is now Lord of Arden. The estate consists of not much more than a little money, a crumbling castle, and an attached house. An old retainer tells them of a legend regarding the Lord of Arden and a buried treasure. Naturally they are eager to locate the treasure, which may help them restore the castle. They discover a way to summon up the mascot of the House, a white mole or “mouldiwarp,” who enables them to travel back through time in search of the treasure.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: The Land That Time Forgot

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Land That Time Forgot opens with the discovery near Greenland of a floating thermos flask containing a manuscript by castaway Tyler Bowen, Jr. The document recounts a series of adventures that starts with a sea battle against a German U-boat and ends on a mysterious island populated by hostile prehistoric animals and people. The second part of the book, “The People That Time Forgot,” continues the story with the tale of Tom Billings, who has been sent on a mission to rescue Bowen after his manuscript was discovered. He flies solo over the mountainous cliffs that encircle the island and is attacked by a monstrous flying reptile, forcing him to crash-land. Billings then attempts to make his way on foot back to the rest of his party while contending with dangerous inhabitants from different stages of human development. The final installment of the story, “Out of Time’s Abyss,” reveals what happened to Bradley, a crew member who was sent on a scouting expedition earlier in the story and was never heard from again. This trilogy of short novels was originally published serially in 1918 in Blue Book Magazine. In 1924 they were published in a single volume by A. C. McClurg. The Burroughs fan community seems to fall into two camps about whether the story comprises three separate novellas, or whether it’s a single novel divided into three parts. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the 1924 edition in combining the three into a single novel.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: The Elusive Pimpernel

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: In the third published installment of her Scarlet Pimpernel stories, Baroness Orczy brings back Chauvelin, the French official unable to catch the Pimpernel in the first novel. This time he is more determined, more ruthless, and more devious. He plans to capture both the Pimpernel and his wife, threatening an entire town in the process. He has thought of every possibility, closed every loophole, anticipated every move of his arch-rival. It appears that at last the Pimpernel might have met his match.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: I Will Repay

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: The young Vicomte de Marny rashly challenges a French official to a duel, and dies as a result. The Vicomte’s father, the ancient Duc de Marny, insists that his daughter, Juliette, swear an oath before God to seek revenge on the man who killed her brother. Years later, as the French Revolution rages, Juliette insinuates herself into the official’s household, and quickly discovers a way to anonymously accuse him before the National Convention. It will take all of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s ingenuity to rescue his friend from the guillotine. I Will Repay is the first of the many sequels that Baroness Orczy wrote after the phenomenal success of the book and play versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In this first sequel, she leaves him mostly in the background until the denouement, when the Pimpernel once more must use all of his skills in disguise and subterfuge to rescue a friend and his household.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Progress and Poverty

Author: Henry George

Description: Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, was American political economist Henry George’s most popular book. It explores why the economy of the mid-to-late 1800s had seen a simultaneous economic growth and growth in poverty. The book’s appeal was in its balance of moral and economic arguments, challenging the popular notion that the poor, through uncontrolled population growth, were responsible for their own woes. Inspired by his years living in San Francisco and his own experience with privation, George argues instead that poverty had grown due to the increasing speculation and monopolization of land, as landowners had captured the increases in growth, investment, and productivity through the rising cost of rent. To solve this, George proposes the complete taxation of the unimproved value of land, thus returning the value of land, created through location, to the community. This solution would incentivize individuals to use the land they own productively and remove the tendency to speculate upon land’s increasing value. George’s argument was profoundly liberal, as individuals retain the right to own land and enjoy the profits generated from production upon it. Progress and Poverty was hugely popular in the 1890s, being outsold only by the Bible. It inspired the Single Tax Movement, and influenced a wide range of intellectuals and policymakers in the early 1900s including Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Cask

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: During the unloading of an Insular and Continental Steam Navigation Company ship arrived from Rouen, the Bullfinch, a cask falls, splits, and reveals its unexpected contents. As the dockworkers try to work out what to do, Mr. Léon Felix arrives and claims the cask as his own. His actions set into motion a complicated trail for the detectives of London’s Scotland Yard and Paris’s Sûreté to follow to the end. Freeman Wills Crofts was one of many authors writing crime fiction in Britain in the 1920s and 30s, and was a contemporary and acquaintance of both Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. The Cask, his first novel, was written during leave from his job as a railway engineer, but its reception was good enough to set Crofts on the course of a further thirty crime novels over his career as an author.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Jacob’s Room

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: In her third novel, Virginia Woolf departs from conventional narrative and explores storytelling through discordant scenes and impressions. Jacob Flanders’ life story is told through the perspectives of the people in his life. In Jacob’s Room, we see Jacob grow from a young boy to an ardent student of Classical culture while the world around him moves closer to an impending war. Jacob is described in flashes by the women around him—his mother and his lovers.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: This collection of short “mystery” stories by Oscar Wilde was originally published in 1891 and was his second published collection of stories. This edition follows the 1907 edition, which was published after his death and added “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a story first published in 1899. ritten around the same time as The Picture of Dorian Gray and before he turned his hand to playwriting, these stories showcase the quintessential Wilde: dark irony combined with an incisive dissection of Victorian society, with just a hint of the supernatural added to amuse and engage his Victorian audience.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Author: Henry Fielding

Description: A baby is deposited in the bed of Squire Allworthy, a wealthy widower in Georgian England. The baby is given the name of Tom Jones and given to Allworthy’s live-in sister to raise. She soon marries and has her own son, and the two boys are raised together, with the usual household rivalries and jealousies. As Tom reaches his late teenage years, he discovers the several young ladies that surround, but especially the one that lives next door. Circumstances eventually lead to Tom being thrown out of Allworthy’s house, and the bulk of the novel is about the resulting adventures and pursuit of his beloved Sophia. Tom Jones is many things: a coming-of-age story, a romance, a picaresque, but it is first and foremost a comedy. It is also one of the earliest English novels, and was hugely popular when it was released, going through four printings in its first year. Fielding used the first chapter of each of its eighteen “books” to weigh in on a wide-range of topics, from critics to religion, and his narrator is as important a character in the novel as Tom himself. Highly regarded and highly popular, it is still in print over three-and-a-half centuries after its initial success.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Description: Edgar Allan Poe is one of the primary figures of American nineteenth-century literature. His writing was heavily influenced by Romanticism ideals of emotion and feeling, and although mostly known for his Gothic-tinged horror, his tales jump between many different genres, including science-fiction, satire, humor, mystery, and even early detective fiction. Poe mostly wrote short stories and poems, published in magazines and periodicals like the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s Magazine, although he also turned his hand to essays and novels (including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket). He was one of the first American writers to pursue writing as a career, but was better received in France than in his native country. He struggled to make ends meet and resorted to work as a literary critic. His reputation suffered a further blow after his unfortunately early death in 1849 at the age of 40, when a rival not only wrote an extremely unflattering obituary, but bought the rights to his work and published a compilation with a hit piece for an introduction. This undeserved reputation took many decades to fade, but didn’t hinder praise from other notable authors including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft. Collected here are all of Poe’s short fiction stories, in order of their original magazine publication. Notable stories include “The Gold-Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and many more.

Subjects: adventure, comedy, horror, mystery, satire, science fiction, shorts

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Title: King Lear

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: King Lear is a tragedy by Shakespeare, written about 1605 or 1606. Shakespeare based it on the legendary King Leir of the Britons, whose story is outlined in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudohistorical History of the Kings of Britain (written in about 1136). The play tells the tale of the aged King Lear who is passing on the control of his kingdom to his three daughters. He asks each of them to express their love for him, and the first two, Goneril and Regan do so effusively, saying they love him above all things. But his youngest daughter, Cordelia, is compelled to be truthful and says that she must reserve some love for her future husband. Lear, enraged, cuts her off without any inheritance. The secondary plot deals with the machinations of Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, who manages to convince his father that his legitimate son Edgar is plotting against him. After Lear steps down from power, he finds that his elder daughters have no real respect or love for him, and treat him and his followers as a nuisance. They allow the raging Lear to wander out into a storm, hoping to be rid of him, and conspire with Edmund to overthrow the Earl of Gloucester. The play is a moving study of the perils of old age and the true meaning of filial love. It ends tragically with the deaths of both Cordelia and Lear—so tragically, in fact, that performances during the Restoration period sometimes substituted a happy ending. In modern times, though, King Lear is performed as written and generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s best plays. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Julius Caesar

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: After defeating enemies in battle, Roman citizens celebrate in the streets as Julius Caesar and his entourage make their way through the city. As Caesar passes a soothsayer, he receives an ominous warning: “Beware the ides of March,” which he immediately disregards. Meanwhile, some of his closest followers are convinced their leader has become too powerful and plot his removal. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans was Shakespeare’s primary source for Julius Caesar. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Some Do Not …

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: Some Do Not … opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf. As their love story develops, the novel explores the horrors of the war without the narrative ever entering the battlefield. The characters are complex and nuanced. Tietjens is an old-fashioned man even by the standards of his day; he’s concerned with honor and doing the right thing, but he lives in a society that only pays those values lip service. Yet he himself isn’t free of a thread of hypocrisy: he won’t leave his deeply unhappy marriage because that would be the wrong way to act, but the reader is left wondering if he tolerates his situation simply because he married up in class. He wants to do to the noble and right thing, but does that mean going to war? The men and women around him each have their individual motivations, and they are often conniving and unlikable in their aspirations even as the propaganda of England at war paints the country as a moral and heroic one. The delicate interplay of each character’s subtleties paints a rich portrait of 1920s English society, as the romantic ideals of right and wrong clash with notions of ambition and practicality. The prose is unapologetically modernist: unannounced time shifts combine with a stream-of-consciousness style that can often be dense. Yet Ford’s portrayal of shell shock, the politics of women in the 1920s, and the moral greyness of wartime is groundbreaking. The book, and its complete tetralogy—called Parade’s End—has garnered praise from critics and authors alike, with Anthony Burgess calling it “the finest novel about the First World War” and William Carlos Williams stating that the novels “constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Art of War

Author: Sun Tzu

Description: Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise on the art of war has exerted enormous influence over both Asian and Western soldiers, covering subjects ranging from morale and discipline to the correct use of spies. Despite questions about the historicity of the author, the text has stood the test of time and remains widely read by strategists, politicians, and even business leaders today. Though Dr. Lionel Giles was not the first to translate Sun Tzu into English, he was the first to do so in a systematic and scholarly manner. His translation was unequaled until the mid-20th century, and remains relevant today due to his copious notes.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Decameron

Author: Giovanni Boccaccio

Description: In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron. The Decameron was written after the Black Plague spread through Italy in 1348. Most of the tales did not originate with Boccaccio; some of them were centuries old already in his time, but Boccaccio imbued them all with his distinctive style. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to comedy, from lewd to inspiring, and sometimes all of those at once. They also provide a detailed picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Italy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Five Children and It

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: Initially published in The Strand Magazine, which explains its episodic nature, Five Children and It was later collected into a book. Like many of E. Nesbit’s works, it has proven popular with children and adults to this day. It has been adapted into a TV series, a musical, a film, and even an anime series. In this story, five siblings encounter an ancient magical creature in a gravel pit. The Psammead, as it calls itself, grants each of them a wish per day, with the restriction that it ends at sunset. As expected, all of the children’s wishes go comically wrong, and it’s up to them to solve the problems they created. E. Nesbit’s enduring popularity is due in large part to the way she addresses children. Like Lewis Carrol and Kenneth Grahame, she engages children seriously, tapping into their imagination without any condescension. C. S. Lewis admired her, and the grumpy (but kind) sand-sorcerer Psamathos in Roverandom, a story J. R. R. Tolkien wrote for his own children, bears a striking resemblance to the Psammead—indeed, an early version of the story featured the creature itself!

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Quo Vadis

Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Description: Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero was first published in Polish as Quo vadis. Powieść z czasów Nerona. Among Henryk Sienkiewicz’s inspirations was the painting Nero’s Torches (Pochodnie Nerona) by fellow Pole Henryk Siemiradzki; the painting, which depicts cruel persecution of Christians, serves as the cover art for this ebook edition. Sienkiewicz incorporates extensive historical detail into the plot, and notable historical figures serve as prominent characters, including the apostles Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Ofonius Tigellinus, and the infamous Nero himself. Sienkiewicz used the historical basis of the novel as an opportunity to describe in detail the lives of the citizenry under Nero’s cruel and erratic rule. Sienkiewicz was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for his authorship of Quo Vadis. The book was exceedingly popular both domestically and internationally: it was translated into more than 50 languages, sold 800,000 copies in the U.S. within a period of eighteenth months, and was the best selling book of 1900 in France. The plot of Quo Vadis follows the love story of Marcus Vinicius and Lygia. He is a young, charming, up-and-coming Roman patrician; she is a high-ranking hostage, a former princess of a country conquered by Rome. Vinicius’s immediate infatuation with Lygia is complicated by her devout Christianity, a faith barely tolerated in Rome of the time. As the painting that inspired the novel foreshadows, Rome burns in a great fire, and Christians receive the blame. The subsequent persecution of the Christians in Rome serves as the main obstacle between the two lovers. Sienkiewicz portrays a pro-Christian narrative throughout the book, with the apostles Peter and Paul serving as spiritual mentors to both Vinicius and Lygia. The novel’s title translates to “Where are you going, Lord?”, a quote from the apocryphal Christian text the Acts of Peter, which depicts Peter’s death. The text describes how while fleeing Rome, Peter asks a vision of Jesus the titular question, to which Jesus replies that he is returning to Rome to lead the Christians since Peter, their leader, is deserting them. Peter then realizes he must turn back and remain with his people, despite the cost. Quo Vadis depicts this exchange, along with Paul’s fate and the deaths of Nero and Petronius, Vinicius’s wise and worldly uncle and mentor. Sienkiewicz contrasts Petronius’s and Nero’s hedonism with Vinicius’s and Lygia’s journey to a deeper faith in their God, and with Peter and Paul’s faithful martyrdom, to great effect. As such, the novel is not just a love story, but also a thoughtful reflection on how one’s way of living affects how they see death.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Pierre and Jean

Author: Guy de Maupassant

Description: The sons of the Roland family, Pierre and Jean, return home in the lull between the completion of their studies and the start of their professional careers, bringing the Roland family back together again, in a way. This peace, though, is broken when the younger brother Jean is left a life-changing inheritance by Maréchel, an old family friend—and Pierre is left with nothing. Despite the happiness in the rest of the family, unanswered questions start gnawing at Pierre. Pierre and Jean was Guy de Maupassant’s shortest novel, and is often acclaimed as his greatest. The setting for the novel is the scenery of de Maupassant’s childhood, and it is, accordingly, richly described. It was serialized in Nouvelle Revue in 1887 before being published as a complete novel in 1888; this edition is based on the 1902 translation by Clara Bell.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Hadji Murád

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: In this short novel, Tolstoy fictionalizes the final days of Hadji Murád, a legendary Avar separatist who fought against, and later with, Russia, as the Russian Empire was struggling to annex Chechnya and the surrounding land in the late 1840s. The novel opens with the narrator finding a thistle crushed in a blooming field, which reminds him of Hadji Murád and his tragic tale. As the narrator recounts the story, the reader is quickly thrust into the rich, colorful history of the Caucuses, and its people’s fight against Russian imperialism. Hadji Murád is portrayed as a legendary and imposing, yet friendly and approachable figure. Despite his reputation, it seems that his best days are behind him; as the novel opens, Murád is fleeing Shamil, a powerful imam who has captured Murád’s family. Murád finds himself thrust between the invading Russians on one side, and Shamil’s vengeance on the other. As Murád and his tiny but loyal group of warriors try to forge alliances in their attempt to rescue Murád’s family, they quickly find themselves politically outclassed. The Russians are Murád’s enemies, yet only they can help him in his struggle against Shamil; and after years of losses incurred by Murád’s guerrilla tactics, the Russians would like his help but cannot trust him. Shamil, on the other hand, is a deep link to the region’s complex web of tribal blood feuds, vengeances, reprisals, and quarrels over honor. He’s one of the few powers left standing between the Russians and their control of the Caucuses, but Murád, having crossed him, can’t rescue his family from Shamil’s clutches without the help of the Russians. Murád’s impossible position, the contradiction between his legendary past and his limping, dignified, and ultimately powerless present, and the struggle against a mighty empire by a people torn by internecine conflict, form the major thematic threads of the novel. The novel was one of the last that Tolstoy finished before his death, and was only published posthumously in 1912. Tolstoy himself served in the Crimean War, and the war scenes portrayed in the novel echo his personal experiences. As the story progresses, Tolstoy characterizes various real-life historical personalities besides Hadji Murád and Shamil, including Emperor Nicholas I, Mikhail Loris-Melikov, and Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, making this a fascinating piece of historical fiction. Despite this being such a late entry in Tolstoy’s corpus, it has been highly praised by critics both contemporary and modern, with the famous critic Harold Bloom going so far as to say that Hadji Murád is “my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best I have ever read.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Penguin Island

Author: Anatole France

Description: Penguin Island, published by Anatole France in 1908, is a comic novel that satirizes the history of France, from its prehistory to the author’s vision of a distant future. After setting out on a storm-tossed voyage of evangelization, the myopic St. Maël finds himself on an island populated by penguins. Mistaking them to be humans, Maël baptizes them—touching off a dispute in Heaven and ushering the Penguin nation into history.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, satire

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Title: The Turmoil

Author: Booth Tarkington

Description: Bibbs is the dreamy, sensitive son of Mr. Sheridan, a cigar-chomping, larger-than-life businessman in the turn-of-the-century American Midwest. Sheridan made his fortune in the rapid industrialization that was overtaking the small towns and cities of America, but Bibbs—named so “mainly through lack of imagination on his mother’s part”—is too sickly to help his father in Sheridan’s relentless quest for “Bigness.” The Sheridan family moves to a house next door to the old-money Vertrees family, whose fortunes have declined precipitously in this new era’s thirst for industry. Bibbs makes fast friends with Mary, Vertrees’ daughter; but as he tries to make a life for himself as a poet and writer, away from the cutthroat world of business, he must face off against the relentless drum of money, growth, and Bigness that has consumed American small-town life. The Turmoil is the first book in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy, a series that explores the destruction of traditional small-town America in favor of industrialization, pollution, automobiles, overcrowding, and suburbia. Tarkington makes no secret of his opinion on the matter: the trilogy is filled with acrid smoke, towering buildings crammed with people, noise and deadly accidents caused by brand-new cars, brutal working conditions, and a yearning for the clean, bright, slow, dignified days of yore. The book was made in to two silent films just eight years apart from each other. Its sequel, The Magnificent Ambersons, went on to win the Pulitzer prize in 1919.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: He Who Gets Slapped

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Description: A mysterious gentleman arrives at Papa Briquet’s circus, and applies to be a clown; unable to do a backflip, and with the circus unwilling to accept the idea of political discourse among the clowns, they settle together on the role of He Who Gets Slapped. Unfortunately for the troupe, He has motives for joining that aren’t immediately apparent; motives that start to threaten the integrity of the circus. He Who Gets Slapped was first presented in Moscow in 1915 to enthusiastic audiences, although critics at the time were confused about Leonid Andreyev’s subtexts. It is his most famous play, at least partially due to the later release in 1924 of a film adaptation by the newly formed M.G.M. Studios.

Subjects: drama

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Title: R.U.R.

Author: Karel Čapek

Description: R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots is a play written in 1920 by Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who wrote many plays and novels, many of them with science-fiction and dystopian themes. R.U.R. is perhaps the most well-known of these works in the English-speaking world because it brought the word “robot” into the language. “Robot” is derived from the Czech word meaning “worker.” The play is set in the island headquarters of the R.U.R. corporation. The corporation has been manufacturing artificial beings which resemble humans, but who are tireless workers. They can be mass-produced in large numbers and are being adopted as workers in many countries. In the first scene of the play, they are visited by a young woman, Helena Glory, who aspires to relieve the lot of the robots, who she sees as oppressed. However, in what must be the fastest seduction scene in all drama, she is wooed and agrees to marry Harry Domin, the factory manager, who she has just met. She still however aspires to improve the life of robots and find a way to give them souls. Ultimately, however, this admirable desire leads to disaster for humankind. The play was translated into English, and slightly abridged, by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair in 1923. This version quickly became popular with both British and American audiences and was well received by critics.

Subjects: drama, science fiction

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Title: The Tempest

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The Tempest, thought to be one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone, begins with a storm which shipwrecks the king of Naples and his crew. We quickly learn that the tempest was not a natural occurrence; it was created by Prospero, the usurped duke of Milan who is stranded on a nearby island, with the help of Ariel, a spirit in his service. The rest of the play explores the relationships between the shipwrecked crew, Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and a native of the island: a half human, half monster called Caliban. Though this play is traditionally classified as a comedy, more modern scholarship, out of a desire to highlight the dramatic elements of some of Shakespeare’s comedies, created a genre subgroup called the “late romances.” The Tempest is included in that subgroup. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Romeo and Juliet

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Over four hundred years after it was first published, Romeo and Juliet remains one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most frequently performed plays. During the late 1500s many playwrights loved to base their plays off of Italian stories, and Shakespeare was no different; he was heavily influenced by the Italian tale “The Goodly History of the True and Constant Love of Romeo and Juliett.” Today Romeo and Juliet continues to spread its influence within literature and performing arts. It has been adapted into 24 operas, numerous films, a ballet, and has also been referenced in law. The play has entertained generations with its romance, deception, revenge, sword-fighting, creative verse, comedic relief, and tragic fate. The prologue lays before us the fate of our star-crossed lovers: two Italian households have a long, ongoing vendetta against each other, kept under control only by Prince Escalus, the ruler of Verona. Romeo meets with his friends Benvolio and Mercutio after having his heart broken by Rosaline. Encouraged to find love elsewhere, Mercutio sneaks him into one of Capulet’s masked parties, where he encounters Juliet, Capulet’s daughter. This is the beginning of a love affair that is destined to end in tragedy. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Our Nig

Author: Harriet E. Wilson

Description: Our Nig is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson, her only published work. It was written not for pleasure, but to financially support the lives of the author and her sick child. It was long considered to be the first novel published by an African-American woman in the United States, but recent research has put that title into question. Frado, born to a white mother and black father, is abandoned by her parents at age six and left to the Bellmont family. Though the Bellmonts live in the northern United States, the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Bellmont, loathes her for her dark skin color. She forces Frado (nicknamed “Nig”) to do the chores of the family under the threat of rawhide floggings and beatings. However, not everyone agrees with Mrs. Bellmont’s treatment of their new family member.

Subjects: autobiography, fiction

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Title: Bashan and I

Author: Thomas Mann

Description: In Bashan and I (sometime referred to as Man and Dog), Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, writes in the most remarkable way of the unique relation that links a dog with his master. These memoirs read as a novel, and describe in fierce detail the behavior, feelings and psychology of Mann’s dog Bashan, and of Mann himself. Mann tells how he acquired Bashan, details traits of his character, and describes how they go on harmless and bucolic hunts. ritten in 1918 at the end of the First World War, Bashan and I is an ode to life, to nature, to simple joys, and to a dog.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Irish Fairy Tales

Author: James Stephens

Description: This collection of short stories, retold by Irish author James Stephens, focuses mainly on the adventures of legendary hunter-warrior Fionn mac Uail and his companions in the Fianna. The stories often feature the magical people of the Shí (fairies) and their interactions with the residents of medieval Ireland.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Pollyanna

Author: Eleanor H. Porter

Description: Eleven year-old Pollyanna, having recently been orphaned by her widower father, is sent back East to be cared for by her dutiful and stoic Vermont aunt. Naive and ever-literal, this very positive young girl brings with her an infectious habit of instinctive gratitude that was taught to her as “the game” by her late father. This game serves her well, while also uplifting the turn of the century New England community which becomes her home. Pollyanna inspired the production of five feature length films and fifteen subsequent novels, including books written by six other authors. Pollyanna was a best-selling children’s book when first published, and the eponyms “Pollyanna” and “Pollyanna Principle” have taken a lasting place in our culture.

Subjects: children’s

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Title: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Author: Phillis Wheatley

Description: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first book of poetry ever published by an African-American author. Phillis Wheatley’s deep familiarity with Latin literature and Christianity, combined with her African ancestry, provided her with a unique and inimitable view of poetry. She was kidnapped and brought over to America on a ship called The Phillis after which she was named. Her interest in poetry and literature was recognized by the Wheatley family who, though keeping her enslaved, provided her with classic works of literature by authors such as Virgil, Homer, Terence, and Pope, all of whom had a significant influence on her work. She received praise from many of her contemporaries including George Washington, John Hancock, and Voltaire. Shortly after publishing her collection of poetry she was emancipated by the Wheatley family. Even so, her life ended in poverty and obscurity. Though her influence on poetry and African-American literature is indisputable, more modern critics of her work point to the lack of censure of slavery and the absence of discussion about the lives of black people in the United States as an example of the Uncle Tom syndrome.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Author: Frederick Douglass

Description: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was written in 1845, seven years after Douglass escaped slavery, and is the first of three autobiographies. It covers his life as a slave, enduring the whips of the overseers and the hopelessness of his circumstances, until his escape to the north and arrival at New Bedford, Massachusetts. The brutalities he witnessed and his slowly growing desire for freedom are presented in the vivid language he was already known for in his antislavery oration. The eloquence of Douglass’s speeches caused some skeptics to doubt his credibility, believing that a former slave with no education could never speak so well. Thus, part of his motivation for writing the book was to dispel this suspicion and to provide a fuller history than was possible in his lectures. The abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips provided introductions vouching for the truth of Douglass’s words. The book was an immediate best seller. The fame brought danger to Douglass, who sailed for England shortly after the book’s publication to ensure he would not be apprehended as a fugitive slave. He spent two years touring and lecturing in Great Britain and Ireland before returning to America to continue his abolitionist work. English supporters raised funds to purchase his freedom from his former master. The slave narrative is an autobiographical genre written by escaped slaves concerning their lives in bondage. Slave narratives not only promoted abolitionism by giving first hand evidence of the cruelty and hypocrisy of slaveholders, but also allowed African Americans to express themselves as intelligent, articulate individuals, deserving of respect and freedom. Douglass’s Narrative is perhaps the most important example of the genre, on the basis of its literary merits and its impact on the abolitionist movement.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Way of the World

Author: William Congreve

Description: William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World was first performed in 1700 at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It was not well received, and as a result Congreve vowed never to write for the stage again—a vow he kept. Nonetheless the comedy was printed in the same year and has come to be regarded as the author’s masterpiece, a classic of Restoration drama. In a world still reacting against the puritanism of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, Restoration drama had slowly transitioned from celebrating the licentiousness and opulence of the newly returned court to the more thoughtful and refined comedy of manners that was to dominate the English stage of 18th century. In one way Congreve’s The Way of the World is the last (and best) of its type, and in another way, it is the forerunner of a style that is echoed even now. The play centers on the love affair of Mirabell and Millamant who are prevented from marrying by a number of obstacles, not the least of which is Mirabell’s past dalliance with Millamant’s aunt’s affections. Intricate, witty, and amusing, the comedy nevertheless concludes with no clear heroes or heroines—one of the things that makes it such an incisive portrait of human experience and an enduring example of its type.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: Roughing It

Author: Mark Twain

Description: hen Orion Clemens is appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, his brother Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, joins him on his journey west. Together with their all-important six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary they make their way to Nevada in a six-horsed mail coach and are, of course, derailed by all sorts of problems. In Roughing It Twain combines the beautiful descriptions of the West’s idyllic landscape with his now-patented sense of humor. He joins the silver and gold mining scramble, begins his career as a writer working for different newspapers and journals, visits the Mormons of Salt Lake City, and even makes his way to Hawaii, then still known as the Sandwich Islands. Roughing It was written as a prequel to his earlier travelogue The Innocents Abroad.

Subjects: memoir, travel

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Title: Green Forest Stories

Author: Thornton W. Burgess

Description: American naturalist and conservationist Thornton W. Burgess was the author of more than one hundred books for children; the best-remembered of these is Old Mother West Wind, which was originally written for his young son. Burgess also wrote dozens of books about the creatures of the northern North American forest, four of which are collected here as the Green Forest Stories. This Green Forest Stories compilation focuses on Lightfoot the Deer, Blacky the Crow, Whitefoot the Wood Mouse, and twin bear cubs Woof-Woof and Boxer. Readers may have encountered these characters in other of Burgess’s stories about the “little people” of the Massachusetts forest. Burgess’s earliest ventures into animal fantasy are roughly contemporary with Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Beatrix Potter’s tales of various animals, and represent the most lasting American entry into this genre. Animal fantasy is a sub-genre of children’s literature in which animals are anthropomorphized into human-like characters and use language like humans. It is often criticized by those who want readers to experience more realistic representations of animals and the natural world, but animal fantasies engage a millennia-old tradition, in the Western canon reaching back at least as far as Aesop’s Fables; animal characters feature in teaching stories for children (and adults) in cultures around the world. Burgess’s stories are intended for children in the early elementary grades. The challenges and triumphs of the “little people” in his stories will feel identifiable to many young readers, and the snippets of moralizing and authorial commentary interleaved with the actions of the plot reflect a teaching device with a long history. In the late twentieth century, Burgess fell out of favour with teachers and librarians. This shift occurred in part due to changing tastes in literary style and in part due to a changing society. Burgess is entirely a writer of his time. Most of the animals he depicts are male, and many of the female animals who wander into the stories are more passive and more stereotyped than the kinds of representation preferred for girls today. (Such is not the case, however, of Old Granny Fox, who may be the smartest of the little people Burgess represents and certainly does not lack agency or self-determination.) The style of Burgess’s storytelling is undeniably old-fashioned but still deserves consideration. Although the writing is often simple and plain, there are rhetorical flourishes that reveal the author’s attention to craft. In particular, Burgess’s use of formulaic expressions such as “jolly, round, bright Mr. Sun” and “the Merry Little Breezes” links these tales to an orality that stretches back to at least The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer (think of phrases such as “the wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered Dawn,” and “bright-eyed Athena”). Through his broader use of repetition and through onomatopoeia, Burgess underscores characteristics of his characters’ real-life forest counterparts—the way a chickadee calls, a squirrel scolds, or a rabbit lopes, for example. In these stories, as in the Green Meadow Stories collection, we observe features that signal Burgess’s experience as a writer for periodicals and as an early radio broadcaster. Each chapter begins with reminders about the previous chapter, and chapters end with either a strong, propulsive conclusion or a traditional cliff-hanger. The chapters are generally quite short—a comfortable size to read as a bedtime story, and just long enough to hold a new reader’s attention without demanding too much of that reader’s energy. The strong narrative voice sounds distinctly like oral storytelling. One can almost imagine a small group of young people seated in a circle at the storyteller’s feet. That image captures the essence of these animal tales. They are light, bright peeks into a complex and beautiful world, a world any girl or boy may want to pursue through study or personal explorations. As humanity faces the daily loss of animal species, stories that delight readers and listeners, that encourage them to learn about and respect the creatures of the non-human world, deserve our renewed attention and respect.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Queen Victoria

Author: Lytton Strachey

Description: The publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in 1918 was a tremendous success. In it, Strachey looked at four iconic figures of the Victorian Age and punctured the hagiographical illusions surrounding them. It seems only fitting that he should follow up in 1921 with a similarly unsentimental but fair biography of the person at the pinnacle of that era, Queen Victoria herself. Thoroughly researched, with his references documented in hundreds of footnotes, Strachey looks at the life of the young woman who, when she was born, was by no means certain to become the British monarch. He also spends considerable time on her consort, Prince Albert, who, in Strachey’s telling, develops from a careless youth to becoming a truly remarkable and effective figure in British society, while continuing to be generally perceived as an outsider. Strachey’s sardonic and witty style makes this account of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert an entertaining and very informative read.

Subjects: biography, nonfiction

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Title: She

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: A professor is entreated by a dying colleague to take custody of the colleague’s five-year old son, raise him to adulthood, and at that time pass on a chest to him. The professor does so, and when the child reaches adulthood and the chest is revealed, it leads them on an adventure to Africa. There they encounter a young queen of a lost race who says she’s over two thousand years old, with an equally startling claim about the young man. H. Rider Haggard invented the “lost world” genre of fiction with King Solomon’s Mines, and he continued the theme, adding in a bit of romance, in She. Haggard wrote the book in six months “in a white heat,” and handed the manuscript to his agent with the remark, “There is what I shall be remembered by.” Haggard was right: with its setting in darkest Africa and a woman at its center described as the most beautiful in the world, She was a sensation at its release, has never been out of print, and has sold upwards of 100 million copies.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Green Meadow Stories

Author: Thornton W. Burgess

Description: Thornton W. Burgess was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children, the most enduring of which are Old Mother West Wind and The Burgess Bird Book for Children. Burgess was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern North American forest. The Green Meadow Stories compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of Happy Jack Squirrel, Mrs. Peter Rabbit, Bowser the Hound, and Old Granny Fox. Through the adventures of these focal characters readers are introduced to the wider territory of the Green Meadows, the Green Forest, and the Smiling Pond as well as to the animals’ Great World. The animals of Burgess’s stories are anthropomorphized, undoubtedly, but not caricatured: these are not the twee creatures of Disney cartoons. Their behaviour is explained in ways that would be understandable to a human child—this is fiction, after all—but Burgess’s “little people of the forest” are not simply humans dressed in fur and feathers. The original illustrations in Burgess’s books (by Harrison Cady, not reproduced in this edition) show the animals wearing clothes, but Burgess’s own descriptions of animals are more natural and metaphorical, and less fantastic. For example, he describes Chatterer the Red Squirrel, “who always wears a red coat with vest of white,” a compact way of communicating the look of a squirrel that many of today’s children will never have seen with their own eyes. Less pleasantly, it is Peter Rabbit’s fur and flesh that is rent when Hooty the Owl tears Peter’s “coat” one night on the Old Pasture. Burgess has tremendous respect for the creatures he depicts, as well as for their natural home. While the presentation of the Green Meadow is hardly “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” it is surprisingly unsentimental. Peter Rabbit, for example, lives a highly anxious life under threat from the many predators who would enjoy having him for dinner; similarly, Happy Jack Squirrel experiences days and nights of terror when Shadow the Weasel discovers Happy Jack’s home and hunts him relentlessly. During a long, hard winter, Granny Fox and Reddy Fox come close to starving, and Old Man Coyote leads Bowser the Hound on a dangerous chase that may result in one or the other dying. Despite other fanciful, sentimental elements of storytelling, Burgess does not sugarcoat prey/predator relationships or the precarity of wild animals’ lives. Burgess is a clear conservationist in his representations of hunting. The animals are highly aware of hunters and their “dreadful guns.” It is a notable moment in this collection when Farmer Brown’s Boy decides he will no longer use his gun to harm the little people of the Green Meadow and the Green Forest. The stories are also notable in their detailed representation of a largely intact forest, something few children in the twenty-first century will experience. On the other hand, these are books for children, and they contain plenty of sweetness and light. Animal pairings—such as when Peter Rabbit meets the dainty Little Miss Fuzzytail, the future Mrs. Rabbit—are vague but sentimental and soon lead to proud new families of Rabbits, Ducks, Deer, and Owls. The “little people” celebrate the arrival of each spring’s babies, mark each other’s new relationships and homes, play together, and even help each other survive. They laugh, tease, and trick each other—a fanciful interpretation of animal behaviour that could lead to a reader’s life-long fascination with, and respect for, forest creatures—and for generations of readers, they did just that. The stories are also more didactic than most twenty-first-century authors would dare to be. There are morals associated with most stories, often attributed to the animal about whom the story is being told. Through this practical teaching, Burgess suggests a correspondence between how animals and humans live; but he consistently clarifies that animal intelligence is different from, but certainly no less than, human intelligence. Unlike the bouncy rhyming verses of many of today’s children’s books, Burgess’s sentences have a somewhat old-fashioned cadence, creating the distinct and appealing music of traditional storytelling. Burgess’s episodic chapters are eminently readable and particularly come to life when they are voiced by animated reading-aloud. For older readers looking for something different to share with children, or for new readers beginning to tackle “chapter books,” the tales of the Green Meadow Stories collection are a delightful place to discover Burgess and his animal friends.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Author: James Weldon Johnson

Description: The protagonist of this fictional autobiography wrestles with race in America from the perspective of someone who learns that he is considered black but also that he can pass as white if he wants to. His personal ambitiousness and racial ambivalence makes him a sort of American Hamlet: undone by indecision. Will he be “a credit to his race” by advancing an African-American heritage he loves and appreciates in the face of a hostile culture, or will he retreat into the mediocrity of a safe, white, middle-class family life? Along the way, he shares his penetrating observations about race relations in the American north and south, about the “freemasonry” of subterranean black American culture, about the emerging bohemian jazz subculture in New York City, and about traditions of African American religious music and oratory.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Erewhon

Author: Samuel Butler

Description: In a desire for better sheep-farming land on an unnamed British colony, Higgs decides to traverse the distant mountain range. On the other side he discovers not the empty rolling plains of his imagination but an entirely new civilization: the land of Erewhon. Inducted into the ways of their culture, he attempts to transcribe as best he can their thoughts on birth, death, machines, the production of food, their financial system, and many more subjects that on first glance seem absurd to the narrator but often end up revealing absurdity in his own thinking. Erewhon was extremely well received on its initial (and anonymous) publication, with its satirical commentary on contemporary Victorian attitudes ensuring its commercial success. Samuel Butler incorporated into the novel his philosophical ideas, including chapters founded on his interest in Darwinian evolution theory, and on the potential rise in artificial consciousness. George Orwell held the novel in high regard, and the Erewhonian philosophy on the danger of machines even made its way into Frank Herbert’s Dune series as the “Butlerian jihad.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Black Star Passes

Author: John W. Campbell

Description: In the year 2126, scientists Arcot and Morey chase a sky pirate—and invent the technology to travel through space. In the second story, the heroes travel to Venus and make first contact with an alien species. Finally, they must defend the solar system from invaders whose own star has long since gone dark. Originally published separately as “Piracy Preferred” in Amazing Stories June 1930 edition, “Solarite” in Amazing Stories November 1930, and “The Black Star Passes” in Amazing Stories Quarterly Fall 1930, these three novellas were edited and collected into this volume in 1953. This is the first book in John W. Campbell’s Arcot, Morey, and Wade trilogy. Most famous for editing Astounding Science Fiction and Fact magazine and introducing Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and many other great science fiction authors to the world, Campbell’s other notable works include the novella “Who Goes There?”, which was adapted to film as The Thing by John Carpenter in 1982.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Fritz Leiber

Description: Fritz Leiber is most famous for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” stories, but he also wrote in many other genres. Between 1950 and 1963 he wrote a number of short stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine, including one in the same universe as The Big Time and the Change War stories (“No Great Magic”).

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Clotel

Author: William Wells Brown

Description: The first published novel by a black American author combines real-life stories, including his own story of escaping slavery and recollections he heard while helping others escape, with abolitionist agitprop, revealing ephemera from the newspapers of the time, and sympathetic (if somewhat melodramatic) characters. What emerges from this collage is an indictment of slavery and of American hypocrisy about liberty that found an enthusiastic and enraged audience when it was published in 1853. Clotel has a complex publishing history, with four separate editions published between 1853 and 1867. These editions contain huge differences in characters and plotting, so much so that they might each be considered separate novels in their own right. This edition is based on the first edition of 1853.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Main Street

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Description: Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which she’s exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicott’s home town. Carol, inspired by big-city ideas, soon begins chafing at the seeming quaintness and even backwardness of the townsfolk, and their conservative, self-satisfied way of life. She struggles to try to reform the town in her image, while finding meaning in the seeming cultural desert she’s found herself in and in her increasingly cold marriage. Gopher Prairie is a detailed, satirical take on small-town American life, modeled after Sauk Centre, the town in which Lewis himself grew up. The town is fully realized, with generations of inhabitants interacting in a complex web of village society. Its bitingly satirical portrayal made Main Street highly acclaimed by its contemporaries, though many thought the satirical take was perhaps a bit too dark and hopeless. The book’s celebration and condemnation of small town life make it a candidate for the title of the Great American Novel. Main Street was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but the decision was overturned by the prize’s Board of Trustees and awarded instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. When Lewis went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, he declined it—with the New York Times reporting that he did so because he was still angry at the Pulitzers for being denied the prize for Main Street. Despite the book’s snub at the Pulitzers, Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, with Main Street being cited as one of the reasons for his win.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Ukridge Stories

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is one of P. G. Wodehouse’s less famous characters. He first appears in Love Among the Chickens in 1906 and then continues to make appearances in another 19 short stories until as late as 1966, making him Wodehouse’s longest running character. Ukridge is an inveterate opportunist, and these stories chronicle his exploits as a young man: his trials and tribulations as one who is destined for greatness, if the rest of the world would only cooperate. Told from the point of view of his long-suffering friend and fellow bachelor “Corky” Corcoran, they chronicle their many meetings in the years before the period of Love Among the Chickens. As with most of his stories, Wodehouse published the first 10 stories in both the U.S. (Cosmopolitan) and the UK (Strand Magazine) before they were published in the 1924 collection Ukridge.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: Satan’s Diary

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Description: Satan has returned to Earth for a sightseeing visit in the form of the American billionaire Henry Wondergood. Accompanied by his faithful demon butler Toppi they head for Rome, but are sidetracked by an unforeseen accident and end up at the home of the inscrutable Thomas Magnus and his divine daughter Maria. As Satan begins to discover the meaning of being a man, the satanic aspects of mankind become ever more apparent to him. Leonid Andreyev was a Russian author active in the beginning of the twentieth century, famous mostly for his plays and short fiction, and often portrayed as Russia’s equivalent to Edgar Allan Poe. Satan’s Diary was his last work, completed just a few days before his death in 1919. This edition was translated by his previous collaborator Herman Bernstein and published in 1920.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: War and Peace

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, five aristocratic families in Russia are transformed by the vagaries of life, by war, and by the intersection of their lives with each other. Hundreds of characters populate War and Peace, many of them historical persons, including Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, and all of them come to life under Tolstoy’s deft hand. ar and Peace is generally considered to be Tolstoy’s masterpiece, a pinnacle of Russian literature, and one of history’s great novels. Tolstoy himself refused to call it that, saying it was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” It contains elements of history, narrative, and philosophy, the latter increasing in quantity as the book moves towards its climax. Whatever it is called, it is a triumph whose breadth and depth is perhaps unmatched in literature. This Standard Ebooks edition restores the Russian given names that were anglicized by the Maudes in their translation, the use of Russian patronymics and diminutives that they eliminated, and Tolstoy’s original four-book structure.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Comedy of Errors

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and shortest plays. This comedy utilizes slapstick humor, word play, and mistaken identities to create a series of farcical accidents. Over time, the play’s title has become an idiom used to describe “an event or series of events made ridiculous by the number of errors that were made throughout.” In Ephesus, the law forbids entry to any merchants from Syracuse, and if they are discovered within the city, they must pay a thousand marks or be put to death. Aegeon, an old Syracusian merchant, is arrested and Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus, listens to his story of coming to the city. Long ago, Aegeon was on a sea voyage. Traveling with him was his wife, his twin sons, and their twin slaves. The family becomes separated during a tempest; Aegeon, one son, and one slave were rescued together, and the others were never to be seen again. Years later his son Antipholus and his slave Dromio left to search for their long lost siblings; after the boys didn’t return, Aegeon set out to bring his son back home. Moved by this story, the duke allows Aegeon one day to get the money to pay his fine and to find his family. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Piccadilly Jim

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse, was first published on February 24, 1917 by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York. It was subsequently published in London in May 1918 by Herbert Jenkins. It is based on a story originally published in the Saturday Evening Post from September 16 to November 11, 1916. The book sees Jimmy Crocker, also known as “Piccadilly Jim,” trying to escape his increasingly bad reputation by returning to New York from London. On the way, he meets and falls in love with Ann Chester, and agrees to help her kidnap Ogden, her cousin, for his own good. Their plans go awry and become more convoluted as impersonations, explosives and a determined detective get in the way.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Iron Heel

Author: Jack London

Description: The Iron Heel is some of the earliest dystopian fiction of the 20th century. The novel is framed as a presentation of the long-lost “Everhard Manuscript,” a document written by the socialist revolutionary Avis Everhard around 1932. The manuscript is discovered in the year 2600, and is introduced and annotated by a far-future commentator. In it, Avis tells of how the United States was slowly overcome by a group of oligarchs, the Iron Heel, who use their monopoly power to systematically bankrupt American small businesses and farmers in order to cement their control over the capitalist system. Eventually, the U.S. Army is brought under the control of the oligarchs, who entrench a brutal system of repression against the working class. Everhard, her husband, and a scrappy group of socialists fight valiantly against the Iron Heel, though we learn in the foreword that they don’t survive the fight, and die as martyrs. London uses the narrative as a vehicle for espousing his socialist views, sometimes to the detriment of the plot, and even going so far as to plagiarize an essay by Frank Harris nearly verbatim—issues which caused the work to earn scant critical praise. Despite this, it sold over 50,000 copies in hardcover and influenced a generation of activists, including George Orwell, Harry Bridges, and Frederic Tuten.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Jude the Obscure

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.” Indeed, Jude was to be Hardy’s last novel. The story chronicles the life of Jude Fawley, an orphan boy of unremarkable birth or means, growing up in the small farming village of Marygreen in Hardy’s fictional version of Wessex, England. From an early age, Jude determines to chart the course of his life by the stars of learning and scholarship, but he very quickly discovers just how little interest the society of his time would take in the grand ambitions of a young man of so humble an origin. Without proper guidance and limited resources, his progress is slow and arduous. And when he discovers the existence of his cousin, the charming Sue Bridehead, it is nearly abandoned altogether in favor of an almost obsessive pursuit. The novel proceeds to trace the lives of Jude and Sue as they become locked in a struggle both against themselves and the conventions of their times. Lofty ideals clash with harsh realities; grand pursuits fall prey to darker aspects of human nature. Characters are complex: at times spiteful, selfish, or self-destructive. Hardy, however, remains very subtle in his portrayal of these tragic figures and their flaws. The effect is to render them convincingly human. Ultimately, Jude is an unhappy tale of unfulfilled promise that is rarely told, and rarely told so well.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Man in the Brown Suit

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: After her father’s death, young Anne Beddingfeld moves to London with her meagre inheritance, hopeful and ready to meet adventure. She witnesses a fatal accident at a Tube station and picks up a cryptic note dropped by the anonymous doctor who appeared on the scene. When Anne learns of a murder at the estate that the dead man was on his way to visit, it confirms her suspicion that the man in the brown suit who lost the note was not a real doctor. ith her clue in hand she gains a commission from the newspaper leading the search for the “man in the brown suit,” and her investigation leads her to take passage on a South Africa–bound ocean liner. On board, she meets a famous socialite, a fake missionary, a possible secret service agent, and the M.P. at whose estate the second murder occurred. She learns about a secretive criminal mastermind known only as the Colonel and of stolen diamonds connected to it all. During the voyage, she evades an attempt on her life, and in South Africa she escapes from a kidnapping and barely survives another attack on her at Victoria Falls. She falls in love, finds the diamonds, and discovers the truth about the two deaths in London that started it all. Finally, she confronts the mysterious criminal mastermind, the Colonel. Published in 1924 by the Bodley Head, The Man in the Brown Suit is Agatha Christie’s fourth novel. Unlike the classic murder mysteries that made her famous, The Man in the Brown Suit, like her second novel The Secret Adversary, is an international crime thriller.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, mystery

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Title: Poor Folk

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: In 1840s St. Petersburg the ageing copyist Makar Dievushkin is, with various degrees of subtlety, trying to woo Barbara Dobroselova, a young woman who has had a swift fall in fortunes. Told in alternating letters to each other, their past stories and current hopes play out in raw and personal detail, as the daily realities of an uncaring and expensive town take hold. Poor Folk was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel and was written to try and cover his escalating debts from his expensive lifestyle and gambling addiction. Luckily for Dostoevsky, it was an immediate success when it was published in the St. Petersburg Collection, and the accolades from critics such as Belinsky and Herzen propelled him into the high echelons of Russian literary society. This edition is the 1915 translation by C. J. Hogarth.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Vladimir Korolenko

Description: Vladimir Korolenko was a Ukrainian author and humanitarian. His short stories and novellas draw both on the myths and traditions of his birthplace, and his experiences of Siberia as a political exile due to his outspoken criticism of both the Tsars and the Bolsheviks. His first short story was published in 1879, and over the next decade he received many plaudits from critics and other authors, including Chekhov, though he also received some criticism for perceived uneven quality. He continued writing short stories for the rest of his career, but thought of himself more as a journalist and human rights advocate. Korolenko’s work focuses on the lives and experiences of poor and down-on-their-luck people; this collection includes stories about life on the road (“A Saghálinian” and “Birds of Heaven”), life in the forest (“Makar’s Dream” and “The Murmuring Forest”), religious experience (“The Old Bell-Ringer,” “The Day of Atonement” and “On the Volva”) and many more. Collected here are all of the available public domain translations into English of Korolenko’s short stories and novels, in chronological order of their translated publication. They were translated by Aline Delano, Sergius Stepniak, William Westall, Thomas Seltzer, Marian Fell, Clarence Manning and The Russian Review.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Howards End

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: Howards End, published in 1910, is considered by many to be Forster’s masterpiece. The plot revolves around three families in Edwardian England: the Schlegels, a trio of half-German, middle-class siblings who to poor people seem rich, but to rich people seem poor; the Wilcoxes, a large, wealthy family of businessmen; and the Basts, a lower class young couple struggling to keep up appearances. The Schlegel siblings are sharp, intelligent, and idealistic, and they pursue culture and art with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the Bloomsbury group. They befriend the Wilcoxes while on a trip abroad, and the lonely Wilcox matriarch and Margaret Schlegel, the strong-willed elder sister, strike up a friendship. As their families begin butting heads in London, Helen, the younger Schlegel sister, runs in to Leonard Bast while at the opera. Bast is proud and ambitious, but clearly impoverished and lacking gentility. Helen, a rash and fiery idealist, takes him up as a pet project, oblivious to the deep cultural gulf between Bast and themselves as she tries her best to educate him in matters of art and literature and lift him out of his class. The interplay between the three families becomes a complex reflection on social codes and class difference in England: how class can lock lives in place, and how even the well-to-do are not immune from becoming ossified in their station thanks to the seemingly unbreakable social conventions of the age. Capitalism, a still-new philosophy of life, is juxtaposed against humanism and the arts as the families try to do what they each think is the right thing. Forster weaves these threads expertly against the backdrop of London city life and the cozy family cottage of Howards End, the ultimate centerpiece in these three families’ lives.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Jurgen

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: Jurgen is James Branch Cabell’s most famous novel, and a highly influential one in the fantasy genre. The novel is a witty, parodic send-up of the ideal of courtly love. Soon after publication, its bawdy style and double-entendre-laden dialog brought it to the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who promptly attempted to prosecute it for obscenity. After some years Cabell finally won the trial, and the publicity the trial brought made the book and Cabell famous. In his revised 1922 edition (on which this ebook is based) Cabell satirizes the Society in his Foreword, where Jurgen is placed on trial by the Philistines, overseen by a giant dung beetle as prosecutor. The eponymous Jurgen is a pawnbroker and self-described “monstrous clever fellow” who, after passing by a demon and offering an offhand compliment, finds himself having regained his youth as he is launched on a magical, amorous journey. On his quest for love Jurgen meets a series of mythological and legendary characters—from Nessus the centaur, to Guinevere, to Helen of Troy, to the Lady of the Lake, and more. His wit charms all of them, though Jurgen never seems happy with whatever astonishing situation he finds himself in—whether it’s pestering the devils of hell or chatting with the creator in heaven. The novel is dense with allegory and allusion, but despite its erudition it maintains a brisk pace as puns and witticism zip by. It influenced a huge number of authors, including Fritz Leiber and Robert A. Heinlein, and was widely considered a masterpiece of its time, with personalities like Aleister Crowley proclaiming it an “epoch-making masterpiece of philosophy.” Its publication and widespread popularity and acclaim set the stage for the modern fantasy-comedy genre perfected by authors like Terry Pratchett and Piers Anthony.

Subjects: comedy, fantasy

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Title: Le Morte d’Arthur

Author: Thomas Malory

Description: Thomas Malory did not invent the stories of Arthur, King of Britain, but it is fair to say that he reinvented them. Although the legends were already hundreds of years old by the fifteenth century, the contemporary stories of Arthur in Malory’s day were primarily French. The French had added many of the elements familiar to modern readers, among them Lancelot, and the search for the Holy Grail. Malory combined, edited, and added some of his own material to the stories available to him, and in the process created a uniquely British work. (It was his printer Caxton who gave it a French name.) Le Morte d’Arthur is the source material for almost all modern retellings of King Arthur and his knights, from Hollywood movies and musicals to Nobel-prize winning writers. Malory’s identity is still in some dispute, as there are several men of various spellings of the name to choose from. Sir Thomas Malory from Newbold Revel in Warwickshire is the most popular choice, but his life of crime—he was a rapist and serial thief at the minimum—seems to be at odds with the acts of chivalry and moral code present in this book. It is known from the author’s own notes that he wrote the book while in prison; perhaps he was trying to make amends for his crimes. Regardless, the result was to give new life to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: First Lensman

Author: E. E. Smith

Description: Against the backdrop of a secret war between two all-powerful alien races, Virgil Samms of the Triplanetary Service is selected by the seemingly omniscient Arisians to be the first bearer of the Lens. Only individuals deemed brave, virtuous, capable, and incorruptible can receive a Lens, which grants its user telepathy and other powers. With it, Samms seeks out other “Lens worthy” humans and aliens, with the goal of creating a Galactic Patrol that will defend planets adhering to Civilization from corruption, vice, and piracy. First Lensman is the second book in E. E. Smith’s Lensman series but was the last to be written. Unlike the rest of the series, it was never serialized, and was first published in 1950 to help link Triplanetary with Galactic Patrol. Smith’s imaginative and bizarre alien races are on full display, as well as the constantly escalating space warfare that is the hallmark of the space opera genre.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Gambler

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: In the fictional town of Roulettenberg, Germany, a Russian tutor to the children of a seemingly wealthy general is enticed to play roulette at the local casino. First playing for others (including his beloved Polina Alexandrovna), he soon gets a taste for the experience himself, which can lead in only one direction. Dostoevsky wrote this story based at least partially on personal experience. After his second marriage (and the successful publication of Crime and Punishment) he and his wife took a honeymoon in Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky lost large quantities of money at the roulette table. To get his financial situation back to normal he then set up a wager with his publisher: they’d have the right to publish his work for free for nine years if he couldn’t deliver this novel by November 1866. He succeeded in this, and was able to move on to writing The Idiot. The Gambler has been translated to screen and radio, and was even turned into an opera by Prokofiev. This edition is the 1915 translation by C. J. Hogarth.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Journey to the Center of the Earth

Author: Jules Verne

Description: A classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, this work is one of the most well-known subterranean fictions to this day. It inspired many similar works and adaptations. First published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre, it was quickly translated to English by several different publishers in the 1870s. The current edition was based on the translation by Frederick Amadeus Malleson that was published by Ward Lock Co Ltd. in 1877. Our protagonist is Axel, whose overcautious and unadventurous spirit contrasts with that of his uncle Professor Otto Lidenbrock, an eccentric professor of geology. When Professor Lidenbrock obtains a mysterious runic-coded note in the manuscript of an Icelandic saga, he is determined to decipher it. Axel inadvertently solves the code and, much to his chagrin, discovers that it is a set of directions left by a sixteenth-century Icelandic alchemist to reach the center of the earth via the volcano Snæfelljökull. Reluctantly, Axel joins his uncle on a trip to Iceland, and with the aid of a local guide, Hans, begins an adventure towards the center of the earth, where they will encounter giant mushrooms and insects, an island with an enormous geyser, and battle pre-historic reptiles. One of Verne’s most well-known works, this novel is a testament to Verne’s love of geology, science, and cryptography.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: Pellucidar

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: Pellucidar, the sequel to At the Earth’s Core, was published in 1915. It continues the adventures of David Innes as he returns to the hollow interior of the Earth in search of his friend Perry and his lost love Dian the Beautiful. He takes with him many tools and weapons, intent on bringing civilization to the savage world within, which is populated with dinosaurs and neolithic creatures. He has many perilous adventures as he battles to survive.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Time Traders

Author: Andre Norton

Description: The Time Traders is the first book in Andre Norton’s Time Traders series. First published in 1958 by World Publishing Co., The Time Traders is told from the perspective of Ross Murdock, a young criminal faced with a choice: be turned over to the new Rehabilitation Service or volunteer for a secret government project. Murdock chooses the secret government project, hoping for a chance to escape. At the Arctic base he learns what the project is, and instead of escaping he joins a team posing as Beaker Traders during Europe’s Bronze Age. His team makes several jumps through time searching for the source of technology the Reds are using to gain advantages in the present.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the many comedies written by William Shakespeare. It was written around 1595 and first published in Shakespeare’s first quarto in 1600. The exact reason for why this play was produced has been lost to time; some historians theorize that it could have been written for an aristocratic wedding, or for Queen Elizabeth I to celebrate the feast of St. John. The play opens with Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, planning the celebration of their marriage. During their visit to Athens four guests—Demetrius, Lysander, Helena, and Hermia—are trying to find their own spouses and to follow each other into the woods. Also entering the woods are six actors practicing a play for the duke and his new wife. Unbeknownst to all, they have also entered the realm of the fairy kingdom, ruled by King Oberon and Queen Titania and inhabited by the mischievous Puck. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: A Tangled Tale

Author: Lewis Carroll

Description: In the late 19th century, Lewis Carroll—better known these days as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—was also an established mathematician who had published many books and papers in the fields of algebra and logic. His mathematical interest extended to the setting of puzzles for popular consumption. The stories collected here cover varied subjects including the cataloguing of paintings, the number of times trains will pass each other on a circular track, the most efficient way to rent individual rooms on a square, and many more. They were published originally in The Monthly Packet magazine and then collected with some additional commentary into a book originally published in 1885. Included along with the stories is a full appendix with Carroll’s answers, and his often acerbic commentary on the answers submitted to him at the time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Marvelous Land of Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Description: Four years after writing his immensely popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum returned to the Land of Oz in this second book of fourteen he wrote about the magical country. Like its predecessor, The Marvelous Land of Oz has delighted children through the years, and has been adapted into stage plays, films, and comics. A young boy named Tip lives in Gillikin Country in Oz with an old witch named Mombi. When Mombi threatens to turn Tip into a statue, he escapes with his friend Jack, a wooden man with a pumpkin for a head who has been brought to life through magic. He then journeys to the Emerald City, where he embarks upon an exciting adventure, meeting new quirky characters and returning favorites from the first book.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Villette

Author: Charlotte Brontë

Description: Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, Villette, is thought to be most closely modelled on her own experiences teaching in a pensionnat in Brussels, the place on which the fictional town of Villette is based. In the novel, first published in 1853, we follow the protagonist Lucy Snowe from the time she is fourteen and lives with her godmother in rural England, through her family tragedies and departure for the town of Villette where she finds work at a French boarding school. People from her past reappear in dramatic ways, she makes new connections, and she learns the stories and secrets of the people around her. Through it all, the reader is made privy to Lucy’s thoughts, feelings, and journey of self-discovery.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: At the Earth’s Core

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: At the Earth’s Core, published in 1914, is the first of a series of science fiction novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs set inside a hollow earth with a central “sun,” a land called Pellucidar. However unlikely this scenario, it allowed Burroughs free play to create heroic adventures in yet another alien environment in addition to his fantastic version of Mars in his Martian series. The story’s hero, David Innes, is recruited by an old man, Perry, to help fund his invention, a “mechanical subterranean prospector,” and then to test it out. Unfortunately once the powerful burrowing machine is set going, it cannot be steered, and the pair find themselves burrowing deeper and deeper into the Earth’s crust. To their astonishment, rather than dying from suffocation or increasing heat, they emerge inside a hollow shell inside the Earth. This world is populated by prehistoric creatures as well as primitive humans, intelligent gorillas, and supremely intelligent pterosaurs, the masters of this land. David and Perry are captured by these creatures and many adventures ensue.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: We

Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Description: D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, the United State’s first spaceship. A life of calculations and equations in the United State leaves little room for emotional expression outside of the pink slips that give one private time with another Number. The façade however starts to crack when I-330, a mysterious she-Number with a penchant for the Ancients, enters the picture. e, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s fourth novel, was written in 1920–21, but remained unpublished until its English release in 1924 due to conditions in the Soviet Union at the time (it was eventually published there in 1988). Its dystopian future setting predates Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, and it’s now considered a founding member of the genre. It has been translated into English and other languages many times; presented here is the original 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Hairy Ape

Author: Eugene O’Neill

Description: Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape isn’t one of his best-known works, but it has gained popularity as an exploration of early American society. It was first produced in 1922 by the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts, embracing expressionism in its set design and staging, before moving on to Broadway, where it faced resistance from local and federal governments due to its radical views. The play examines the existential crisis of the protagonist, a brutish stoker named Yank, who begins the play secure in his role as the leader of firemen on an Atlantic ocean liner. But when confronted by the disdain of an upper-class passenger who calls him a “filthy beast,” he seeks to rebel against his place. Then, as all his plans for revenge fail, he slowly finds himself descending to the literal level that society has relegated him to. O’Neill uses Yank’s search for belonging to explore the destructive forces of industrialization and social class. Early on, The Hairy Ape’s commentary on the dehumanization of workers caused it to be taken up by many labor groups and unions to further their own causes. The play also touches on themes of masculinity and socialism, and the repeated references to the “blackface” of the ship’s stokers and Yank’s degeneration into an animal have added a racial element to recent analyses.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Nonsense Books

Author: Edward Lear

Description: Edward Lear began his career as an ornithological illustrator, becoming one of the first major artists to draw birds from living models. During this period he was employed to paint the birds from the private menagerie owned by Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby and one of Lear’s closest friends. In 1837, Lear’s health started to decline. His deteriorating eyesight and failing lungs forced him to abandon the detailed painting required for depicting birds, and, with the help of the earl, he moved to Rome where he established himself as a poet of literary nonsense. hile Lear was visiting the Earl of Derby, he wrote poems and drew silly sketches to entertain the earl’s children. In 1846, he collected together his pile of limericks and illustrations and published his first poetical book, titled A Book of Nonsense and dedicated to the Earl of Derby and his children. He decided to publish under the pseudonym Derry down Derry, but after he started making plans for more books, he republished under his real name. His next book, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets wasn’t published until 24 years later, in 1870. Lear then released More Nonsense, which contains more limericks, in 1872, and Laughable Lyrics in 1877. This final book in the series contains many of Lear’s most famous fantastical creatures, such as the Quangle Wangle. The influence of Lear’s poetry in the twentieth-century can be seen in styles like the surrealism movement and the theater of the absurd.

Subjects: comedy, poetry, shorts

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Title: Triplanetary

Author: E. E. Smith

Description: Hundreds of millions of years ago, two near-omnipotent alien races encountered each other, beginning a conflict that will shape the history of the entire universe. The benevolent Arisians covertly influence humanity, hoping to create a people capable of one day defeating the vile Eddorians, who are waging their own campaign for the fate of civilization on Earth. This sets the stage for a clash between the Triplanetary League of the inner solar system, the enigmatic pirate-scientist Roger, and the Nevians, interlopers whose first appearance wreaks havoc among the other parties. Triplanetary is the first of Edward E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, an early and influential entry in the space opera genre. Originally serialized in Amazing Stories in 1934 as a stand-alone story, Triplanetary was collected in book form in 1948 with six new chapters and numerous additions, changing the story to be a prequel to the rest of the Lensman series.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Herland

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Description: Three male explorers set out to reach a legendary land where only women live, and find—to their surprise—that the legends are true. This country hidden in the mountains is a feminist utopia. There are no men, nor is there war, poverty, or crime. The residents subsist on food from cultivated forests, maintain immaculate houses and roads, and reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis. Although the main characters are men, their role is to show us how their notions about society and womanhood are humorously upturned. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an outspoken activist and suffragist, most famous nowadays for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As a writer, she was stunningly prolific. She founded The Forerunner, a monthly magazine for which she personally wrote every article, story, and poem. Because she chose to run no advertisements, she covered the cost of printing the magazine herself. In contrast to many women’s publications of the day, Gilman advocated for equal rights and expanded social roles for women. Originally published serially in The Forerunner in 1915, Herland was not republished as a standalone work until decades later. It is the second in Gilman’s Utopian trilogy, along with Moving the Mountain and With Her in Ourland.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Country of the Pointed Firs

Author: Sarah Orne Jewett

Description: The Country of the Pointed Firs was first published in serial form in 1896 in The Atlantic, then later expanded into a novel. The narrator, like Jewett, is a middle-aged female writer. She goes to the fictional coastal town of Dunnet Landing in Maine to find time and space to write. There she meets its residents, including her landlady, Mrs. Almira Todd, a widow and herbalist; she rents the empty schoolhouse as a place to write; and she sails with Mrs. Todd to meet Mrs. Todd’s brother and elderly mother. The Country of the Pointed Firs is not so much concerned with plot, but with place—its rhythms, its people and its language. It captures the isolation, community and languishing of a small town. It is often described as Jewett’s finest work, and one of the most influential works of American literary regionalism. Willa Cather considered it one of the most enduring American literary works of all time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Gods of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Gods of Mars is Burroughs’ sequel to A Princess of Mars. After ten long years, John Carter is again transported to Mars to try and determine the fate of his wife Dejah Thoris, but finds himself in the forbidden Valley Dor, from which no man may return. Published serially in five parts between January and May 1913, this sequel appeared a year after the initial serialization of its predecessor. It was eventually published in its full novel form in 1918. Although the Martian series contains ten books in total, the first three—of which The Gods of Mars is the second—are often considered a stand-alone trilogy. Throughout the series, Burroughs’ imagination and sense of adventure shine through, and his extravagant prose and innovative vocabulary raise the works up above run-of-the-mill pulp fiction.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: A Passage to India

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: The setting of A Passage to India is the British Raj, at a time of racial tension heightened by the burgeoning Indian independence movement. Adela Quested, a young British subject, is visiting India to decide whether to marry a suitor who works there as a city magistrate. During her visit, a local physician, Aziz, is accused of assaulting her. His trial brings tensions between the British rulers and their Indian subjects to a head. The novel is a complex exploration of colonialism, written at a time when the popular portrayal of the Indian continent was of mystery and savagery. Forster humanized the Indian people for his at-home British audience, highlighting the damage that colonialism caused not just to interpersonal relationships, but to society at large. On the other hand, some modern scholars view the failure of the human relationships in the book as suggesting a fundamental “otherness” between the two cultures: a gulf across which the disparate cultures can only see each other’s shadows. In any case, the novel generated—and continues to generate—an abundant amount of critical analysis. A Passage to India is the last novel Forster published in his lifetime, and it frequently appears in “best-of” lists of literature: The Modern Library selected it as one of its 100 great works of the 20th century, Time magazine included it in its “All Time 100 Novels” list, and it won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Anna Karenina

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: Anna Karenina is certainly somewhat unhappy in her life, but presents a strong and vivacious character when called in to smooth over a major crack that’s appeared in her brother’s marriage. Unfortunately, the very visit designed to help her brother introduces her to Count Alexei Vronsky and sets in motion a chain of events that will ripple through families and the unforgiving society of wealthy Moscow and St. Petersburg. Initially serialized over five years in The Russian Messenger, Anna Karenina was first published as a two-volume novel in 1878. It was Leo Tolstoy’s second novel, coming after War and Peace and further cementing his role as the primary Russian author of his age. Tolstoy drew on his aristocratic upbringing to set the scene for the novel, and it’s widely believed that he wrote his own experiences and struggles with religion (documented in A Confession) into the central character of Konstantin Levin. This edition compiles into a single volume the 1901 English translation by Constance Garnett.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Warlord of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: The Warlord of Mars begins after the previous installment in the Martian series abruptly ends: John Carter’s beloved princess Dejah Thoris has been imprisoned in the Temple of the Sun, whose rooms only revolve back to the entrance once every Barsoomian year. Now, Carter must mount a rescue to save the princess from certain doom. The novel, a fast-paced and straightforward tale of swashbuckling adventure, is another solid entry in Burroughs’ “swords-and-planets” corpus. It was originally serialized in four parts in All-Story Magazine before being published as a novel in 1919.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have made him wealthy and respectable. However, he cannot escape his past. His secret guilt, his pride, and his impulsive temper all serve to sabotage his good name. The Mayor of Casterbridge was published in 1886, first as a magazine serial and then later that year as a book. It is perhaps most noteworthy for the psychological portrait of Michael Henchard, a tragic character who remains sympathetic while simultaneously being deeply flawed. Typical of other Hardy novels, it also vividly depicts life in the rural countryside at that time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Cream of the Jest

Author: James Branch Cabell

Description: The Cream of the Jest is a later entry in James Branch Cabell’s Dom Manuel series. The series as a whole is a fantasy series, and this entry takes a philosophical turn: after the first few chapters of standard high-fantasy fare, the narrative pulls out to reveal the point of view of the narrative’s author, Felix Kennaston. Kennaston life slowly starts to blur with his fantasy world. He finds himself constantly dreaming of Etarre, a mysterious, Beatrice-like figure; but every time he tries to touch her, he wakes up. Soon his neglected wife begins to blur in to Etarre, and his increasingly philosophical dream worlds begin to become less distinguishable from his day-to-day life. Though The Cream of the Jest is a kind of capstone to a larger fantasy series, the book itself feels more like philosophy than fantasy. Kennaston’s journeys through his dream worlds explore a series of thoughtful threads, from the interface of thought and reality, to the power of religion, to the human condition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Scarlet Letter

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Description: The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850; it was one of the first books to be mass-produced in America, which helped ensure its immediate popularity and ubiquitous presence on contemporary shelves. Its first printing of 2,500 books sold out in ten days. The novel is set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1642 and 1649. Hester Prynne has had a child out of wedlock, and its father is a mystery. For her sin, she is made to wear an embroidered scarlet A on her clothes—for “Adulteress.” She now faces a life of unending shame in the stern and religious Puritan colony, in a part of the world where there are no others to turn to. hile the plot is simple, the novel is highly allegorical. It explores themes of sin, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, alienation, and legalism. Characters have symbolic names and appearances, and many aspects of the narrative can be viewed in a symbolist lens. Hawthorne initially thought the novel was too short for publication on its own; to pad the length, he included the “Customhouse” introduction. The introduction angered the residents of Salem, who thought the introduction was poking mean-spirited fun at them. This prompted Hawthorne to republish the book “without the change of a word,” but with a reassurance that the introduction was meant in good spirits. The novel has been consistently popular since its publication, with it being required reading in many American high schools. D. H. Lawrence called it “a perfect work of American imagination.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Beetle

Author: Richard Marsh

Description: The Beetle was published in 1897, the same year as Dracula—and outsold it six to one that year. Like Dracula, the novel is steeped in the evil mysteries of an ancient horror: in this case, a mysterious ancient Egyptian creature bent on revenge. The story is told through the sequential points of view of a group of middle-class Victorians who find themselves enmeshed in the creature’s plot. The creature, in the guise of an Egyptian man, appears in London seeking revenge against a popular member of Parliament. They soon find out that it can shape shift into other things, including women; that it can control minds and use hypnosis; and that it won’t stop at anything to get the revenge it seeks. The heroes are soon caught in a whirlwind of chase scenes, underground laboratories, secret cults, and more as they race to foil the creature. hile The Beetle didn’t earn the lasting popularity of Stoker’s counterpart, it remains a strange and unique morsel of Victorian sensationalist fiction.

Subjects: horror

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Title: The Pilgrim’s Progress

Author: John Bunyan

Description: The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come was written in 1678 by John Bunyan, a Puritan and a dissenter from the Church of England. It is an allegory of the journey to redemption of the faithful, through many snares and difficulties. Cast in the form of a dream, the first part of the work deals with a man called Christian, who sets off carrying a great burden. He meets many helpers and many adversaries on this journey. The second part of the work deals with Christian’s wife, Christiana, and her four children, who follow a similar journey. One of the most influential of all religious works, The Pilgrim’s Progress was immediately popular and has been translated over the years into many languages and into many forms, including verse, opera, movies, and many illustrated versions for children. Several of its story elements, characters and locations have entered the language, such as the “Slough of Despond,” “Vanity Fair,” “Great-heart,” and “Giant Despair.” This edition is based on a version of Bunyan’s complete works edited by George Offor and published in 1855. It contains many endnotes drawn from a variety of commentators.

Subjects: fiction, spirituality

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Title: The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Author: Diogenes Laërtius

Description: These brief biographies of more than eighty philosophers of ancient Greece were assembled by Diogenes Laërtius in the early third century. He based these on a variety of sources that have since been lost. Because of this, his biographies have become an invaluable source of information on the development of ancient Greek philosophy, and on ancient Greek culture in general. Most of what we know about the lives and otherwise lost doctrines of Zeno the Stoic and Diogenes the Cynic, for example, come from what Diogenes Laërtius preserved in this book. Mourning what else we have lost, Montaigne wrote: “I am very sorry we have not a dozen Laërtii.” Steamy romance, barbed humor, wicked cattiness, tender acts of humanity, jealous feuds, terrible puns, sophistical paradoxes, deathbed deceptions, forgery, and political intrigue … while the philosophers of ancient Greece were developing their remarkable and penetrating philosophies, they were also leading strange and varied lives—at times living out their principles in practice, at other times seeming to defy all principle. Diogenes Laërtius collected as much biographical information as he could find about these ancient sages, and tried to sift through the sometimes contradictory accounts to find the true story. He shares with us anecdotes and witty remarks and biographical details that reveal the people behind the philosophies, and frequently adds a brief poem of his own construction that comments sardonically on how each philosopher died.

Subjects: biography, philosophy

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Title: New Hampshire

Author: Robert Frost

Description: Robert Frost published New Hampshire, his fourth book of poetry, in 1923. The centerpiece is the long poem “New Hampshire,” an ode to the state. Endnotes on its lines point to shorter poems in the “Notes” section, and the book is capped with “Grace Notes,” a series of short lyrics—some of which are among Frost’s most famous works. The poems are each a meditative brushstroke of Americana, presented in Frost’s trademark plain-spoken but carefully considered verse. The collection went on to win the 1924 Pulitzer prize for poetry, the first of four Frost would go on to receive. Included in this book is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Poetry

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Though mostly known for his plays, Shakespeare also published poetry during his writing career. From 1592 to 1593, an outbreak of the bubonic plague swept through England, killing almost 20,000 people. In January 1593 city officials ordered the theaters in London to shut their doors, and work for the famous playwright and actor came to a halt. Shakespeare turned to writing poetry to make ends meet during the closures. While the plague hindered his work in theaters, it provided source material for some of his most famous plays. He first published “Venus and Adonis” in 1593, followed by “The Rape of Lucrece” in 1594. While both narrative poems contain sexual themes, their views on love versus lust are in stark contrast. After the theaters reopened, Shakespeare continued to write poetry and went on to publish “The Passionate Pilgrim” and “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” The last of his poems were published in his 1609 quarto, containing 154 sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” The sonnets cover an array of themes: different types of romantic love, real beauty versus clichéd beauty, and the responsibilities of being beautiful. This Standard Ebooks edition includes all of his poems and is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Sinister Street

Author: Compton Mackenzie

Description: Michael Fane arrives in the thin red house in Carlington Road to his new family of Nurse, Cook, Annie the housemaid, his younger sister Stella, and the occasional presence of Mother. From here, the novel follows the next twenty years of his life as he tries to find his place in the upper echelons of Edwardian society, through prep school, studies at Oxford, and his emergence into the wide world. The setting is rich in period detail, and the characters portrayed are vivid and more nuanced in their actions and stories than first impressions imply. Sinister Street was an immediate critical success on publication, although not without some worry for its openness to discuss less salubrious scenes, and it was a favorite of George Orwell and John Betjeman. Compton Mackenzie had attended both St. James’ school and St. Mary’s College at Oxford and the novel is at least partly autobiographical, but for the same measure was praised as an accurate portrayal of that experience; Max Beerbohm said “There is no book on Oxford like it. It gives you the actual Oxford experience.” Although originally published in two volumes (in 1913 and 1914) for commercial reasons, the two form a single novel and have been brought back together again for this edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Description: In 1839, Thoreau and his brother took a small boat upriver and back. Some years later, while in his cabin at Walden Pond, he gathered his notes from that journey and other writings from his journals, and composed this, his first book. Like the rivers it describes, the book meanders through varying territories and climates. He writes of the natural surroundings they encounter and of the history of the region, but also takes long and remarkable detours through topics like friendship, history, a comparison of Christianity and Hinduism, Vedic literature, government and conscience, Thoreau’s philosophy of literature, monuments and graveyards, poetry (in particular Ossian, Chaucer, and certain minor Greek poets), and the satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. Thoreau also includes several poems of his own. Thoreau had the first edition of this book published at his own expense, and at first it struggled to find an audience. “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes,” he remarked at one point, “over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Night Land

Author: William Hope Hodgson

Description: The Night Land is science fiction ahead of its time. Published in 1912, the book introduces a 17th-century gentleman who loses his wife. He soon discovers himself somehow reanimated in Earth’s far future, millions of years from now, when the sun has died and the Earth has become a hellish waste. What remains of humanity lives in titanic mile-high pyramids surrounded by energy shields to protect them from the abhuman monsters lurking in the darkness. The human survivors soon receive a distress signal sent by a long-forgotten lesser pyramid, and the narrator embarks on a bloody quest to rescue the maiden of the pyramid—which he knows to be his lost love, somehow transcending time and space. On his journey the narrator is beset by countless horrifying monsters, many of them mutated former-humans. These depictions are so singular that H. P. Lovecraft called The Night Land “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.” The novel is unique in its farsighted depiction of technology. The narrator has telepathic powers and is able to communicate with others over long distances. These powers are enabled by his “brain elements,” which are possibly surgically implanted. Telepathic communications may be spied upon by the monsters of the waste, but a “master word” sent by the caller may verify the integrity of the signal—a description of a kind of early public-key cryptography. The narrator survives on food pellets and “powdered water,” predicting a kind of astronaut food. His weapon of choice is a Diskos, a kind of whirling razor-sharp blade that shoots fire and energy. The machines and force fields of the human pyramid monument are powered by “Earth current,” which the narrator worries is slowly becoming dimmer over the years. The pyramid itself is a jewel of imagination: described as miles wide and miles high, each layer is its own city, and it continues deep underground where artificial grow chambers provide food for millions of humans. Though the novel maintains a sort of legendary status for its grim and imaginative depiction of a monstrous future world, critics acknowledge the work as a flawed masterpiece. The narrative is written in a highly affected style, perhaps meant to emulate 17th century speech, or perhaps meant to be a stylized form of speech used by far-future humans. In any case, it resembles no real style of English, past or present. While some critics praise this style as uniquely atmospheric, others point to it, along with the lack of dialog or proper names, as some of the book’s more difficult aspects. Critics also frequently cite the book’s highly repetitious nature, simplistic characterization, and inordinate length—nearly 200,000 words—as major flaws. But despite whatever flaws the novel may have, the awesome vision of The Night Land remains a marvel to behold.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Shirley

Author: Charlotte Brontë

Description: Shirley, published in 1849, was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel after Jane Eyre. Published under her pseudonym of “Currer Bell,” it differs in several respects from that earlier work. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person of Jane Eyre, and incorporates the themes of industrial change and the plight of unemployed workers. It also features strong pleas for the recognition of women’s intellect and right to their independence of thought and action. Set in the West Riding of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic period of the early 19th Century, the novel describes the confrontations between textile manufacturers and organized groups of workers protesting the introduction of mechanical looms. Three characters stand out: Robert Moore, a mill-owner determined to introduce modern methods despite sometimes violent opposition; his young cousin Caroline Helstone, who falls deeply in love with Robert; and Shirley Keeldar, a rich heiress who comes to live in the estate of Fieldhead, on whose land Robert’s mill stands. Robert’s business is in trouble, not so much because of the protests of the workers but because of a government decree which prevents him selling his finished cloth overseas during the duration of the war with Napoleon. He receives a loan from Miss Keeldar, and her interest in him seems to be becoming a romantic one, much to the distress of Caroline, who pines away for lack of any sign of affection from Robert. Shirley Keeldar is a remarkable female character for the time: strong, very independent-minded, dismissive of much of the standard rules of society, and determined to decide on her own future. Interestingly, up to this point, the name “Shirley” was almost entirely a male name; Shirley’s parents had hoped for a boy. Such was the success of Brontë’s novel, however, that it became increasingly popular as a female name and is now almost exclusively so. Although never as popular or successful as the more classically romantic Jane Eyre, Shirley is nevertheless now highly regarded by critics.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Discourses

Author: Epictetus

Description: Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus. In these discourses, Epictetus explains how to gain peace-of-mind by only willing that which is within the domain of your will. There is no point in getting upset about things that are outside of your control; that only leads to distress. Instead, let such things be however they are, and focus your effort on the things that are in your control: your own attitudes and priorities. This way, you can never be thrown off balance, and tranquility is yours for the taking. The lessons in the Discourses of Epictetus, along with his Enchiridion, have continued to attract new adherents to Stoic philosophy down to the present day.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Water of the Wondrous Isles

Author: William Morris

Description: The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morris’s death in 1897 by Kelmscott Press—Morris’s own printing company—the novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw. After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witch’s clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of the Victorian “new woman,” embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre’s first examples of a strong female hero. This socialist-feminist allegory is presented in an Arthurian-style fantasy world complete with magic, witches, fairies, knights both chivalrous and evil, and castles (indeed, anyone doubting the allegorical nature of the work only needs to look at the name of the tale’s main redoubt: “The Castle of the Quest”). The language is purposefully archaic, reveling in vocabulary drawn from the language’s Anglo roots; and the prose is lent a hypnotic quality by its lack of quotation marks to offset dialog, and its short chapters characterized by a fairy-tale-narrative voice.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Age of Innocence

Author: Edith Wharton

Description: Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union when the bride’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns from a failed marriage overseas. As Newland endeavors to help Countess Olenska be reinstated into the family’s good graces, his affections for her grow. Newland soon finds himself torn between his desire to conform to the society he knows and his new-found passion for the forbidden Countess. The Age of Innocence was originally published in 1920 as a four-part series in Pictoral Review, then later that same year as Wharton’s twelfth novel. It went on to win the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the award.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Forsyte Saga

Author: John Galsworthy

Description: Between 1906 and 1921 John Galsworthy published three novels chronicling the Forsyte family, a fictional upper-middle class family at the end of the Victorian era: The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let. In 1922 Galsworthy wrote two interconnecting short stories to bind the three novels together and published the whole as The Forsyte Saga. hile the novels follow the Forsyte family at large, the action centers around Soames Forsyte—the scion of a nouveau-riche London tea merchant—his wife Irene, and their unhappy marriage. Soames and his sprawling family are portrayed as stereotypes of unhappy gilded-age wealth, their family having entered the industrial revolution poor farmers and emerged as wealthy bourgeoise. Their rise was powered by their capacity to acquire, won at the expense of their capacity for almost anything else. Thematically, the saga focuses on the mores of the wealthy upper-middle class, which was still a newish feature in the class landscape of England at the time; duty, honor, and love; and the rapidly growing differences across generations occurring in a period of war and social change. The characters are complex and nuanced, and the situations they find themselves in—both of their own making, and of the making of society around them—provide a rich field for analyzing the close of the Victorian age, the dawn of the Edwardian age, and the societal frameworks that were forged in that frisson. Galsworthy went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932 for The Forsyte Saga, one of the rare occasions in which the Swedish Academy has awarded a prize for a specific work instead of for a lifetime of work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Eugene Onegin

Author: Alexander Pushkin

Description: Eugene Onegin is bored: bored of the city, of parties, and of the superficial St. Petersburg social scene. So when a newly deceased uncle leaves him his country mansion, he jumps at the chance to play the rural lord. There he meets his new neighbours Lenski, a young poet and stark contrast to Onegin’s affected nonchalance, and Tattiana, a dreamy but introverted romantic, and triggers a set of events with tragic consequences. Serialized over the course of seven years starting in 1825, Pushkin’s novel in verse was and is a huge influence on Russian literature. Its unusual verse structure combined with Pushkin’s own commentary on the social canvas of the time has meant that it has remained relevant and read to this day. Eugene Onegin has been translated into many different languages, and into many different formats including successful operas and films.

Subjects: fiction, poetry

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: O. Henry

Description: William Sydney Porter, known to readers as O. Henry, was a true raconteur. As a draftsman, a bank teller, a newspaper writer, a fugitive from justice in Central America, and a writer living in New York City, he told stories at each stop and about each stop. His stories are known for their vivid characters who come to life, and sometimes death, in only a few pages. But the most famous characteristic of O. Henry’s stories are the famous “twist” endings, where the outcome comes as a surprise both to the characters and the readers. O. Henry’s work was widely recognized and lauded, so much so that a few years after his death an award was founded in his name to recognize the best American short story (now stories) of the year. This collection gathers all of his available short stories that are in the U.S. public domain. They were published in various popular magazines of the time, as well as in the Houston Post, where they were not attributed to him until many years after his death.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Tusculan Disputations

Author: Cicero

Description: Cicero composed these discourses while in his villa in Tusculum as he was mourning the death of his daughter, in order to convey his philosophy of how to live wisely and well. They take the form of fictional dialogues between Cicero and his friends, with each one focusing on a particular Stoic theme. The first, “On the Contempt of Death,” reminds us that mortality is nothing to be upset about. The second, “On Bearing Pain,” reassures us that philosophy is a balm for pains of the body. The third and fourth, “On Grief of Mind” and “Other Perturbations of the Mind,” say that this extends also to mental anguish and unrest. The last, “Whether Virtue Alone Be Sufficient for a Happy Life,” tells us that the key to happiness is already in our hands: it is not to rely on accidents of fate, but on our own efforts in areas of life that are under our own control.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Poirot Investigates

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: Poirot Investigates is a classic collection of Agatha Christie’s short stories first published in 1924. It follows the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his companion Arthur Hastings as they solve a series of mysteries. From threatening letters to Egyptian curses to missing wills, Poirot’s little grey cells never falter. While Hastings and the reader are lost in the minutiae of the case, Poirot sees it all—and with impeccable attention to detail, finds the culprit.

Subjects: mystery, shorts

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Herman Melville

Description: Melville’s pen ranges far and wide in this collection of his short stories and novellas, with subjects including a faraway mountain lodge, a magnificent rooster, a haunted table, and of course the inimitable scrivener Bartleby, whose tale is now viewed as one of the great English short stories. While his earlier novels had been well received, by this point in his career his star had waned, and it was only in the early twentieth century that his work, including these short stories, started to get the recognition it still enjoys today. This volume collects Melville’s short stories verified in the order they were originally published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (along with “The Piazza” which was written for the collection The Piazza Tales). It also includes three stories (notably “Billy Budd, Foretopman”) that were edited and printed posthumously by Raymond Weaver from Melville’s original manuscripts. The racism displayed in “Benito Cereno” against the African slaves is somewhat shocking to modern readers given our greater understanding of their story, but was common in the mid-nineteenth century.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Oliver Twist

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker. Running away from this situation, he walks to London and falls under the influence of a criminal gang run by an old man called Fagin, who wants to employ the child as a pickpocket. The novel graphically depicts the wretched living conditions of much of the poor people of Victorian times and the disgusting slums in which they were forced to live. It has been accused of perpetrating anti-Semitic stereotypes in the character of Fagin, almost always referred to as “the Jew” in the book’s early chapters. Interestingly, while the serial was still running in the magazine, Dickens was eventually persuaded that he was wrong in this and removed many such usages in later episodes. He also introduced more kindly Jewish characters in such later novels as Our Mutual Friend. Oliver Twist was immediately popular in serial form, with its often gripping story and lurid details. It has remained one of Dickens’ best-loved novels, and the story has often been made into films and television series, as well as into a very popular musical, Oliver!.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Author: Laurence Sterne

Description: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a vivid picture of the players and their personal stories. Published two volumes at a time over the course of eight years, Tristram Shandy was an immediate commercial success although not without some confusion among critics. Sterne’s exploration of form that pushed at the contemporary limits of what could be called a novel has been hugely influential, garnering admirers as varied as Marx, Schopenhauer, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie. The book has been translated into many other languages and adapted for the stage, radio, and film.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Playboy of the Western World

Author: J. M. Synge

Description: A young man stumbles into a rural public house in western Ireland claiming to be on the run after having killed his father. He immediately becomes a source of awe and an object of adoration, and even love. But what happens when the inhabitants of this tiny village find out all is not as the stranger claims? J. M. Synge first presented The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the 26th of January, 1907. The performance immediately offended Irish nationalists by seemingly insulting the Irish people and language, and the general public, by being an offense against moral order. Before it was even finished, it was disrupted by a riot that soon spread out into the city. When it was performed in 1911 in the U.S., the play was again greeted with scorn and the company arrested for an immoral performance. But as Synge himself attempts to explain in the preface to his play, rather than attack Irish Gaelic, he wanted to show the relationship between the imagination of the Irish country people and their speech, which is “rich and living,” and that his use of such language reflects reality in a way missing from other modern drama. He later insisted that his plot was not to be taken as social realism, but died in 1909 before the play finally gained broader appeal in the wider world. Since then the significance of The Playboy of the Western World has been recognized and celebrated both for its characterizations and its rich use of dialect.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Plague Ship

Author: Andre Norton

Description: After an unusual mission trading catnip to the catlike Salariki of planet Sargol, Dane Thorson and other low-ranking crew members of the Solar Queen watch in horror as the rest of their crew falls mysteriously ill. Only the four men left standing—and maybe the Captain’s bizarre pet Hoobat—can save their ship from drifting through space for all time, condemned as a plague ship. Originally published by Gnome Press in 1956 under the name Andrew North, Plague Ship is the second installment in the Solar Queen series of science fiction novels by Andre Norton, the male pseudonym of Alice Mary Norton.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Much Ado About Nothing

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing towards the middle of his career, sometime between 1598 and 1599. It was first published in quarto in 1600 and later collected into Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of Much Ado About Nothing was performed for the newly married Princess Elizabeth and Frederick the Fifth, Elector Palatine in 1613. Shakespeare’s sources of inspiration for this play can be found in Italian culture and popular texts published in the sixteenth century. Gossip involving lovers deceived into believing each other false was often spread throughout Northern Italy. Works like Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Edmund Spencer’s Fearie Queene also feature tricked lovers like Claudio and Hero. Besides these similarities, the idea of tricking a couple like Benedick and Beatrice into falling in love was an original and unusual idea at the time. The play focuses on two couples: upon the noblemen’s return to Messina, Claudio and Hero quickly fall in love and wish to marry in a week; on the contrary, Benedick and Beatrice resume their verbal war, exchanging insults with each other. To pass the time prior to the marriage a plot to trick Benedick and Beatrice into falling in love has been set in motion. Unbeknownst to both our couples, a fouler plot to crush the love and happiness between Hero and Claudio has also begun to unfold. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: School Stories

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: School Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the trials, tribulations and adventures of the denizens of the turn-of-the-century English boarding school. First published in schoolboy magazines starting in 1901, the stories originally appeared in publications like The Captain and Public School Magazine. Some were also later collected into books. These stories, written more than a decade before he moved on to his more famous characters like Jeeves and Wooster, represent Wodehouse’s first magazine sales and showcase his early career. While some of these stories are definitely of a moment, they’re filled with delightful bits that would be instantly recognizable to students and teachers of any age. Indeed, the stories experienced a bit of a resurgence in the latter part of the 20th century, and remain a worthy part of Wodehouse’s canon.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: Just William

Author: Richmal Crompton

Description: Just William, published in 1922, was the first of a long series of well-loved books about William Brown, an eleven-year old English schoolboy, written by Richmal Crompton. William is continually scruffy and disreputable, and has a talent for getting into trouble and becoming involved in various inventive plots and scrapes, to the exasperation of his long-suffering parents and older siblings. Crompton continued to write stories about the amusing adventures and mishaps of William Brown right up until her death in 1969. Some 39 book collections of stories about William were eventually published, entertaining several generations of children. Despite this, Crompton felt her real work was in writing novels for adults, of which she wrote some 41—most now forgotten and out of print.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Author: Anne Brontë

Description: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was the second novel written by Anne Brontë, the youngest of the Brontë sisters. The novel begins with the arrival of a young widow, Mrs. Graham, in a rural neighborhood. She brings with her her five year old son Arthur and takes up residence in the partly ruined Wildfell Hall. Gossip soon begins to swirl around her, questioning her mysterious background and the closeness of her relationship with her landlord. First released in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was considered shocking by the standards of the time due to its themes of domestic disharmony, drunkenness and adultery. Perhaps this was why it quickly became a publishing success. However, when Anne died from tuberculosis her sister Charlotte prevented its republication until 1854, perhaps fearing for her sister’s reputation, though some attributed her actions to jealousy.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mill on the Floss

Author: George Eliot

Description: Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was the second novel published by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Set in the late 1820s or early 1830s, it tells the story of two young people, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, from their childhood into early adulthood. Their father, Jeremy Tulliver, owns Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, and the children grow to adolescence in relative comfort. However Mr. Tulliver is litigious and initiates an unwise legal suit against a local solicitor, Mr. Wakem. The suit is thrown out and the associated costs throw the Tulliver family into poverty, and they lose possession of the mill. The main character of the novel is Maggie Tulliver, an intelligent and passionate child and young woman, whose mental, romantic, and moral struggles we follow closely. As in Eliot’s other novels, the author shows a realistic and sympathetic understanding of human behavior. The Mill on the Floss is regarded as a classic of English literature, and has been made into both a film and a television series.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Islands of Space

Author: John W. Campbell

Description: Though better known as the editor for authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, John W. Campbell also wrote science fiction under both his own and various pen names. Islands of Space was the second in his Arcot, Morey, and Wade trilogy. Originally published in the spring 1931 edition of Amazing Stories Quarterly, it was later published in book form in 1957. After the events of The Black Star Passes, Arcot, Morey, Wade, and Fuller look for new challenges. Creating a spaceship that can exceed the speed of light, the four of them set out to explore other galaxies.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer

Description: The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English. This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Iliad

Author: Homer

Description: The Iliad is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Odyssey. Written in an early literary dialect of ancient Greek, both poems were originally composed in dactylic hexameters. This meter is beautiful in the original but can sound awkward in modern English; Eric McMillan humorously described it as resembling “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” In the translation presented here, William Cullen Bryant avoids the problem by using iambic pentameter, a more familiar meter for verse in English. This epic poem begins with the Achaean army sacking the city of Chryse and capturing two maidens as prizes of war. One of the maidens, Chryseis, is given to Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaeans, and the other maiden, Briseis, was given to the army’s best warrior, Achilles. Chryseis’ father, the city’s priest, prays to the god Apollo and asks for a plague on the Achaean army. To stop this plague, Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father, but then orders Achilles to give him Briseis as compensation. Achilles refuses.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Phantom of the Opera

Author: Gaston Leroux

Description: “When I die and am in Heaven,” Christine Daaé’s father said, “I will send the Angel of Music to you.” It is with these words still in her ears years later that Christine accepts the disembodied voice that speaks to her to claim that divine title, and to give her singing lessons within her dressing room at the Paris Opera, as the fulfillment of her beloved father’s promise. And when those lessons lead her to a performance that astonishes the whole city, who could doubt but that the Angel had indeed come? Yet there is another, more sinister presence stalking about the Opéra Garnier: the Opera Ghost. A creature who not only makes inconvenient demands—such as the exclusive use of Box Five at every performance, as well as a sizable retainer paid monthly—but who also hangs a man for wandering into the wrong part of the Opera’s cavernous cellars, and sends a chandelier plunging down onto the heads of a packed house when his demands are not met. But is the Opéra truly host to so many supernatural phenomena, or could it be that the Angel and the Opera Ghost are in fact one and the same? And could it be also that he is far less angel than demon? And if so, will Christine realize her peril before it is too late?

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Tono-Bungay

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: Tono-Bungay, published in 1909, is a semi-autobiographical novel by H. G. Wells. Though it has some fantastical and absurdist elements, it is a realist novel rather than one of Well’s “scientific romances.” The novel is written in the first person from the point of view of George Ponderevo, the son of the housekeeper at a large estate. He is made to feel his inferiority when he is banished after fighting with the son of one of the owner’s aristocratic relatives, and is sent to live with his own poor but religiously fervent relatives. He can’t abide or agree with their religious views and returns to his mother who sends him on to live with his Uncle, Edward Ponderevo, then a local pharmacist in a small town. Uncle Ponderevo, though, has grand plans, and eventually makes a fortune by selling a quack patent medicine he calls “Tono-Bungay.” George joins him in this endeavour and becomes rich himself, eventually turning his interests towards the new science of aeronautics. Meanwhile the Tono-Bungay scheme expands enormously and begins to topple towards its own destruction. Throughout the novel, George comments cynically on England’s class system, the shabbiness of commerce, and the lies told in advertising. We also follow his unfortunate love life, his unwise marriage, his divorce, and his eventual reconnection with a woman he loved as a child. Tono-Bungay met with a mixed reception on first release, but has since come to be considered as perhaps Wells’ finest realist novel, an assessment Wells himself shared.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Great Expectations

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, and editor whose work brought attention to the struggles of Victorian England’s lower classes. His writings provided a candid portrait of the era’s poor and served as inspiration for social change. Great Expectations, Dickens’ thirteenth novel, was first published in serial form between 1860 and 1861 and is widely praised as the author’s greatest literary accomplishment. The novel follows the life, relationships, and moral development of an orphan boy named Pip. The novel begins when Pip encounters an escaped convict whom he helps and fears in equal measure. Pip’s actions that day set off a sequence of events and interactions that shape Pip’s character as he matures into adulthood. The vivid characters, engaging narrative style, and universal themes of Great Expectations establish this novel as a timeless literary classic, and an engaging portrait of Victorian life.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Poul Anderson

Description: Poul Anderson’s prolific writing career began in 1947, while still an undergraduate physics student at the University of Minnesota, and continued throughout his life. His works were primarily science fiction and fantasy, but he also produced mysteries and historical fiction. Among his many honors, Anderson was a recipient of three Nebula awards, seven Hugo awards, three Prometheus awards, and an SFWA Grand Master award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2000. This collection consists of short stories and novellas published in Worlds of If, Galaxy SF, Fantastic Universe, and other periodicals. Presented in order of publication, they include Innocent at Large, a 1958 story coauthored with his wife and noted author Karen Anderson.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Way of All Flesh

Author: Samuel Butler

Description: The Way of All Flesh is often considered to be Samuel Butler’s masterpiece, and is frequently included in many lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century. Despite this acclaim, Butler never published it in his lifetime—perhaps because the novel, a scathing, funny, and poignant satire of Victorian life, would have hit his contemporaries too close to home. The novel traces four generations of the Pontifex family, though the central character is Ernest Pontifex, the third-generation wayward son. The reader follows Ernest through the eyes of his watchful godfather, Mr. Overton, as he strikes out from home to find his way in life. His struggles along the way illustrate the complex relationships between a son and his family, and especially his father; all while satirizing Victorian ideas about family, church, marriage, and schooling.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Wired Love

Author: Ella Cheever Thayer

Description: Ella Cheever Thayer used her experience of being a telegraph operator at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, to write Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. The story begins when Nathalie Rogers receives a call from another telegrapher, “C,” who manages to make her laugh. Little did they know, this was the beginning of an unusual romance (for the time period) between two people who don’t know anything about each other—not even what they look like. Wired Love was a bestseller for 10 years after it was published.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Antic Hay

Author: Aldous Huxley

Description: Theodore Gumbril Junior is fed up with his job as a teacher, and tries a new tack as an inventor of pneumatic trousers. The development and marketing of these is set against his attempts to find love, and the backdrop of his friends’ and acquaintances’ similar quest for meaning in what seems to them a meaningless world. Aldous Huxley, although primarily known these days for his seminal work Brave New World, gained fame in the 1920s as a writer of social satires such as this, his second novel. Condemned at the time for its frank treatment of sexuality and adultery—it was even banned in Australia—the book’s characters’ comic lack of stability following the society-wide alignment of the Great War still resonates today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Three Musketeers

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Description: The Three Musketeers is the first of three adventure novels written by Alexandre Dumas featuring the character of d’Artagnan. The young d’Artagnan leaves home in Gascony for Paris to join the King’s Musketeers. On his way to Paris, the letter which will introduce him to the commander of the Musketeers is stolen by a mysterious man in the town of Meung. This “Man of Meung” turns out to be a confidant of the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of the government of France. hen he arrives in Paris and seeks an audience with the commander of the Musketeers, d’Artagnan sees this man again and rushes to confront him. As he pushes his way out he provokes three inseparable musketeers—Athos, Porthos and Aramis—and ends up setting up duels with all three of them that afternoon. At the first of the duels he discovers, to his surprise, that each of the three is a second to the other. As they start to fight, they are ambushed by the Cardinal’s men and join forces. So begins one of the most enduring partnerships in literature. hen d’Artagnan’s landlord tells him that his wife has been kidnapped, d’Artagnan investigates, falls in love and becomes embroiled in a plot to destabilize France. The Three Musketeers was first published in 1844 and has been adapted for stage, film, television, and animation many times; such is the endurance of its appeal. At its heart is a fast-paced tale of love and adventure.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: My First Summer in the Sierra

Author: John Muir

Description: In the summer of 1869, Scottish-American naturalist and author John Muir spent the months of June through September in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California accompanying a group of shepherds while they led a flock of sheep to the high country to graze. During that time, Muir took every opportunity to explore the Yosemite area extensively—hiking, camping, writing, and sketching. Muir’s diary entries describing the land, flora, and fauna he encountered became the basis for the book My First Summer in the Sierra, first published in 1911. Muir’s journal entries from that summer reveal his growing wonder and awe at the Yosemite landscape, as well as his endless curiosity for the natural world. On a grand scale, he trekked into remote areas for sometimes days at a time. He climbed Cathedral Peak and Mount Dana and trekked through Bloody Canyon to Mono Lake. On a more modest scale, Muir observed the flora and fauna that surrounded him with the keen enthusiasm of a naturalist. He described in detail the area’s trees, shrubs, flowers, mountain meadows, glacial features, and animals. In the years that followed the publication of My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir went on to advocate for the protection and preservation of wild landscapes. In 1892, Muir co-founded the Sierra Club and became the organization’s first president. Muir also played an instrumental role in the establishment of several national parks including Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon. My First Summer in the Sierra remains among John Muir’s most popular works. The book’s inspired and lyrical accounts of an iconic wilderness, written at a time in Muir’s life when his character as a naturalist and wilderness advocate was taking form, earns it a prominent, influential place in the annals of nature writing and the history of wilderness preservation.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Lady Audley’s Secret

Author: M. E. Braddon

Description: Lady Audley’s Secret was the most successful of a long series of novels written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in what was then called the “sensation” genre because of the inventive and slightly scandalous plots of such works. Published in 1862, Lady Audley’s Secret was immediately popular and is said to have made a fortune for its author. It has never been out of print and has been the basis for a number of dramas and movies. The novel begins with the return from the Australian goldfields of ex-dragoon George Talboys. Three years earlier, in the depths of poverty, he had abandoned his young wife and their baby in order to seek his fortune. He returns to England having made that fortune by finding a huge gold nugget. He enlists the help of his friend Robert Audley, a rather idle young barrister, to seek out his wife. To George’s dismay and overwhelming grief, however, he sees a newspaper notice of the death of his wife only a few days prior to his return. A year later, when visiting Audley’s relatives and after catching a glimpse of the pretty new wife of Robert’s uncle, George goes missing. Robert becomes increasingly convinced that his friend has met with violence and is dead, and begins to investigate. What he discovers fills him with despair.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Beowulf

Author:

Description: Horothgar, King of the Danes, invites warriors from neighboring kingdoms to his great mead hall with the hope that one of them will solve his problem. A monster named Grendel has been terrorizing the land and killing his people. One of the warriors who answers this call is our epic hero, Beowulf. The Beowulf Manuscript, also known as the Nowell Codex, dates back to the late 10th century or early 11th century and is the only copy in existence. In 1731, the manuscript was damaged from the Cotton Library fire, making several lines in the poem unreadable. Today, with the help of modern technology, advanced techniques are being used not only to preserve the document from further degradation but also to reveal missing letters. All this is done to ensure that this epic story will continue to live on for many more generations.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: A Popular Schoolgirl

Author: Angela Brazil

Description: Ingred Saxon grew up in luxury in Rotherwood, a large house in southern England, and is looking forwards to moving back in after its wartime usage as a Red Cross hospital. Unfortunately for her, her family is weathering unforeseen financial troubles, and has had to let it out to a different family while they cram into their dramatically smaller bungalow. Even more unfortunately, the popular new girl at Grovebury College is the new tenant, leaving Ingred to remake previous bonds she’d taken for granted. A Popular Schoolgirl is just one of nearly fifty “schoolgirl fiction” books written by Angela Brazil, and put together they sold over three million copies. As a boarder at a girls’ school herself in her youth, she successfully mined this rich seam of experience to the tune of two novels and several short stories a year. Her protagonists are ultimately believable young women, written in a way that exposes their hopes and fears at a time where possibilities for women were rapidly opening up.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Black Beauty

Author: Anna Sewell

Description: The best-selling novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was published in 1877. The story is a first person narrative told from the perspective of the horse Black Beauty. This unique narrative perspective enables readers to empathize with the lives of working horses and to reflect upon the cruel treatment that has been inflicted upon them. As a result, the novel serves as a strenuous and timeless statement against animal cruelty and exploitation.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Middlemarch

Author: George Eliot

Description: “George Eliot” was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the greatest of English novelists of the Victorian era. Her long novel Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is generally considered to be her finest work. Published in eight installments between 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch tells the intertwined stories of a variety of people living in the vicinity of the (fictional) midlands town of Middlemarch during the early 1830s, the time of the great Reform Act. The novel is remarkable for its realistic treatment of situation, character and relationships and also demonstrates its author’s accurate knowledge of political issues, medicine, politics, and rural economy. Yet it also includes several touches of humor. The novel’s main characters include: Dorothea Brooke, a religiously inclined and very intelligent young woman who marries a much older man believing that she can assist him in his scholarly studies; Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who comes to Middlemarch to further his medical research and implement his ideas for treatment, but whose plans are thrown into disarray by an unwise marriage; Fred Vincy, an idle young man, the son of the town’s Mayor, who gets into a mire of debt; and several others. The initial reception of the novel by critics was mixed, with a number of unfavorable reviews, but its reputation has grown through time and Middlemarch is now generally considered to be one of the best novels ever written in English.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Star Born

Author: Andre Norton

Description: This sequel to The Stars Are Ours! was first published in 1957 by the World Publishing Company. It continues the tale of the humans who escaped an anti-intellectual Earth and founded a colony on Astra, a planet across the galaxy. Astra has a vibrant, intelligent species, as well as the ruins of a much older civilization. Norton weaves two stories together by alternating points of view with each chapter. We follow a 4th generation colonist, as well as a mechanic-pilot newly arrived on Astra as a member of a research mission from a recently revived Earth. Each is on a journey of discovery, and they find themselves allied with opposing sides of an ongoing war between two intelligent, indigenous species.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Fyodor Sologub

Description: Fyodor Sologub was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work generally has a downcast outlook with recurring mystical elements, and often uses anthropomorphic objects or fantastical situations to comment on human behaviour. As well as novels (including the critically acclaimed The Little Demon), Sologub wrote over five hundred short stories, ranging in length from half-page fables to nearly novella-length tales. hile most of his short stories were not contemporaneously translated, both John Cournos and Stephen Graham produced English compilations and contributed individual stories to publications such as The Russian Review and The Egoist. This collection comprises the best individual English translations in the public domain of Sologub’s short stories, presented in chronological order of the publication of their translation.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Sea-Wolf

Author: Jack London

Description: After a ferry accident on San Francisco Bay, literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is swept out to sea only to be rescued by the seal-hunting schooner Ghost. Wolf Larsen, the captain of the Ghost, is brutal and cynical but also highly intelligent, and he has no intention of returning Van Weyden to shore. Van Weyden is forced to serve on the Ghost, leaving behind his comfortable world ashore and entering into a psychological battle with Larsen on the sea. Jack London wrote The Sea-Wolf in 1904 following the success of his previous novel The Call of the Wild, and it has gone on to become one of his most popular novels. London actually served on a sealing schooner during his early career and that experience lends a gritty realism to his depiction of life at sea. The book can be read as a psychological thriller and adventure novel, but can also be read as a criticism of Nietzsche’s Übermensch philosophy with Wolf Larsen embodying a “superman” lacking conventional morality.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Jane Eyre

Author: Charlotte Brontë

Description: Jane Eyre experienced abuse at a young age, not only from her aunt—who raised her after both her parents died—but also from the headmaster of Lowood Institution, where she is sent away to. After ten years of living and teaching at Lowood Jane decides she is ready to see more of the world and takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. Jane later meets the mysterious master of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Rochester, and becomes drawn to him. Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre: An Autobiography on October 16th 1847 using the pen name “Currer Bell.” The novel is known for revolutionizing prose fiction, and is considered to be ahead of its time because of how it deals with topics of class, religion, and feminism.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Red House Mystery

Author: A. A. Milne

Description: The Red House Mystery is a detective novel by A. A. Milne, better known for his children’s writing, who wrote this book for his father in 1922. It is his only mystery novel and was very popular at the time. Mark Ablett is the amiable host of a country-house party to which his estranged brother, Robert, arrives from Australia. Robert is the black sheep of the family who is said to have borrowed money in the past and had written to warn of his visit. One afternoon a gunshot is heard, and Robert is found shot in the head while locked in the library, while his brother Mark has vanished. Tony Gillingham, who has arrived to visit Bill Beverley, one of the guests at the house-party, takes it upon himself to investigate the death. Together Tony and Bill form a Holmes and Watson partnership and seek to solve the mystery in an unorthodox manner, taking over from a bumbling police force. The Red House Mystery has divided opinion on its literary merit but it remains an entertaining and intriguing read nonetheless.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Little Lord Fauntleroy

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Description: In Little Lord Fauntleroy, an American boy named Cedric is transported from the impoverished streets of New York City to the grandeur of his ancestral home, Dorincourt Castle. Here he learns how to become an English aristocrat from the Earl of Dorincourt, his cold and cynical grandfather. Frances Hodgson Burnett published this, her first children’s story, in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885. Because of the story’s popularity, a year later, it was published as an illustrated novel to be sold around the world and translated to 20 different languages.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Anne of Green Gables

Author: L. M. Montgomery

Description: Anne of Green Gables established the career of Canadian writer Lucy Maude Montgomery. When Matthew Cuthbert sends away for an orphan boy to help on his farm, he is surprised to instead meet the captivatingly imaginative Anne Shirley. What ensues is one of the most enduringly popular coming-of-age stories, bringing the pastoral beauty of Prince Edward Island to the world.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Hill of Dreams

Author: Arthur Machen

Description: An ancient Roman hilltop fort proves an irresistible draw to Lucian Taylor, but what awaits at the top isn’t just a view of the surrounding Welsh landscape but a bacchal experience his young soul isn’t ready for. This experience sets his path as he attempts to transcribe his increasingly elaborate visions into the perfect book; the book that will actually mean something more than the banal novels he sees the publishing houses push out. The Hill of Dreams is a semi-autobiographical work, with Arthur Machen following a similar physical journey to the novel: a childhood in rural Wales followed by attempts to become an author in London. Machen was inspired by a review of Tristram Shandy that described it as “a picaresque of the mind,” and determined to write “a Robinson Crusoe of the soul.” The protagonist’s isolation from the rest of society certainly resonates with that description. Machen wrote this ten years earlier than its original 1907 publication, it having been turned down by the publishers of the time. While it was mostly ignored on its initial release, it has picked up admirers over the years and is now viewed as one of Machen’s most important works.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Practical Mysticism

Author: Evelyn Underhill

Description: Surprisingly timeless and under the guise of “Christian Mysticism,” Underhill describes in 1914 what could rightly be called “secular mindfulness” today. Evelyn Underhill doesn’t use much Christian terminology, instead preferring to use words that may be considered “new age.” If one can get past the terminology, the “Practical Mysticism” allows anyone to explore the mystical aspects of their own worldview without necessarily betraying their prior deeply held beliefs. Practical Mysticism is not a guidebook for mystical practice, though it does provide some tips along the way. What it does give is an introduction and apology for the sufficiently motivated; those that see (or want to see) the world in a different way.

Subjects: nonfiction, spirituality

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Title: The Dark Other

Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum

Description: Stanley Weinbaum’s The Dark Other was first written sometime in the 1920s under the name The Mad Brain. The manuscript went unpublished until 1950, where it was posthumously released with edits by Forrest J. Ackerman. Patricia Lane is a spirited young woman, in the midst of a passionate relationship with Nicholas Devine, a writer with a fascination with horror. When he starts to show bizarre personality shifts, she turns to her neighbor, a talented psychologist, to discover the source of these outbursts.

Subjects: horror

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Title: The Golden Bowl

Author: Henry James

Description: In The Golden Bowl, an impoverished Italian aristocrat comes to London to marry a wealthy American, but meets an old mistress before the wedding and spends time with her, helping her pick out a wedding gift. After their marriage, his wife maintains a close relationship with her father, while their own relationship becomes strained. Completed in 1904, Henry James himself considered The Golden Bowl one of his best novels, and it remains one of critics’ favorites. Along with The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, the novel represents James’ “major phase,” where he returned to the study of Americans abroad, which dominated his earlier career. The novel focuses almost entirely on four central characters, and explores themes of marriage and adultery in an intricate psychological study, which some critics have even suggested anticipates the style of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Lives of the Caesars

Author: Suetonius

Description: Suetonius was a Roman historian born in about 69 AD, shortly after the death of the emperor Nero. This book, detailing the lives of the twelve Roman emperors who were known as “Caesar”—some by a family connection to Julius Caesar, some just as a title—is considered to be Suetonius’ most important work. The Lives of the Caesars is a detailed account of the often dramatic lives of these emperors, whose abilities and morals varied enormously; from the capable, stable Augustus, to the insane Caligula. Several of these men died violently either by their own hand or by assassins. Suetonius, though, is careful to give credit where it is due, outlining the better actions and laws of each alongside an account of the crimes and immoralities they also carried out. This turbulent period of Roman history has often been depicted in fiction and in media, drawing on the work of Suetonius and other contemporary historians. For example, Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius (1934), which was made into a highly controversial television series by the BBC in 1976.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Gulliver’s Travels

Author: Jonathan Swift

Description: Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is probably the most famous work by Jonathan Swift. It was an instant hit—selling out within a week—and has never been out of print, as well as having been adapted many times. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon on the Antelope, is shipwrecked and washed up on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are less than six inches tall. This part of the book is a thinly veiled attack on the political classes of the time, as the Lilliputians focus on the minutiae of life, most notably the rift which has developed according to which end of a boiled egg gets opened at breakfast—the big end or the little end. On his second recorded journey he is abandoned on an island of giants where he is paraded as a curiosity at local markets and fairs. On his third journey he is marooned by pirates and is rescued by the inhabitants of a floating island devoted to music, mathematics and astronomy. On his final journey he meets the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses who have subdued the Yahoos, creatures who resemble humans. On his return to England, Gulliver has a very different outlook on life and views the human race in a very different way.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Description: Leonid Andreyev was a Russian playwright and author of short stories and novellas, writing primarily in the first two decades of the 20th century. Matching the depression he suffered from an early age, his writing is always dark of tone with subjects including biblical parables, Russian life, eldritch horror and revolutionary fervour. H. P. Lovecraft was a reader of his work, and The Seven Who Were Hanged (included here) has even been cited as direct inspiration for the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand: the event that started the first World War. Originally a lawyer, his first published short story brought him to the attention of Maxim Gorky who not only became a firm friend but also championed Andreyev’s writing in his collections to great commercial acclaim. idely translated into English during his life, this collection comprises the best individual translations of each of his short stories and novellas available in the public domain, presented in chronological order of their original publication in Russian.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Sense and Sensibility

Author: Jane Austen

Description: When her husband dies and leaves his estate to his son from a former marriage, Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters are offered a cottage on the estate of a distant relative. The two oldest daughters fall in love, only to find that the objects of their affection have secrets that throw their lives into an uproar. The reserved oldest daughter and impetuous, fiery middle daughter will take very different journeys to discovering the true worth of their respective beaus. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility, was largely written fifteen years earlier, when Austen was approximately the same age as her older protagonist Elinor. It was published anonymously (“By A Lady”), possibly due to propriety, or perhaps because she wanted to avoid any negative publicity if the book was not well-received. She needn’t have worried; it sold out its first printing of a modest 750 copies. She used well-defined characters, humor, and satire to paint a vivid picture of life in the England of George III, with all of its manners, class issues, and unwritten rules of behavior. That it’s still being read over two hundred years later is a testimony to her brilliance.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Author: Mark Twain

Description: The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain’s first novel written solely by himself. Although he was already a well-known author, it was for autobiographical sketches (The Innocents Abroad) and novels written with others (The Gilded Age). In writing about Tom, Twain drew on his childhood growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, infusing the story with his usual biting satire and social commentary. In Tom Sawyer and his friends, Twain created young men who would long outlive him. Not without controversy over the years due to its language and negative depiction of a Native American, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is arguably Twain’s most endearing, and enduring, work.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Notre-Dame de Paris

Author: Victor Hugo

Description: Esmeralda is a breathtaking beauty and attracts the attention of men all around her, including an actor, a captain, and an archdeacon, to whom she is of course forbidden. But because of a kindness she paid to him, there is one whose love for her is pure: the archdeacon’s bellringer. The actions of the archdeacon, who cannot control his lust for the young woman, ultimately draws all four men into her orbit, and his, with tragic consequences. Hugo’s tragic novel is an ode to gothic architecture in general and that of Notre-Dame de Paris in particular. Hugo was upset both at the neglect of buildings like Notre-Dame, and the modernization of those that weren’t being neglected. By centering on the building, he was able to bring all classes into his story: from kings and nobles to bellringers and sewer rats. The first American translation changed the title to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” shifting attention to the bellringer, but Hugo’s focus was always on Notre-Dame and the beautiful gothic architecture of Paris.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Ten Days That Shook the World

Author: John Reed

Description: In 1917 John Reed, a journalist and socialist, witnessed first-hand the 1917 Russian October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks seized power and began forming the Soviet Union. Ten Days that Shook the World is his account of the revolution, including on-the-ground descriptions of the days up to those portentous events. The book received a mixed reception. Some reviewers found it a powerful account of the events, one of the few available in English. Others noted Reed’s bias as an established Socialist writer. In any case, the book was hugely influential: this edition boasts a preface by Lenin, John Reed was buried in Moscow in a site reserved for Soviet leadership, and some Soviet couples even went so far as to name their children “Johnreed.” In 1999 New York University placed Ten Days that Shook the World 7th in their “Top 100 Works of Journalism” list.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Up from Slavery

Author: Booker T. Washington

Description: Booker Taliaferro Washington began life as a slave in Virginia shortly before emancipation, but rose to become one of the most celebrated leaders the African American community has ever had. His principal occupation was as president of the Tuskegee Institute, which he founded in 1881, but he earned national renown as an orator, writer and political advisor. His address at the Atlanta Exposition was a pivotal moment in race relations in America. ashington believed deeply in the dignity of physical labor, and that merit and talent are eventually rewarded regardless of race or class. The Tuskegee Institution was primarily a technical college, and aimed to teach industrial skills in addition to academic training. Students built many of the buildings on the campus, grew the food that was eaten there, and even made the furniture, tools and vehicles used by the school. Up from Slavery was originally published as a serialized work in The Outlook, a Christian magazine based in New York, before being collected in a single volume in 1901. This edition includes an introduction by Walter H. Page, a future U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Subjects: autobiography, memoir, nonfiction

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Title: The Valley of Fear

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Valley of Fear is the final novel in the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story originally appeared over several issues of the monthly Strand Magazine in late 1914 before being published as a standalone work. While Doyle would continue to publish Sherlock Holmes short stories until 1927, The Valley of Fear remains Holmes’ final long-form appearance. In the novel, Holmes and his assistant Watson are called to assist with an investigation into the murder of John Douglas, a man shot in his own home at point-blank range with a shotgun. As evidence is examined and witnesses within the house are questioned, Holmes uncovers holes in testimonies and a connection to a secret society that no one wishes to discuss.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Jeeves Stories

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Jeeves Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the adventures of his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster. Wooster is a wealthy and idle young English gentleman of the interwar era. Jeeves is his extraordinarily competent valet whose name has since become synonymous with perfect service. The stories follow Wooster in his wanderings about London, around England, and across the Atlantic to New York, with Jeeves following in his wake and striving to keep his employer well-groomed and properly presented. Along the way Jeeves must somehow also manage to extricate Wooster and his friends from the various scrapes and follies they get themselves into. First published as early as 1915, the stories first appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine. They were later collected into books or reworked into novels. Though only less than 50 of Wodehouse’s over 300 short stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, they remain his most enduring characters. They’ve been copied, imitated, and featured in countless interpretations and adaptations. A century later, these stories still are as amusing and entertaining as they were when they were first published.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, shorts

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Title: Mr. Standfast

Author: John Buchan

Description: Published in 1919, Mr. Standfast is a thriller set in the latter half of the First World War, and the third of John Buchan’s books to feature Richard Hannay. Richard Hannay is called back from serving in France to take part in a secret mission: searching for a German agent. Hannay disguises himself as a pacifist and travels through England and Scotland to track down the spy at the center of a web of German agents who are leaking information about the war plans. He hopes to infiltrate and feed misinformation back to Germany. His journey takes him from Glasgow to Skye, onwards into the Swiss Alps, and on to the Western Front. During the course of his work he’s again reunited with Peter Pienaar and John Blenkiron, who both appear in Greenmantle, as well as Sir Walter Bullivant, his Foreign Office contact from The Thirty Nine Steps. The title of the novel comes from a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to which there are many references in the book, not least of all as a codebook which Hannay uses to decipher messages from his allies. The book finishes with a captivating description of some of the final battles of the First World War between Britain and Germany in Eastern France.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: William Carlos Williams

Description: Poems is an anthology of William Carlos Williams’ poetry collections, combining The Tempers (1913), Al Que Quiere! (1917), and Sour Grapes (1921). Williams is recognized as one of the foremost poets of American Modernism. In these collections a reader may perceive Williams’ contact with and subsequent growth through and away from Imagism. The poet’s work asserts a decidedly American approach to Modernism and features highly localized diction and imagery. William Carlos Williams was born in 1883, grew up in New Jersey, and was educated in Europe and the United States. He was friends with Hilda Doolittle “H. D.” and Ezra Pound, and through these friendships was introduced to Imagism. He eventually broke with the Imagists and invested himself instead in capturing the unique diction and linguistic intermingling of the United States, while remaining committed to the concreteness that characterizes Imagism. A practising doctor, Williams included many images of bodies, sickness, and medical care in his early poems. Williams later claimed there are “no ideas but in things,” a sentiment rooted in both his contact with Imagism and his firm sense of place. Williams continued to read and respond to expatriate and English Modernism, culminating in his long work Paterson. In his later career Williams influenced postwar literary movements, most notably the Beat Generation. He died in 1963.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Brood of the Witch-Queen

Author: Sax Rohmer

Description: Perhaps best known for creating the character Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer is also known for his works involving the supernatural. This novel follows Robert Cairn, his father, Dr. Bruce Cairn, and their suspicion of one Antony Ferrara. After witnessing the strange and violent death of a swan, Robert Cairn suspects that Ferrara may be involved with the death of the bird. Soon after two murders, Dr. Bruce Cairn arrives in London and warns Robert that he suspects Ferrara is using ancient Egyptian magic to accomplish his evil deeds. After a mystical attack on Robert, Dr. Cairn and his son become involved in a series of supernatural events as they work to prevent Antony Ferrara from inflicting his dark magic on more victims. Like many of his works, Rohmer includes exotic locations in this novel; first set in London, the action soon moves to the pyramids of Egypt as the father and son duo track down Ferrara. Having received both success and notoriety from Fu-Manchu, Rohmer has been given praise for Brood of the Witch-Queen, such as when H. P. Lovecraft favorably compared it to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: Paradise Lost

Author: John Milton

Description: Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the Puritan English poet John Milton between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667. This is a period of English history which encompasses the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Perhaps reflecting some of his country’s turmoil during Milton’s life, Paradise Lost deals with revolution in Heaven by Satan and his followers against God, their defeat and banishment to Hell, and their subsequent plotting of revenge, leading ultimately to Satan beguiling Eve in Paradise to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge against the explicit command of God. Milton’s vivid and poetic description of these events is both dramatic and compelling. The work gained swift acceptance and has always remained a popular and important part of English literature. Originally published in ten books, a second edition was published in 1674 arranged into twelve books, the form in which it appears here. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a 1910 edition edited by A. W. Verity.

Subjects: fiction, poetry, spirituality

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Title: While the Billy Boils

Author: Henry Lawson

Description: hile the Billy Boils collates Henry Lawson’s most well known short stories of the 1890s, originally published in a variety of Australian and New Zealand newspapers—most prominently the Sydney Bulletin. Lawson presents a satirical and sometimes emotional study of frontier life in late colonial Australia, and the characters living in it.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: The Diary

Author: Samuel Pepys

Description: Pepys’ Diary is a decade-long snapshot of the life of an up and coming naval administrator in mid-17th century London. In it he describes everything from battles against the Dutch and the intrigues of court, to the plays he saw, his marital infidelities, and the quality of the meat provided for his supper. His incredibly frank observations have proved invaluable in establishing an accurate record of the daily life of the people of London of that period. Pepys eventually stopped keeping the diary due to progressive deterioration of his eyesight, fearing that continuing to write would worsen the condition. He did consider employing an amanuensis to transcribe future entries for him, but worried that the content he wanted written would be too personal. Luckily for Pepys, his eyesight difficulties never progressed to blindness and he was able to go on to become both a Member of Parliament and the President of the Royal Society, but he never resumed his diarism. After Pepys’ death he left his large library of books and manuscripts first to his nephew, which was then passed on to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it survives to this day. The diary, originally written in a shorthand, was included in this trove and was eventually deciphered in the early 19th century, and published by Lord Baybrooke in 1825. This early release censored large amounts of the text, and it was only in the 1970s that an uncensored version was published. Presented here is the 1893 edition, which restores the majority of the originally censored content but omits “a few passages which cannot possibly be printed.” The rich collection of endnotes serves to further illustrate the lives of the people Pepys meets and the state of internal politics and international relations during the English Restoration.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Charing Cross Mystery

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: The Charing Cross Mystery follows a young lawyer, Hetherwick, who happens to be on a train alongside a former police inspector who dies suddenly in front of him. The other man in the carriage runs off at the next stop and vanishes. Hetherwick takes it upon himself to investigate what turns out to be a murder. J. S. Fletcher originally wrote the story in 1922 for a weekly magazine, who called it Black Money. It was published in a single volume in 1923 as The Charing Cross Mystery and immediately had to be reprinted because of its popularity. The novel is a classic Edwardian detective novel where the plot twists and turns as more and more people become involved in the investigation, both as investigators and as suspects.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Henry V

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: Written by William Shakespeare around 1599, The Life of Henry the Fifth, more commonly known as Henry V, chronicles the later history of King Henry the Fifth of England and his efforts during Hundred Years’ War to reclaim disputed territories in France. The play starts with Henry’s claims to be the rightful heir to the French throne and, after his invasion of France, culminates with his famous and improbable victory at the Battle of Agincourt and the negotiation of the Treaty of Troyes. Henry V is believed to have been first performed in 1599 and first appears in a “bad” quarto in 1600, so-called because it contains a shortened version, likely unauthorized and potentially just based on a performance. This quarto was republished again in 1602 by a different printer and again in 1619. The first definitive text is the version published in the 1623 First Folio. The play is the last part of a series of four history plays written by Shakespeare, including Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2 and many of characters like Henry (who appears as a wild young Hal in the Henry IVs), Pistol, Bardolph, and Mistress Quickly would have therefore been familiar to the audience. It contains some of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines and is often held up as a powerful portrayal of inspirational leadership. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Les Misérables

Author: Victor Hugo

Description: Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo has been described as one of literature’s greatest novels. The first two volumes were published in French in March 1862 and translated into English later the same year. Since then it has been translated by numerous others and has been adapted for film, television, radio, animation and the stage. This epic novel tells the story of Jean Valjean, an ex-convict who is attempting to escape from his past. Newly released from the galley-ships, Jean Valjean steals the silverware from the bishop who has taken him in for the night. When he is captured, the bishop urges him to use the silver to become an honest citizen. Valjean becomes a wealthy man, owner of a factory and mayor of his town but his past is only a footstep away in the form of Javert, Inspector of Police, who recognises Valjean from his time as a guard. A factory-worker, who has been dismissed from Valjean’s employment, is sentenced to six months imprisonment but ends up dying in the town’s hospital and Valjean feels responsible for the downward spiral of her life, so rescues her child, Cosette, from the corrupt inn-keepers with whom her mother had left her. The rest of the novel tells the stories of Valjean, Cosette and other characters which intertwine with each other. Hugo also included a number of “digressions” on subjects including cloistered religious orders, the use of slang language and, most significantly, the battle of Waterloo. The book was highly anticipated in 1862, having been advertised from as early as 1860. Hugo did not allow the publishers to summarise the story in advance, surely because any summary could not do a novel of this length any justice.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Tale of Two Cities

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: A doctor is released from the Bastille after being falsely imprisoned for almost eighteen years. A young woman discovers the father she’s never known is not dead but alive, if not entirely well. A young man is acquitted of being a traitor, due in part to the efforts of a rather selfish lout who is assisting the young man’s attorney. A man has a wine shop in Paris with a wife who knits at the bar. These disparate elements are tied together as only Dickens can, and in the process he tells the story of the French Revolution. Charles Dickens was fascinated by Thomas Carlyle’s magnum opus The French Revolution; according to Dickens’ letters, he read it “500 times” and carried it with him everywhere while he was working on this novel. When he wrote to Carlyle asking him for books to read on background, Carlyle sent him two cartloads full. Dickens mimicked Carlyle’s style, his chronology, and his overall characterization of the revolution; although A Tale of Two Cities is fiction, the historical events described are largely accurate, sometimes exactly so. Even so, Dickens made his name and reputation on telling stories full of characters one could be invested in, care about, and despise, and this novel has all of those and more. It also, in its first and last lines, has two of the most famous lines in literature. With the possible exception of A Christmas Carol, it is his most popular novel, and according to many, his best.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Author: William Shakespeare

Description: First published in 1602 by William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor features the popular figure Sir John Falstaff, who first appeared in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. Some speculate that Merry Wives was written at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted to see Falstaff in love; and that Shakespeare was forced to rush its creation as a result, and so it remains one of Shakespeare’s lesser-regarded plays. The play revolves around two intertwined plots: the adventures of the rogue Falstaff who plans to seduce several local wives, and the story of young Anne Page who is being wooed by prominent citizens while she has her sights set on young Fenton. The wives come together to teach Falstaff a lesson, and in the end love triumphs. The Merry Wives of Windsor is believed to have been first performed in 1597 and was subsequently published in quarto in 1602, in a second quarto in 1619, and then in the 1623 First Folio. Despite holding a lesser place in Shakespeare’s canon, it was one of the first Shakespearean plays to be performed in 1660, after the reinstatement of Charles II and theatre once again was permitted to be performed in London. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson’s 1923 Cambridge edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Duel

Author: Aleksandr Kuprin

Description: At the young age of twenty-two Sublieutenant Romashov has become an officer, but he’s already disillusioned with army life in the middle of nowhere, and the brutish and blood-thirsty natures of his commanders and peers. The only thing keeping him from outright depression is his growing infatuation with the wife of a fellow officer; an infatuation which, half-returned, leads inevitably towards the titular subject. The Duel is regarded as the highlight of Kuprin’s bibliography and was praised by famous Russian authors of the period including Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin and Tolstoy. It was published in 1905 in the middle of the failure of the Russian army in the Russo-Japanese war and widespread social unrest. Kuprin himself had military experience as a lieutenant, which shines through in the novel’s vivid depictions of the minutiae of officer life. The Duel was later adapted for both film and television in Russia. This edition is based on the 1916 translation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Secret Tomb

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: When Dorothy, ropedancer and palmist, arrives at the Château de Roborey with her circus, she’s already observed strange excavations at the grounds. Fate reveals a familial connection and drags her and her motley crew of war orphans into a quest for long-lost ancestral treasure, but her new-found nemesis is always close on her trail. Maurice Leblanc, most famous for his Arsène Lupin stories, here switches to a new protagonist, but fans of his other work will find her strangely recognisable. Indeed, the mystery presented here is later referenced in The Countess of Cagliostro as a puzzle that Lupin did not have time to solve. This book was originally serialised in Le Journal between January and March 1923, and was published in novel form both in French and in this English translation later in the year. It was also later adapted as a French-language made-for-TV movie in 1983.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Slaves of Paris

Author: Émile Gaboriau

Description: In this, Gaboriau’s penultimate Lecoq novel, Lecoq doesn’t make an appearance until the last few chapters of the book. In fact, the protagonists’ identity remains unclear until almost halfway through. They’re not missed, though, because the antagonists are a group of blackmailers of exhaustive ingenuity and knowledge, and piecing together the game they’re playing with several noblemen and women occupies all of one’s faculties for most of the book. Young love, old love, forbidden love, lost love, along with a couple of missing individuals: what is the blackmailers’ endgame? Will Lecoq be able to figure it out in time? Called “French sensational” in its day, Lecoq’s last case is still sensational today.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: A Bid for Fortune

Author: Guy Boothby

Description: Guy Newell Boothby, born in Adelaide, was one of the most popular of Australian authors in the late 19th and early 20th century, writing dozens of novels of sensational fiction. A Bid for Fortune, or Dr. Nikola’s Vendetta is the first of his series of five books featuring the sinister mastermind Dr. Nikola, a character of gothic appearance usually accompanied by a large black cat, and who has powers of mesmerism. In this first novel, the protagonist is a young Australian, Richard Hatteras, who has made a small fortune in pearl-diving operations in the Thursday Islands. With money in his pocket, he decides to travel. Visiting Sydney before taking ship for England, he meets and falls in love with the daughter of the Colonial Secretary, Sylvester Wetherell. As the story moves on, it is revealed that Wetherell has fallen foul of the evil Dr. Nikola, who has developed a devious scheme to force Wetherell to submit in to his demands to give him a mysterious oriental object he has acquired. The life and liberty of Hatteras’ lady-love are imperilled as Nikola’s plot moves on, and Hatteras has to make strenuous efforts to locate and free her. Boothby’s novels, particularly the Dr. Nikola books, achieved considerable popular success, particularly in his native country of Australia. A study of library borrowings in the early 20th Century has shown that Boothby’s works were almost as frequently borrowed in Australia as those of Charles Dickens and H. Rider Haggard.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Monsieur Lecoq

Author: Émile Gaboriau

Description: The last Lecoq novel goes back to the beginning, to Monsieur Lecoq’s first case, the case that began his reputation as a master of detection, master of disguise, and master of detail. The case begins simply: Lecoq and several other policemen come upon a crime as it’s being committed. Three men are dead and the killer is in custody. But who is he? Lecoq and his companion officer spend months trying to figure it out, to no avail. Lecoq finally goes to visit his old mentor in order to gain some insight. The scene then changes to some fifty years previous; in the aftermath of Waterloo, some noblemen return from exile. One of them insults the character of a local who has acted honorably on the nobleman’s behalf, and the remainder of the novel is devoted to how those few minutes end up unravelling the lives of everyone present, and many who aren’t. Gaboriau again demonstrates his ability to mix detective mystery and Dickensian drama, and foreshadows the style of the first two novels of his more famous English cousin in detection.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

Author: Charles Babbage

Description: Charles Babbage was a Victorian polymath, and someone with a seemingly never-ending intellectual curiosity about the world around him. A mathematician by training, he also wrote copiously on subjects such as economics, physics, engineering, computation, cryptography, religion and education, along with conducting practical experiments with pretty much anything that had grabbed his interest at the time. Today, he’s widely viewed to be the father of the computer with his Difference and Analytical Engines. Although neither were fully completed during his lifetime, a working replica of the Difference Engine was built in the 1990s, and an Analytical Engine is currently in the planning stages. This autobiography (first published near the end of his life in 1864) veers from topic to topic and rarely settles on any subject for more than a chapter. Apart from his early life and an explanation of the thinking behind his computing Engines, Babbage also transcribes his memories of climbing into an active volcano, arguing with street musicians, picking locks, standing in elections, and imagining life as a cheese mite, among other diverse subjects. The original meaning of the titular word “Philosopher” is “lover of wisdom,” and this book shows Babbage to be just that.

Subjects: autobiography

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Title: File No. 113

Author: Émile Gaboriau

Description: A bank safe is robbed. Only two men have both the key and the combination to the safe. The police naturally look to the employee rather than the owner of the bank. But Monsieur Lecoq, as always, sees what everyone else misses. Was it one of the two? Or was it a seemingly impossible third party? Only Lecoq will be able to determine it. But why doesn’t he want his involvement in the case known? Like Gaboriau’s two novels before it, File No. 113 is a mystery with a Dickensian tragedy behind it. Men and women of good character, of bad character, and good character who make bad choices abound, and remind us that the best mysteries have great personalities inhabiting them.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Mack Reynolds

Description: Dallas McCord “Mack” Reynolds was an American science fiction writer who authored almost two hundred short stories and novellas, was a staple in all the major science fiction and fantasy magazines and published dozens of science fiction novels. He began his writing career in the late 1940s. His fiction focused on exploring and challenging both the socioeconomic themes of the day and the implications of the Cold War that raged throughout his career. A thoughtful writer of speculative fiction, many of Mack Reynolds’ predictions have come to pass, including the credit-card economy, remote warfare and a worldwide computer network. His thoughts about the outcomes of both the Soviet and western political and economic systems are still highly relevant. This collection gathers stories that were published in Analog, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and others. Ordered by date of first publication, they range from spy adventures to the ultimate expression of corporate warfare and from a very short 1000-word story to full-blown novellas.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Prophet

Author: Khalil Gibran

Description: The Prophet is Lebanese-American writer Khalil Gibran’s best known work. In the book, the prophet Almustafa is returning home after 12 years in the fictional city of Orphalese. Before he boards his ship, he speaks to the people of Orphalese on a number of universal themes such as love, work, marriage, beauty, and death, which form this collection of 26 short fables or prose poetry. First published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print since, and has been translated into over a hundred languages.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: The Problems of Philosophy

Author: Bertrand Russell

Description: The Problems of Philosophy, published in 1912, is an introductory book for a beginner in philosophical studies. In this book, the author attempts to provoke a discussion by posing different problems. The book covers a wide variety of theories proposed by philosophers like Plato, Descartes, Hume, Aristotle, etc. In view of these theories, Russell poses questions about the nature of reality and our perception of it. hile the book refrains from providing absolute solutions to the problems it describes, it excels in guiding the readers towards developing their own way of thinking.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: Bulfinch’s Mythology

Author: Thomas Bulfinch

Description: Thomas Bulfinch was an American banker and Latin scholar. Bulfinch’s Mythology is a posthumous compilation of three volumes published by Bulfinch during his lifetime which were intended to introduce the general reader to the myths and legends of Western Civilization by presenting them in simple prose with occasional commentary by the author. Bulfinch also includes many quotations showing how these stories have been handled by poets and playwrights of later years. The three original volumes are The Age of Fable (1855), dealing largely with Greek and Roman mythology but also touching on the mythology of other cultures such as the Indian, Egyptian and Norse myths; The Age of Chivalry (1858), dealing with Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail and the Mabinogeon; and Legends of Charlemagne (1863), dealing with the fantastical legends surrounding Charlemagne and his “paladins” such as Orlando, Oliver and Rogero. The combined volume entitled Bulfinch’s Mythology quickly became very popular, and by some accounts it is one of the most popular books ever published in the United States.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Mystery of Orcival

Author: Émile Gaboriau

Description: A murder is discovered. The authorities quickly arrest an obvious suspect. A detective spends hours at the scene in disguise before making himself known, and proceeds to minutely examine the evidence with the assistance of a doctor, among others, before proclaiming the answer lies in a completely different direction. One would be forgiven for thinking the detective must be a certain famous Englishman and his doctor companion. But this detective is French rather than English, a professional working for the police rather than an amateur, and indulges in candy lozenges rather than cocaine. If there is a straight line between Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Holmes, then Gaboriau’s Lecoq lies right in the middle of it. He is a master of disguise, he is proud and sometimes arrogant, he notices infinitesimal things others do not, he makes great leaps in deduction while others are struggling to take small steps. He is both strikingly similar and distinctly different than his more famous English “cousin.” Although Monsieur Lecoq appeared in Gaboriau’s first novel, there he played only a minor part. Here, he is the main attraction. Solving the murder of a countess and disappearance of a count requires all of Lecoq’s skills, and as he steadily unravels the mystery one sees the debt that is owed by all who came after him.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Lerouge Case

Author: Émile Gaboriau

Description: Considered by many to be the first detective novel, The Lerouge Case (aka The Widow Lerouge) introduces Monsieur Lecoq (later Inspector Lecoq), a former “habitual criminal” who becomes a police officer. Émile Gaboriau based Lecoq at least in part on an actual criminal-turned-police-officer, Eugène Vidocq, who went on to be the first director of the Sûreté. In this first book, Lecoq plays a relatively small part, the bulk of the mystery solving being done by Lecoq’s mentor Tabaret, an amateur detective. Gaboriau thus introduces both a police detective and an amateur detective at the same time. Many of the attributes now taken for granted in the mystery arena originated with Gaboriau and Lecoq—hyper attention to detail, mastery of disguises, amateur “agents” who assist the detective, and the above-mentioned amateur detectives that assist and sometimes out-perform the police versions. Gaboriau’s Lecoq novels were wildly successful until another amateur detective named Holmes made his appearance. Holmes even comments on Lecoq in A Study in Scarlet, dismissing him as a “miserable bungler” in response to Dr. Watson’s question. Nevertheless, Arthur Conan Doyle was obviously influenced by Gaboriau and Lecoq, as many of Holmes’ traits can be seen first in Lecoq.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Songs of a Sourdough

Author: Robert W. Service

Description: Songs of a Sourdough is a collection of poems written in 1907 by Robert W. Service while he was working as a bank teller in Whitehorse, Yukon. The best-known poems are those describing life during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, especially his ballads “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and the “Cremation of Sam McGee.” hile some of Service’s work had previously appeared in newspapers and periodicals, Songs of a Sourdough was his first book. Publishers initially questioned the “moral tone” of the work with its bawdy poems depicting not just the hard lives and isolation of Yukon prospectors but also the drinking, gambling, and prostitution that was prevalent in Dawson City. However, despite these reservations, the book was an immediate success. In Canada, there were ten printings and more than 12,000 copies sold in the first year alone. Dozens of additional printings followed in subsequent years, including editions issued in Britain and the United States.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Kai Lung’s Golden Hours

Author: Ernest Bramah

Description: Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories are set in a fantastical ancient China and written with an oblique, ornate prose style that serves to mimic that of Chinese folk tales. The titular character is an itinerant storyteller and the books themselves are mostly collections of stories presented as if he were narrating. Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, published in 1922, is the second of the Kai Lung books, and the first to have an overarching framing narrative and thus be published as a novel. In it we see Kai Lung brought before the court of the Mandarin Shan Tien, having been accused of treason by the Mandarin’s agent Ming-shu. Appealing to Shan Tien’s appreciation for refined narrative, Kai Lung tries to regain his freedom by spinning a series of beguiling tales filled with aphorisms and humorous understatement.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Whose Body?

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Description: Whose Body?, published in 1923, is the first in a long and very popular series of mystery novels written by Dorothy L. Sayers and featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. In this novel we are introduced to Wimsey, his imperturbable and multi-skilled butler Bunter, and his close friend Charles Parker of Scotland Yard as they come together to investigate an extremely mysterious incident: the naked body of a man, wearing a golden pince-nez, has been discovered in the bath of a bewildered tenant of a flat in Battersea. There’s a good deal of humor in the book, carefully balanced against the grim reality of murder. hose Body? was well-received on first publication, and provided a basis for Sayer’s successful career as a novelist. In sum, she wrote some eleven Wimsey novels as well as several short stories featuring the characters. Nevertheless, it appears that she herself felt that her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was her greatest literary work.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Author: Stephen Leacock

Description: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock’s humourous and affectionate account of small-town life in the fictional town of Mariposa. Written in 1912, it is drawn from his experiences living in Orillia, Ontario. The book is a series of funny and satirical anecdotes that illustrate the inner workings of life in Mariposa—from business to politics to steamboat disasters. The town is populated by many archetypal characters including the shrewd businessman Mr. Smith, the lovelorn bank teller Mr. Pupkin, and the mathematically challenged Rev. Mr. Drone. During his lifetime, Stephen Leacock was very popular in much of the English-speaking world as a writer and humourist. Sunshine Sketches is considered one of his most notable and enduring works. In Canada, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour is named in his honour. The medal is an annual award for the best Canadian book of literary humour published in the previous year.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, satire

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Title: The Way We Live Now

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: The Way We Live Now is Anthony Trollope’s longest novel, published in two volumes in 1875 after first appearing in serial form. After an extended visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1872, Trollope was outraged on his return to England by a number of financial scandals, and was determined to expose the dishonesty, corruption, and greed they embodied. The Way We Live Now centers around a foreign businessman, Augustus Melmotte, who has come to prominence in London despite rumors about his past dealings on the Continent. He is immensely rich, and his daughter Marie is considered to be a desirable catch for several aristocratic young men in search of a fortune. Melmotte gains substantial influence because of his wealth. He rises in society and is even put up as a candidate for Parliament, despite a general feeling that he must be a fraudster and liar. A variety of sub-plots are woven around this central idea. The Way We Live Now is generally considered to be one of Trollope’s best novels and is often included in lists of the best novels written in English.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Ethan Frome

Author: Edith Wharton

Description: Ethan Frome is a young man whose nascent ambitions were thwarted by illness and privation. Now his daily toils wring only the most meager living from his fading farm, and his marriage is as frigid as the winter that has beset his home in Starkfield, MA. Yet despite the swirling snows, a flame of passion sparked by the recent arrival of his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, burns desperately within him. How far will he go to pursue a forbidden love and the prospect of true happiness? What will be the cost?

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Moon and Sixpence

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: The Moon and Sixpence tells the story of English stockbroker Charles Strickland, who abandons his wife and child to travel to Paris to become a painter. First published in 1919 in the United Kingdom by Heinemann, the story is inspired by the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin. It’s told in episodic form from a first-person perspective. The narrator, who came to know Strickland through his wife’s literary parties, begins the story as Strickland leaves for Paris. Strickland’s new life becomes a stark contrast to his life in London. While he was once a well-off banker living a comfortable life, he must now sleep in cheap hotels while suffering both illness and hunger. Maugham spent a year in Paris in 1904, which is when he first heard the story of Gauguin, the banker who left his family and profession to pursue his passion for art. He heard the story from others who had known and worked with Gauguin. Ten years later Maugham travelled to Tahiti where he met others who had known Gauguin during the artist’s time there. Inspired by the stories he heard, Maugham wrote The Moon and Sixpence. Although based on the life of Paul Gauguin, the story is a work of fiction.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Kate Chopin

Description: Kate Chopin’s most famous work nowadays is the novel The Awakening, but at the turn of the last century she was more famous for her short fiction, published in American magazines like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Youth’s Companion, and Vogue. A prolific writer, over the course of fourteen years she penned nearly a hundred stories, although many didn’t see publication until a new collection was released in 1963. The stories focus on life in 1890s Louisiana, a setting that she was living in as a resident of New Orleans and Natchitoches. They’re told from many different points of view, but always with empathy for the struggles, both big and small, of the protagonists. This collection contains the forty-nine short stories of Kate Chopin verified to be in the U.S. public domain, including “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Dream of an Hour.” They’re presented in the order they were originally written.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Plays

Author: Roswitha of Gandersheim

Description: Roswitha, also known as Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, was a tenth century German canoness, dramatist, and poet. A remarkable woman, she has been called the first Western playwright since antiquity as well as the first known woman playwright. She was inspired by the Roman comic playwright Terence, who wrote six farces filled with disguises, misunderstandings, and pagan debauchery. Upset by Terence’s immoral subject matter but also inspired by his well-crafted plays, Roswitha sought to “Christianize” his work by writing six plays of her own. Roswitha wrote six dramas in Latin. Two are concerned with the conversation of nonbelievers (Gallicanus and Callimachus), two are concerned with the repentance of sinners (Abraham and Paphnutius), and two are concerned with the martyrdom of virgins (Dulcitus and Sapientia). This edition, originally published in 1923, includes an introduction by Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet (an English Benedictine monk and scholar), a critical preface by the translator (Christopher St. John), and prefaces written by Roswitha herself.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Such Is Life

Author: Joseph Furphy

Description: Such Is Life is an Australian novel written by Joseph Furphy under a pseudonym of “Tom Collins” and published in 1903. It purports to be a series of diary entries by the author, selected at approximately one-month intervals during late 1883 and early 1884. “Tom Collins” travels rural New South Wales and Victoria, interacting and talking at length with a variety of characters including the drivers of bullock-teams, itinerant swagmen, boundary riders, and squatters (the owners of large rural properties). The novel is full of entertaining and sometimes melancholy incidents mixed with the philosophical ramblings of the author and his frequent quotations from Shakespeare and poetry. Its depictions of the Australian bush, the rural lifestyle, and the depredations of drought are vivid. Furphy is sometimes called the “Father of the Australian Novel,” and Such Is Life is considered a classic of Australian literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Scarhaven Keep

Author: J. S. Fletcher

Description: In Scarhaven Keep, the playwright Richard Copplestone is pulled into a search for a missing actor which leads him to the town of Scarhaven on the northern English sea coast. As he slowly uncovers the secrets of the residents of Scarhaven, the mystery deepens and reveals much more than a simple missing person.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Eight Strokes of the Clock

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: Trying to escape from her boring life, Hortense Daniel meets the mysterious Prince Rénine (or should we say Arsène Lupin?) who enlists her help to solve eight mysteries, starting with one that is for her very close to home. The pair’s travels take them across northern France as they help ease the path of true love, bring thieves and murderers to justice, and eventually to recover something very dear to Hortense’s heart. The Eight Strokes of the Clock is an Arsène Lupin novel by any other name, with Maurice Leblanc admitting as much in an opening note. Set in the early days of the character’s history, this collection of mysteries has the hallmarks of classic Lupin: a fervent desire to impress, dazzling jumps of logic and an ambivalent belief that the law can provide justice. This English translation was published in 1922 in the same year it was being serialized in France; it was published in novel form there a year later.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Commentaries on the Gallic War

Author: Julius Caesar

Description: Commentaries on the Gallic War describes the conflicts between Rome and the region of Gaul in western Europe, as well as the Germanic peoples who lived to the east of the river Rhine, and Britain to the north, in the later years of the Roman republic. Despite being written in the 3rd person, the commentaries are the memoirs of Julius Caesar himself, and offer a unique insight into these events. Before the Gallic war began, the Romans had already conquered the region known as Provincia Nostra (literally: “our province”), which is now Languedoc and Provence in the south of France. Julius Caesar had been one of the two consuls elected in the year 59 BC. The consuls held the highest political office in the Roman republic, but their terms only lasted a year. When his consulship came to an end, Caesar retained power through the position of proconsul, governing Provincia Nostra and two other provinces. This provided Caesar with the necessary command to conduct the military campaigns in Gaul. Caesar’s victories in Gaul had huge repercussions on the future of Rome: the related work, Commentaries on the Civil War, documents the ensuing conflict between Caesar and Pompey that ultimately led to the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the Roman empire.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction

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Title: My Brilliant Career

Author: Miles Franklin

Description: My Brilliant Career is a classic Australian work published in 1901 by Stella Miles Franklin, with an introduction by Henry Lawson. A thinly veiled autobiographical novel, it paints a vivid and sometimes grim picture of rural Australian life in the late 19th Century. Sybylla Melvyn is the daughter of a man who falls into grinding poverty through inadvised speculation before becoming a hopeless drunk unable to make a living from a small dairy farm. Sybylla longs for the intellectual things in life such as books and music. She wants to become a writer and rebels against the constraints of her life. For a short period she is allowed to stay with her better-off relatives, and there she attracts the attentions of a handsome and rich neighbour, Harold Beecham. The course of true love, however, does not run smoothly for this very independent young woman. The author, like many other women writers of the time, adopted a version of her name which suggested that she was male in order to get published. Today, the Miles Franklin Award is Australia’s premier literary award, with a companion award, the Stella, open only to women authors. My Brilliant Career was made into a well-regarded movie in 1979. Directed by Gillian Armstrong, it features Judy Davis as Sybylla and Sam Neil as Harry Beecham.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Teeth of the Tiger

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: The fortunes of Don Luis Perenna seem set to only increase after the will of his friend, Cosmo Mornington, is read. Perenna stands to benefit by one million francs if he finds the true heir, and by one hundred million if they can’t be found. But after both a detective and a potential recipient of the fortune die in the in the same way as Mornington, Perenna (alias Arsène Lupin) must fight to prove his innocence and discover the real murderer. The Teeth of the Tiger was published in this English translation in 1914, but wasn’t available in the original French until its serialization in Le Journal in 1920. In the timeline of the series, The Teeth of the Tiger is set after the events of 813, and continues with the rebalancing of Lupin from a god-like genius to a fallible, albeit brilliant, man.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Alchemist

Author: Ben Jonson

Description: First performed in 1610, The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson’s greatest comedies. Written for the King’s Men—the acting company to which Shakespeare belonged—it was first performed in Oxford because the playhouses in London were closed due to the plague. It was an immediate success and has remained a popular staple ever since. The play centers around a con man, his female accomplice, and a roguish butler who uses his master’s house to gull a series of victims out of their money and goods. Jonson uses the play to satirize as many people as he can—pompous lords, greedy commoners, and self-righteous Anabaptists alike—as his three con artists proceed to bilk everyone who comes to their door. They don multiple roles and weave elaborate tales to exploit their victims’ greed and amass a small fortune. But it all comes to a sudden, raucous end when the master unexpectedly returns to London and all the victims gather to try and reclaim their property.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Young Visiters

Author: Daisy Ashford

Description: Daisy Ashford was just nine years old when she penned (or rather, penciled) The Young Visiters in her notebook. As an adult, she found the manuscript along with other childhood writings and showed them to her literary friends for a laugh. They were so delighted that they passed them around their circle. The unexpected result was a publishing deal, with J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, writing the preface. So clever was the book that some assumed Barrie himself had written the entire thing as an elaborate hoax. The story’s “hero” is Alfred Salteena, a polite but bumbling man who hopes to learn the ways of the elite. He is in love with a younger woman, Ethel, but a love triangle with his friend Bernard soon emerges. The characters attend “sumshious” balls, stay in lavish “compartments,” and wear elaborate “get ups,” all of it rendered in Ashford’s original childish spelling. The story reads like a pastiche of high society and even a parody of the Victorian novel. The Young Visiters was published in 1919 and was reprinted eighteen times in that year alone. It has been adapted into a play, a musical, and multiple film versions. Ashford’s other juvenile writings were later published, including The Hangman’s Daughter, a short novel she considered her finest work. As an adult, she did not continue to write.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Secret of Sarek

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: While watching a film, Véronique d’Hergemont spots her childhood signature mysteriously written on the side of a hut in the background of a scene. Her visit to the location of the film shoot deepens the mystery, but also provides further clues that point her towards long-lost relations and a great secret from ancient history: a secret that will require the services of a particular man to unravel. The Secret of Sarek was published in the original French in 1919, and in this English translation in 1920. It was Maurice Leblanc’s first Arsène Lupin novel written after the Great War, and its impact on Leblanc is palpable: the novel has a much darker tone than earlier works, and even the famous cheery charm of Lupin is diluted. The result is a classic horror story, bringing a new dimension to the series.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: My Ántonia

Author: Willa Cather

Description: ritten in the style of a memoir, My Ántonia chronicles Jim Burden’s friendship with the daughter of a Czech immigrant family. Recently orphaned, he moves west to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. Riding the same train is the Shimerda family, who are also on their way to settle in the area. The Shimerdas have a difficult life as pioneers: living in a sod house, working the fields, and running out of food in the winter. Jim soon becomes smitten with Ántonia, the eldest daughter, as they grow up and explore the landscape around them together. Through his eyes, we see both how she shapes the land around her and is shaped by the rigors of poverty. Similarly to Jim, Willa Cather spent her early years in Nebraska but most of her adult life in Eastern cities. She pays homage to her homeland with her Prairie Trilogy of novels: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. They are tinged with her characteristic straightforward language, reverence for nature, and nostalgia, even as she acknowledges the hardships of the past. Published in 1918 to great enthusiasm, My Ántonia is considered one of Cather’s finest works and a defining point in her identity as a writer.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Author: Christopher Marlowe

Description: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe’s classic interpretation of the Dr. Faustus legend, was first performed in London by the Admiral’s Men around 1592. It is believed to be the first dramatization of this classic tale wherein Faustus, a German scholar, trades his soul to Lucifer in return for magical powers and the command over the demon Mephistopheles. Faustus at first seeks to expand his knowledge of the universe, but soon finds that a deal with the devil brings little satisfaction. All too soon the contract expires, and Faustus is faced with the prospect of eternal damnation. Two principal versions of this play exist, one based on the 1604 quarto (the A text) and a longer, emended version published in 1616 (the B text). This edition is based on Havelock Ellis’s 1893 edition of the 1604 text (the A text is currently believed by many scholars to be the closest to Marlowe’s original). Often considered to be Marlowe’s greatest work, Doctor Faustus builds on the ancestry of the medieval morality play, but brings a more sympathetic view to the straying hero than those precursors to Elizabethan drama, and even ventures to pose questions of common Christian doctrine. This is the last play written by Marlowe before he was killed in a Deptford tavern.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Fathers and Children

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Description: Arkady, a university graduate, returns from St. Petersburg to his father’s estate with his mentor Bazarov—a nihilist. Fathers and Children (also known as Fathers and Sons) is a novel written in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and published in Moscow by The Russian Messenger. The main theme of the novel is the conflict between two generations—the “fathers,” the liberal serf owners, and the “children,” nihilists who reject their authority and traditions. Turgenev’s novel also helped popularize the term “nihilism,” especially after the word’s use by an influential Russian nihilist movement in the 1860s. Despite being harshly criticized in Russia, the novel was very well received in Europe, being praised by influential novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, making it the first Russian novel to gain recognition in the Western literary world.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Club of Queer Trades

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Charles Swinburne and his friend, the private detective Rupert Grant, are startled when Major Brown recounts the things that happened to him that morning. Along with Rupert’s brother, the ex-judge Basil Grant, they launch headlong into their investigation only to discover that the antagonist is a member of the Club of Queer Trades. Over the course of six short stories, the secrets of the Club come to light in surprising ways. The Club of Queer Trades was one of G. K. Chesterton’s earlier works, and was originally serialized in Harper’s Weekly in 1904 before being collected into a novel in 1905. In recent years it was produced as a six-part radio drama by the BBC.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

Author: Arthur W. Pinero

Description: Arthur Pinero wrote The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1893 after penning several successful farces. Playing on the “woman with a past” plot that was popular in melodramas, Pinero steered it in a more serious direction, centering the play around the social consequences arising when Aubrey Tanqueray remarries in an attempt to redeem a woman with a questionable past. The play’s structure is based on the principles of the “well-made play” popular throughout the 19th-century. But just as Wilde manipulated the conventions of the “well-made play” to produce a new form of comedy, so did Arthur Pinero manipulate it, forgoing the happy ending to produce an elevated form of tragedy. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was first performed in 1893, at the St. James Theatre, London, at a time when England was still resisting the growing movement in Europe towards realism and the portrayal of real social problems and human misconduct. But while it was regarded as shocking, it ran well and made a substantial profit. Theatre historian J. P. Wearing phrased it thus: “although not as avant-garde as Ibsen’s plays, Tanqueray confronted its fashionable St. James’s audiences with as forceful a social message as they could stomach.”

Subjects: drama

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Ivan Bunin

Description: Ivan Bunin was a Russian author, poet and diarist, who in 1933 (at the age of 63) won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing.” Viewed by many at the time as the heir to his friend and contemporary Chekhov, Bunin wrote his poems and stories with a depth of description that attracted the admiration of his fellow authors. Maxim Gorky described him as “the best Russian writer of the day” and “the first poet of our times,” and his translators include D. H. Lawrence and Leonard Woolf. This collection includes the famous The Gentleman from San Francisco, partially set on Capri where Bunin spent several winters, and stories told from the point of view of many more characters, including historic Indian princes, emancipated Russian serfs, desert prophets, and even a sea-faring dog. The short stories collected here are all of the available public domain translations into English, in chronological order of the original Russian publication. They were translated by S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Woolf, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, and The Russian Review.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Description: Gustave Flaubert was an influential novelist who had both the characteristics of a romanticist and a realist. The short stories in this collection put that dichotomy on display. Flaubert wrote the first story, “The Dance of Death” when he was only 17 years old. It is written in a play format—though sometimes referred to as a prose poem—and features a conversation between Death, Satan and Nero. “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller” is a story about Julian the Hospitaller, a man who shares some similarities with Oedipus; “A Simple Soul” tells the story of a servant girl named Felicité; and lastly “Herodias” retells the beheading of St. John the Baptist.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Ghosts

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Description: Written in 1881, when melodrama and farce were still at their peak of popularity, Ibsen’s Ghosts is a three-act tragedy that explores uncomfortable, even forbidden themes. It is also a highly critical commentary on the morality of the day. The play centers around the widow of a prominent Norwegian sea captain whose son returns home and, with tragic consequences, revives the ghosts of the past that she has long labored to put to rest. Ghosts immediately became a source of controversy for its inclusion of topics like venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, and it was banned from being performed in England for many years. Its arrival signals a shift in the nature of theatre and, despite negative criticism, it was translated into other languages and performed in Sweden, Germany, and New York within a few years of its debut. It stands now as one of the works considered to have ushered in the era of modern drama.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Greenmantle

Author: John Buchan

Description: Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps. The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate’s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war. The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Conjure Woman

Author: Charles W. Chesnutt

Description: The Conjure Woman is a collection of fantastical stories narrated by Julius, a former slave, about life on the nearby plantations prior to the Civil War. Each involves an element of magic, be it a vine that dooms those who eat from it or a man transformed into a tree to avoid being separated from his wife. Julius’s audience, a married couple who have just moved to the South to cultivate grapes, listen on with mixed sympathy and disbelief. They disagree on whether Julius is telling the truth and whether there is some deeper significance to the tales. At turns humorous and unsettling, these stories provide a surprising lens into the realities of slavery. The text is notable for spelling out Julius’s spoken accent. Although Julius has some stereotypical features of a simple-minded old slave, he is often regarded as a more clever and complicated figure. He seems to tell his tales not only to entertain his listeners, but to trick them to his advantage. Many of these stories first appeared in national magazines, where they received popular acclaim, before being assembled as their own volume in 1899. Charles W. Chesnutt’s race was not mentioned by the publisher, nor could many guess his African heritage based on his appearance. However, Chesnutt embraced his African-American identity and was a prominent activist for black rights. The Conjure Woman, his first book, is considered an important early work of African-American fiction. This edition includes four additional Julius tales that appeared in magazines but were not collected during Chesnutt’s lifetime.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Pygmalion

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Pygmalion is a 5-act play by George Bernard Shaw. It was written in 1912 and first produced in 1913. The plot revolves around Professor Henry Higgins’ bet with a colleague over whether he can transform a low-class flower girl, Liza Doolittle, into the equivalent of a Duchess in just 6 months. Pygmalion was a Greek mythological figure who fell in love with a sculpture he had carved and was a popular theme in Victorian drama. Most people would be familiar with the characters Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from the hit 1956 musical My Fair Lady, which was adapted from Pygmalion, though the plots differ in small but significant ways. In particular Shaw wanted to avoid any sense of a “happy ending” and, after viewing a performance of the play where an extra scene had been added, he wrote a sequel which definitively states what came after. The sequel was included in the published edition.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Far from the Madding Crowd

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel and was completed in 1874. It was originally serialized in Cornhill Magazine and was quickly published in a successful single volume. Hardy described Wessex as “a merely realistic dream country” and so it is in Far from the Madding Crowd, where an idyllic view of the countryside is interrupted by the bitter reality of farming life. The novel is the first that Hardy sets in fictional Wessex; he quickly realised that setting novels there could be a money-earner that would subsidise his poetry-writing ambitions. Gabriel Oak, the faithful man and aspiring farmer; Bathsheba Everdene, the young and independent lady farmer; William Boldwood, the lonely neighbour; and Sergeant Troy, the dashing military man, all lead intertwined lives which are full of love and loss.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Author: Fergus Hume

Description: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published in 1886, was the first novel by Fergus Hume. It begins with a sensational murder, as the body of a dead man is discovered in a hansom cab by the driver. Set in Melbourne, Australia, it presents an engaging story of crime and detection, with several unexpected twists and turns. It also gives a clear and interesting portrait of the colonial city at the peak of its 19th Century prosperity following a gold rush, a time when it was known as “Marvellous Melbourne.” The novel contrasts the comfortable lives of the rich and well-connected of the colony with the misery of those living in the noisome slums in the back-streets of the city. The novel, originally published in serial form in a local newspaper, achieved some initial local success when it was first released in book form, but the author then sold the rights to a British company. After warm initial reviews in England The Mystery of a Hansom Cab became not merely a best-seller but what today we would call a “blockbuster” in the United Kingdom, its English-speaking colonies and the United States. It was the best-selling mystery novel of the Victorian era, and apparently was part of the inspiration for Conan Doyle to begin writing his Sherlock Holmes stories. Fergus Hume eventually left Australia and returned to England. Though little-known today, after the success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab Hume went on to write more than a hundred additional novels in the crime genre, as well as several plays.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Our American Cousin

Author: Tom Taylor

Description: Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.

Subjects: comedy, drama

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Title: The Golden Triangle

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: Captain Belval, learning of a threat to his beloved nurse Little Mother Coralie, rescues her from her would-be assailants and is promptly dragged into a plot involving her husband and millions of francs worth of gold. As layer upon layer of conspiracy emerges with no obvious thread to follow, there’s only one man who can be counted on to uncover the truth. The Golden Triangle (also known as The Return of Arsène Lupin) was published in 1917 in both the original French and this English translation. It is set a couple of years after the events of The Teeth of the Tiger, and is representative of its time with themes of convalescent soldiers and continent-wide plots.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: H. G. Wells is probably best known for his imaginative longer works, such as his novels The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man; but he was also a prolific short story writer. This Standard Ebooks edition of his short fiction includes fifty-five of Wells’ stories, written between 1894 and 1909 and compiled from the collections The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), The Plattner Story and Others (1897), Tales of Time and Space (1899), Twelve Stories and a Dream (1903), The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911), and other sources. They are presented here in approximate order of first publication. The stories vary wildly in genre and theme, ranging from tales of domestic romance, to ghost stories and tropical adventures, to far-future science fiction. Interestingly, many of the stories deal with the exciting but also frightening prospect of heavier-than-air flight and aerial warfare, and it is worth noting that these stories were written some years before the Wright brothers first took to the air.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: Notes from Underground

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: Notes from Underground is a fictional collection of memoirs written by a civil servant living alone in St. Petersburg. The man is never named and is generally referred to as the Underground Man. The “underground” in the book refers to the narrator’s isolation, which he described in chapter 11 as “listening through a crack under the floor.” It is considered to be one of the first existentialist novels. With this book, Dostoevsky challenged the ideologies of his time, like nihilism and utopianism. The Underground Man shows how idealized rationality in utopias is inherently flawed, because it doesn’t account for the irrational side of humanity. This novel has had a big impact on many different works of literature and philosophy. It has influenced writers like Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche. A similar character is also found in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Notes from Underground was published in 1864 as the first four issues of Epoch, a Russian magazine by Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky. Presented here is Constance Garnett’s translation from 1918.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author

Author: Luigi Pirandello

Description: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore) is an Italian three-act play written by Luigi Pirandello in 1921, considered as one of the earliest examples of absurdist theatre. It’s a play within a play that deals with perceptions of reality and illusion, and plays with the ideas of identity and relative truths. The plot features an acting company who have gathered to rehearse another play by Pirandello, when they’re interrupted by 6 “characters” who arrive in search of their author. They immediately clash with the manager who at first assumes they’re mad. But, as the play progresses, the manager slowly shifts his reality as the characters become more real than the actors. Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in Rome at Valle di Roma and created a huge and clamorous division in the audience, forcing Pirandello to escape out the side door. But a year later it was presented in Milan to great success, before moving on to Broadway in 1922 where it ran for 136 performances.

Subjects: drama

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Title: The Murder on the Links

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie’s second Poirot novel, featuring the brilliant Belgian detective and his sidekick, Captain Hastings. In this characteristic whodunit, Poirot is summoned to a seaside town in northern France by a desperate letter from a rich businessman, who fears that he is being stalked. Poirot arrives to find the businessman already dead, his body lying facedown in an open grave on a golf course, a knife in his back—the victim of a mysterious murder. Over the coming days Poirot clashes wits with an arrogant Parisian detective, Giraud, while Hastings finds himself pining after a beautiful but shadowy American expatriate known to him only as “Cinderella.” Together, Poirot and Hastings unravel the intricate web of mystery and deceit behind the murder. Christie based this mystery after a real-life French murder case, and it’s believed that this is the first detective novel to use the phrase “the scene of the crime.”

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: Dmitri Karamazov and his father Fyodor are at war over both Dmitri’s inheritance and the affections of the beautiful Grushenka. Into this feud arrive the middle brother Ivan, recently returned from Moscow, and the youngest sibling Alyosha, who has been released into the wider world from the local monastery by the elder monk Zossima. Through a series of accidents of fate and wilful misunderstandings the Karamazovs edge closer to tragedy, while the local townspeople watch on. The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, and was originally serialised in The Russian Messenger before being published as a complete novel in 1880. This edition is the well-received 1912 English translation by Constance Garnett. As well as earning wide-spread critical acclaim, the novel has been widely influential in literary and philosophical circles; Franz Kafka and James Joyce admired the emotions that verge on madness in the Karamazovs, while Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Satre found inspiration in the themes of patricide and existentialism.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Description: Ludwig Wittgenstein is considered by many to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was born in Vienna to an incredibly rich family, but he gave away his inheritance and spent his life alternating between academia and various other roles, including serving as an officer during World War I and a hospital porter during World War II. When in academia Wittgenstein was taught by Bertrand Russell, and he himself taught at Cambridge. He began laying the groundwork for Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while in the trenches, and published it after the end of the war. It has since come to be considered one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy. After publishing it, Wittgenstein concluded that it had solved all philosophical problems—so he never published another book-length work in his lifetime. The book itself is divided into a series of short, self-evident statements, followed by sub-statements elucidating on their parent statement, sub-sub-statements, and so on. These statements explore the nature of philosophy, our understanding of the world around us, and how language fits in to it all. These views later came to be known as “Logical Atomism.” This translation, while credited to C. K. Ogden, is actually mostly the work of F. P. Ramsey, one of Ogden’s students. Ramsey completed the translation when he was just 19 years of age. The translation was personally revised and approved by Wittgenstein himself, who, though he was Austrian, had spent much of his life in England. Much of the Tractatus’ meaning is complex and difficult to unpack. It is still being interpreted and explored to this day.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Major Barbara

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Description: Major Barbara is a three-act play that premiered at the Court Theatre in 1905, and was subsequently published in 1907. It portrays idealist Barbara Undershaft, a Major in the Salvation Army, and her encounter with her long-estranged father who has made his fortune as a “dealer of death” in the munitions industry. Barbara doesn’t wish to be associated with her father’s ill-gotten wealth, but can’t prevent him from donating to the Salvation Army and eventually converting her family to his capitalist views on how best to help the poor. In the preface, Shaw addresses his critics and explicates his actual attitudes towards the Salvation Army, versus the attitudes and fates portrayed by his characters and responded to by the critics. He continues on to discuss the issues of wealth and poverty, religion and science, and how they all fit into his views of society. Major Barbara is one of the most controversial of Shaw’s work and was greeted with decidedly mixed reviews, yet it endures as one of his most famous plays.

Subjects: drama

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Title: Man and Wife

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior. To avoid offending Victorian morals too greatly, much is implied rather than stated outright. Nevertheless, even dealing with such matters at all led to his novels being derided as “sensation fiction” by his critics. By today’s standards, of course, they wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. In Man and Wife, the main character Anne Silvester has fallen pregnant to a muscular and handsome, but boorish man, Geoffrey Delamayn, to whom she is not married. She is working as a governess at a house in Scotland. Anne arranges to meet Delamayn secretly at a garden party and angrily demands that he fulfill his promise to marry her, that very day. He very reluctantly agrees to a secret, private marriage, knowing that a public marriage would badly affect his inheritance prospects. How is the marriage to be arranged quickly but kept quiet? Anne has a plan based on her understanding of the looseness of the marriage laws in Scotland. Naturally, of course, things go badly wrong with this plan and many complexities arise. Collins is deeply critical of the state of contemporary marriage laws, both in how loosely they were framed, and in how little power over their own lives they gave to women once they were married, even if married to a brutal man. He also uses this novel to denounce the worship of sporting heroes and the obsession with physical prowess rather than mental superiority as a primary indication of male virtue. Though not as popular as his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Man and Wife received a good critical reception when it was released and was a commercial success.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Book of Tea

Author: Okakura Kakuzō

Description: The Book of Tea, one of the great English tea classics, is a long essay about the connection between teaism, Taoism, and the aesthetics of Japanese culture. It was written by Okakura Kakuzō in English and was published in the United States in 1906. The essay targets a Western audience and seeks to explain the importance of tea in Japanese culture, not just as a beverage, but as a form of art expressed in different aspects. After a brief introduction of the Western attitude towards tea, Okakura demystifies the admiration of the Japanese people for this green plant by presenting the different schools of tea, its connection to Zen philosophy, and how it has affected the arts. The famous tea ceremony and its rigid formalities are explained, together with the contributions of the great tea-masters. The Book of Tea is considered by many to be one of the first books to introduce Eastern culture and philosophy to the Western world. This was possible due to Okakura’s early contact with the English language and Western thought, but also due to his later involvement in the Asian art division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which he came to head in 1910.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Stand by for Mars!

Author: Carey Rockwell

Description: Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s 1948 novel Space Cadet, the Tom Corbett series started as a TV show in 1950. It stayed on the air for five years and, among other things, spawned a series of novels published by Grosset Dunlap. Written by unknown authors, they were published under the pseudonym Carey Rockwell, with Willy Ley (the TV show’s technical director) listed as technical advisor. Stand by for Mars! is the first of eight novels written between 1952 and 1956. It features a young Tom Corbett who is trying to fulfill his dream of becoming a Space Cadet on his way to joining the Solar Guard. But interpersonal conflicts stand in his way. Tom, along with his unit-mates Astro and Roger Manning, must find a way past their difficulties or else risk being washed out. Their adventure takes them from the rigours of the Academy on Earth to the rugged and deadly deserts of Mars where they need to learn that only by working together can they hope to survive. An entire generation grew up on the adventures of Tom Corbett—it spawned radio shows, music recordings and a whole series of toys and tie-ins. Fans still maintain a Tom Corbett Space Cadet website and have held reunions as recently as 2006. Stand by for Mars! is a classic example of the space-crazy juvenile fiction of its era.

Subjects: adventure, science fiction

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Title: Psmith in the City

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Mike Jackson is a rising cricket star who finds his dreams of studying and playing at Cambridge upset by news of his father’s financial troubles. He takes a job with the New Asiatic Bank in London. He arrives to find that his dapper and verbose young friend Psmith is also a new employee, and together they navigate early twentieth century office life, make the best of their position and squeeze in a little cricket from time to time. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the twentieth century. After leaving school, he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years. Psmith in the City was originally serialized in The Captain magazine in 1908 and 1909 as The New Fold and is the sequel to Mike, an earlier novel by Wodehouse.

Subjects: comedy

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Title: South!

Author: Ernest Shackleton

Description: South! tells one of the most thrilling tales of exploration and survival against the odds which has ever been written. It details the experiences of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition which set off in 1914 to make an attempt to cross the Antarctic continent. Under the direction of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition comprised two components: one party sailing on the Endurance into the Weddell Sea, which was to attempt the actual crossing; and another party on board the Aurora, under the direction of Aeneas Mackintosh, sailing into the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent and tasked with establishing depots of stores as far south as possible for the use of the party attempting the crossing. Shackleton gives a highly readable account of the fate of both parties of the Expedition. Both fell victim to the severe environmental conditions of the region, and it was never possible to attempt the crossing. The Endurance was trapped in pack-ice in the Weddell Sea and the ship was eventually crushed by the pressure of the ice, leaving Shackleton’s men stranded on ice floes, far from solid land. Shackleton’s account of their extraordinary struggles to survive is as gripping as any novel.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: The Origin of Species

Author: Charles Darwin

Description: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin must rank as one of the most influential and consequential books ever published, initiating scientific, social and religious ferment ever since its first publication in 1859. Its full title is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, in some editions prefaced by the word “On.” Darwin describes the book as simply an “abstract” of his ideas, which are more fully fleshed out and supported with detailed examples in his other, more scholarly works (for example, he wrote several long treatises entirely about barnacles). The Origin of Species itself was intended to reach a wider audience and is written in such a way that any reasonably educated and thoughtful reader can follow Darwin’s argument that species of animals and plants are not independent creations, fixed for all time, but mutable. Species have been shaped in response to the effects of natural selection, which Darwin compares to the directed or manual selection by human breeders of domesticated animals. The Origin of Species was eagerly taken up by the reading public, and rapidly went through several editions. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the sixth edition published by John Murray in 1872, generally considered to be the definitive edition with many amendments and updates by Darwin himself. The Origin of Species has never been out of print and continues to be an extremely popular work. Later scientific discoveries such as the breakthrough of DNA sequencing have refined our concept of some of Darwin’s ideas and given us a better understanding of issues he found puzzling, but the basic thrust of his theory remains unchallenged.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Red Badge of Courage

Author: Stephen Crane

Description: Henry Fleming has joined the Union army because of his romantic ideas of military life, but soon finds himself in the middle of a battle against a regiment of Confederate soldiers. Terrified, Henry deserts his comrades. Upon returning to his regiment, he struggles with his shame as he tries to redeem himself and prove his courage. The Red Badge of Courage is Stephen Crane’s second book, notable for its realism and the fact that Crane had never personally experienced battle. Crane drew heavy inspiration from Century Magazine, a periodical known for its articles about the American Civil War. However, he criticized the articles for their lack of emotional depth and decided to write a war novel of his own. The manuscript was first serialized in December 1894 by The Philadelphia Press and quickly won Crane international acclaim before he died in June 1900 at the age of 28.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Son of the Wolf

Author: Jack London

Description: A collection of stories that highlight the trials and tribulations of life in the Yukon and Alaska during the gold rush. Greed, determination, compassion, competition, and survival dominate as native tribes intermingle with western settlers. Despite the laws that each culture abides by, the law of the wilderness will overcome you when unprepared.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Tess of the d’Urbervilles is said to be Thomas Hardy’s fictional masterpiece and is considered to be an important nineteenth century novel. It explores themes of love, sex, class and morality in an aching love story. It initially appeared in a censored, serialised version in The Graphic in 1891 and was published in a single volume the following year. Early reviews were mixed, partly because of its challenge to Victorian sexual morals—it is now looked upon much more favorably. Tess Durbeyfield is the oldest child of uneducated peasants who are given the impression that they may have noble blood, as their surname is a corruption of that of an extinct Norman family. When Tess participates in the village May Dance, she meets Angel, who stops to join the dance but notices Tess too late to dance with her. That night, Tess’s father gets too drunk to drive to the market, so she undertakes the journey herself. However, she falls asleep at the reins, and the family’s only horse encounters a speeding wagon and is fatally wounded. Tess feels so guilty over the consequences for the family that she agrees to try to claim kin with a rich widow who lives in a neighbouring town. The story traces Tess’s life through the following years. The novel has been adapted for the stage, theatre, opera, cinema and television numerous times since its publication.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Confessions of Arsène Lupin

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: The gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin returns in this set of ten short stories to confess—or perhaps boast about—his crimes to the unnamed narrator. Mostly set around Lupin’s attempts to frustrate Chief-Inspector Ganimard and pocket some cash in the process, they also show off his knack for escaping from seemingly impossible situations, and even playing the role of the master detective. In the chronology of Arsène Lupin, these tales were published after, but set before, the darker stories of The Hollow Needle and 813. They were serialised in Je Sais Tout from 1911, and collected into a single publication in 1913.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Created Legend

Author: Fyodor Sologub

Description: Hidden in the forest, the poet Trirodov attempts to secede from the troubled society of early twentieth century Russia to build his own utopia: a school for the quiet children he cares for. Nothing is ever that easy though, and his personal connections to the outside world tie him into the political whirlwind of agitators, factions and power struggles that threaten his solitude. The Created Legend portrays a stark contrast to the protagonists of Sologub’s earlier work The Little Demon, even though the setting is the same town of Skorodozh. There, they varied from at best well-meaning to actively malignant; here the lead characters are idealistic, and isolate themselves from the trials of Russian society in an attempt to maintain their idealism. Trirodov sees beauty and mystery everywhere he looks, and (following the title) works to create his own legend. This volume, originally titled “Drops of Blood,” is the first of the “Created Legend” trilogy and the only one translated contemporaneously into English. It was received with some bewilderment by critics: the combination of current affairs and magical events proved too strange for many. However, treated as an early example of magic realism and with the benefit of hindsight, the setting and symbolism is less shocking and more readily accessible to the modern reader.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Moonfleet

Author: John Meade Falkner

Description: Moonfleet is a small village near the sea in the south of England, where village legend tells of the notorious Colonel John “Blackbeard” Mohune who is buried in a family crypt under the church. He is said to have stolen and hidden a diamond from King Charles I. His ghost is said to wander at night looking for the diamond, and the mysterious lights in the churchyard are attributed to his activities. One night a bad storm floods the village. While attending the Sunday service at church, John Trenchard—an orphan who lives with his aunt—hears strange sounds from the crypt below. Investigating, he soon finds himself in a smuggler’s hideout, where he discovers a locket in a coffin that holds a piece of paper inscribed with Bible verses. John soon finds himself swept up in a smuggling venture planned by Elzevir Block, the smugglers’ leader, and inadvertently finds out that the verses from Blackbeard’s locket contain a code that will reveal the location of the famous diamond. Moonfleet was hugely popular in its day and was even sometimes studied in schools. Adaptations to screen, radio, and theater continue today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Prisoner of Zenda

Author: Anthony Hope

Description: The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope is an adventure novel first published in 1894 that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Ruritania. It tells the story of Rudolph Rassendyll, who is, because of past indiscretions in the family and unbeknownst to him, the near twin of King Rudolph V of Ruritania. Labeled a ne’er-do-well by his sister-in-law, young Rudolph determines to escape his family and secretly travel to Ruritania for the coronation of his distant relative. But when the king is drugged and abducted on the eve of this ceremony, young Rassendyll is convinced to take his place to try and save the day. But things don’t go as planned as the conspirators fail to reckon with the king’s brother, the dastardly Duke of Strelsau, or his fiancée, the beautiful Princess Flavia. What follows is a tale of bravery, sacrifice and love, filled with romance and feats of derring-do that still stands the test of time. The Prisoner of Zenda was Hope’s most famous novel and achieved instant success. Such was the impact of this novel that the setting of Ruritania became famous in its own right as the generic term referring to romantic stories set in fictional central European countries. It went on to spawn numerous adaptations, retellings and homages. Anthony Hope wrote a sequel in 1898 called Rupert of Hentzau but it never achieved the success of the original.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Author: Baroness Orczy

Description: At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, a mysterious daredevil rescues French aristocrats from execution and smuggles them out of France. This secretive escape artist is known to the French authorities only by the drawings of a flower, the scarlet pimpernel, that he leaves as his calling card. Marguerite St. Just has avoided the worst of the revolutionary turmoil. Her recent marriage to the English baronet Sir Percy Blakeney has taken her away from the chaos in France to England, where she is quickly recognized as the most fashionable and clever lady in London. But even in England, she is unable to escape the effects of the Revolution, and she is soon blackmailed into a plot to unmask and capture the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. ith The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy introduced the world to a talented, adventurous hero hiding behind a dull and ineffectual secret identity. Countless imitators followed, until the “secret identity” became a common feature of adventure stories. In addition to the novel, Orczy wrote with her husband a stage play of the same name, which broke stage records and saw several revivals. Both the play and the novel received much critical and popular acclaim, and Orczy went on to write several sequels about the mysterious Pimpernel and his companions.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Author: L. Frank Baum

Description: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the classic American children’s novel about the adventures of Dorothy, a young girl who along with her dog Toto is swept away by a cyclone to the magical Land of Oz. It was written by L. Frank Baum and published in May 1900. Dorothy lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and Toto on a farm in the Kansas prairie. One day, Dorothy and Toto are caught up in a cyclone that deposits her farmhouse into Munchkin Country in the magical Land of Oz. The falling house has killed the Wicked Witch of the East, the evil ruler of the Munchkins. The Good Witch of the North arrives with three grateful Munchkins and gives Dorothy the magical Silver Shoes that once belonged to the Wicked Witch. The Good Witch tells Dorothy that the only way she can return home is to go to the Emerald City and ask the great and powerful Wizard of Oz to help her. The Library of Congress has declared it “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairy-tale.” Its groundbreaking success and the success of the Broadway musical adaptation led Baum to write thirteen additional Oz books which serve as sequels to the first story. The 1939 film musical adaptation starring Judy Garland is considered by many to be one of the greatest films in cinema history.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Persuasion

Author: Jane Austen

Description: Anne Elliot is the under-valued daughter of a vain and improvident English baronet, Sir Walter Elliot. Some years previously, at the urging of a family friend, Anne had rejected a marriage proposal from a young but impoverished naval captain. When she unexpectedly encounters him again, she is filled with regrets. Persuasion was published in 1817, six months after Jane Austen’s death, and is the last novel she completed in full. It was well-regarded on publication and has been turned into several television series and movies.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Nicomachean Ethics

Author: Aristotle

Description: Aristotle examines how best to live by looking at the nature of those virtues that characterize the most thriving human beings, and then at how to acquire and develop such virtues. This book is considered the founding document of what is now known as the “virtue ethics” tradition. Along the way, Aristotle delves into pleasure, happiness, justice, friendship, and willpower. He intended the Nicomachean Ethics to be the foundation on which to build his Politics. Nicomachean Ethics is based on Aristotle’s lectures at the Lyceum and was originally collected as a series of ten scrolls. In translation it was hugely influential in the development of Western philosophic tradition, quickly becoming one of the core works of medieval philosophy.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Airlords of Han

Author: Philip Francis Nowlan

Description: The Airlords of Han, the sequel to Armageddon 2419 A.D., continues the adventures of Buck Rogers, the famous sci-fi adventure hero of early comics and radio shows. Originally published in Amazing Stories in 1929, in the 1960s this novella was later combined with Nowlan’s original piece and re-published under the title Armageddon 2419 A.D.. In it Buck Rogers and his wife, Wilma Deering, lead Americans in a conclusive battle with the evil Han Empire. The story reflects the “Yellow Peril” mindset at the time of its writing, and successfully predicts many future technologies, including bazookas, night-vision devices, and paratroopers.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Good Soldier

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Description: At the height of belle époque Europe, an American couple—the narrator John Dowell and his wife Florence–and a British couple–Leonora and the titular “good soldier” Edward Ashburnham—meet and become firm friends. Travelling and socialising together, it’s a full nine years before the cracks start to show, but when they do the whole edifice starts tumbling to reveal the secrecy and lies concealed within. The Good Soldier is a classic example of the unreliable narrator genre. With a charitable view, everything John Dowell retells is plausible, but it doesn’t take much critical thinking to reframe the story’s events as something entirely more sinister. The novel is now frequently ranked by critics as one of the great pieces of twentieth-century literature. Ford Madox Ford, already published many times over by this novel’s release, and along with collaborations with both Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, went on to create and edit the influential literature journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Struggles and Triumphs

Author: P. T. Barnum

Description: Struggles and Triumphs is the autobiography of P. T. Barnum, the celebrated American showman. Though subtitled Forty Years’ Recollections, it covers a period of over 60 years, from his birth in 1810, to the later years of his career in the 1870s. Barnum has an engaging style, and his autobiography is crammed with many amusing and interesting incidents as he tells how he learned to make money entertaining the public through circuses, “freak shows,” theatrical presentations, concert tours and the like. On the way he builds up an impressive fortune, only to lose it all through a fraudulous speculation perpetrated on him. Then he starts again, pays off his debts and builds up another, greater fortune. Though often labelled as a “humbug” or “a mere charlatan” it’s clear that the majority of his contemporary Americans held him in affectionate regard. However modern readers may be upset by Barnum’s rather cavalier treatment of the animals under his care in the various menageries and aquariums he created, and be distressed by the details of how they were lost in the several fires which destroyed Barnum’s Museums. Also of great interest are Barnum’s philanthropic endeavours: lecturing on teetotalism; supporting negro equality; and funding civic developments.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Voyage Out

Author: Virginia Woolf

Description: Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged twenty-four and previously interested only in music, is on a voyage both literal and metaphorical. An ocean cruise with her father leaves her for the summer at her Aunt’s villa in an unnamed South American country, where she meets the English inhabitants of the local town’s hotel. As the season progresses she starts to become entangled in their own lives and passions, and through those burgeoning acquaintances and friendships the discovery of her own nature grows. The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf’s first novel and was a labour of love, taking her five years to complete. Even though heavy editing was required to reduce some of the more politically charged themes before its publication in 1915, it still bemused some contemporary critics and even garnered accusations of “reckless femininity.” Time however has proved kinder, with the book demonstrating the key points of Woolf’s future style. It even has the first appearance of Clarissa Dalloway, the titular protagonist of Woolf’s later and more famous novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Star Hunter

Author: Andre Norton

Description: On the unexplored jungle world of Jumala, former pilot turned safari guide Ras Hume schemes to collect the reward for finding a missing heir to a fortune. A busboy from local dive bar is brainwashed into believing he is the missing heir, but he soon begins to doubt his own memories. This standalone story was originally published in 1961 as part of a double title paperback by Ace Books along with an abridged version of The Beast Master, and again in 1968 paired with the short novel Voodoo Planet, all by Andre Norton.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Hard Times

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Hard Times (originally Hard Times—For These Times) was published in 1854, and is the shortest novel Charles Dickens ever published. It’s set in Coketown, a fictional mill-town set in the north of England. One of the major themes of the book is the miserable treatment of workers in the mills, and the resistance to their unionization by the mill owners, typified by the character Josiah Bounderby, who absurdly asserts that the workers live a near-idyllic life but they all “expect to be set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon.” The truth, of course, is far different. The other major topic which Dickens tackles in this novel is the rationalist movement in schooling and the denigration of imagination and fantasy. It begins with the words “Now, what I want is, Facts,” spoken by the wealthy magnate Thomas Gradgrind, who is supervising a class at a model school he has opened. This indeed is Gradgrind’s entire philosophy. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” He is supported and encouraged in this approach by his friend Bounderby. Grandgrind raises his own children on these principles, and, as we discover, in doing so blights their lives. The novel also follows the story of a particular mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool, who leads a tragic life. He is burdened with an alcoholic, slatternly wife, who is mostly absent from his life, but who returns at irregular intervals to trouble him. This existing marriage, and the near-impossibility of divorce for someone of his class, prevents him marrying Rachael, who is the light of his life. Dickens depicts Stephen as representing the nobility of honest work, and contrasts his character with that of the self-satisfied humbug Josiah Bounderby who represents the worst aspects of capitalism.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: After the Divorce

Author: Grazia Deledda

Description: Giovanna and Costantino Ledda are a happily married young Sardinian couple living a contented village existence with their small child and extended family. But after Costantino is wrongly convicted of murdering his uncle and imprisoned, the now‐impoverished Giovanna reluctantly divorces him under a newly enacted divorce law and marries Brontu Dejas, a wealthy but cruel drunkard who has always coveted her. While enduring a slave’s existence within this new marriage as well as the community’s derision of her as the “wife with two husbands,” the broken Giovanna is unexpectedly reunited with an embittered Costantino after his exoneration and early release from prison, and the two resume their now‐illicit relationship. An exploration of hypocrisy, expiation, and the human disruption of a supernatural order that remorselessly reasserts itself, After the Divorce is set in an insular society of ancient, religious roots grappling with the intrusion of modern, secular social mores and is among the earliest of the serious works on which Grazia Deledda’s literary reputation is based. Deledda—the first Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—critiqued the social norms of her native Sardinia through verismo depictions of the struggles of the lower classes, into which she wove elements of her own personal tragedies.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Voodoo Planet

Author: Andre Norton

Description: Voodoo Planet is the third in a series of novels featuring the adventures of Dane Thorson and the spaceship Solar Queen, written in the 1950s by Andre Norton under her male pseudonym, Andrew North. In this installment, Dane and his shipmates land on the safari planet Khatka, settled by African refugees of an atomic race war on Earth. They soon face off with a witch doctor seeking to take over the planet. This short work was originally published as a double title paperback by Ace Books in 1959 along with a reprint of Plague Ship, the second novel in the series. Norton followed it with a sequel ten years later and then co-authored a revival of the series in the 1990s.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: His Last Bow

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes is the fourth collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle. It begins with a preface by Dr. John Watson, supposedly written in 1917, assuring the reader that Holmes is still alive but living in quiet retirement in Sussex. This collection contains the well-known stories “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” in which Holmes has to track down stolen plans for a new kind of submarine; and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in which a Cornish family is found one morning driven mad or dead, with expressions of horror on their faces. The titular story “His Last Bow” is set on the very eve of the outbreak of the First World War, and involves Holmes and Watson coming out of retirement to defeat a German spy.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: Eminent Victorians

Author: Lytton Strachey

Description: Eminent Victorians consists of four short biographies by Lytton Strachey of Victorians who were famous in their day: Cardinal Manning, a powerful cleric; Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing; Thomas Arnold, creator of the modern-day English public school; and General Gordon, a popular officer of the British Army. In Strachey’s day, these people were considered heroes and paragons of Victorian morality and ethics. But instead of lengthy, glowing biographies, Strachey opts for short, witty, and biting biographies that skewer their subjects. All of them are portrayed with their human flaws and moral contradictions on full display, implicitly knocking down the sanctimonious visions of these former heroes (perhaps with the exception of Nightingale, who, while portrayed as an often-cold and mercilessly driven taskmistress, nevertheless escaped with her reputation enhanced, not tarnished). The biographies are not only interesting for their wit, humor, and readability, but because of the windows they open to the issues of the age. Manning’s biography occurs against the backdrop of a time of upheaval in the English Catholic church, with concepts like Papal Infallability entering the picture; Nightingale’s biography shines light on the appalling conditions of war; Arnold’s biography is a lens on the development of formal education and schools; and Gordon’s biography reveals England as an empire teetering unsteadily, whose ability to influence and control faraway lands is not as certain as it might think. Eminent Victorians took six years to write and was met with glowing reviews on its publication. It made Strachey famous and cemented his name in the list of literature’s top-tier biographers.

Subjects: biography, nonfiction

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Title: Omega

Author: Camille Flammarion

Description: Born in 1842, Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer who wrote many popular books about science and astronomy, together with a number of novels which we would now consider to be science fiction. He was a contemporary of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, though his works never achieved their level of popularity. Omega: The Last Days of the World is an English translation of Flammarion’s novel La Fin du Monde, published in 1893. The book’s fictional premise is the discovery of a comet on a collision course with the Earth in the 25th century. However, this is mostly a pretext on which Flammarion can hang his interesting scientific speculations about how the world will end, together with philosophical thoughts about war and religion. Much of the scientific description he uses in the book, while accurately representing the knowledge and thinking of his time, has today been superseded by modern discoveries. For example, we now know the source of the Sun’s energy to be nuclear fusion rather than being due to gravitational contraction and the constant infall of meteorites. hen talking about the ills of society, however, Flammarion could well be talking about today’s world. For example, he excoriates the vast waste of society’s resources on war, and demonstrates how much more productive each nation’s economy would be without it. He also depicts the media of his future world as having been entirely taken over by commercial interests, publishing only what will excite the greatest number of readers rather than serving the public interest. Omega ranges over a vast period of time, from prehistory through to millions of years in the future when mankind has been reduced to the last two doomed individuals. Nevertheless, the book ends on a hopeful and inspiring note.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Sybil

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Description: Benjamin Disraeli was a remarkable historical figure. Born into a Jewish family, he converted to Anglican Christianity as a child. He is now almost certainly most famous for his political career. Becoming a member of the British Parliament at the age of 33, he initially rose to prominence within the Conservative (“Tory”) party because of his clashes with the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Rising to lead the Conservative Party, Disraeli became Prime Minister for a short period in 1868, and then for an extended period between 1874 and 1880. He became friendly with Queen Victoria and was appointed Earl of Beaconsfield by her in 1876. However, Disraeli was much more than a politician. He wrote both political treatises and no less than seventeen novels during his lifetime, of which Sybil, or The Two Nations is now among the best regarded. The “Two Nations” of the subtitle refer to the divisions in Britain between the rich and the poor, each of whom might as well be living in a different country from the other. In the novel, Disraeli highlights the terrible living conditions of the poor and the shocking injustices of how they were treated by most employers and land-owners. He contrasts this with the frivolous, pampered lifestyles of the aristocracy. He covers the rise of the Chartist movement, which was demanding universal manhood suffrage—the right for all adult men to vote, regardless of whether they owned property—and other reforms to enable working men a voice in the government of the country. (Female suffrage was to come much later). The upheavals of the time led to the development of the People’s Charter and a massive petition with millions of signatures being presented to Parliament. However the Parliament of the time refused to even consider the petition, triggering violent protests in Birmingham and elsewhere. All of this is well covered and explained in the novel. Sybil is rather disjointed in structure as it ranges over these different topics, but the main plot revolves around Egremont, the younger son of a nobleman, who encounters some of the leaders of the workers’ movement and in particular Walter Gerard, one of the most respected of these leaders, whom Egremont befriends while concealing his real name and social position. During visits to Gerard under an assumed name, Egremont falls for the beautiful and saintly Sybil, Gerard’s daughter, but she rejects him when his true identity is exposed. Sybil subsequently undergoes many difficult trials as the people’s movement develops and comes into conflict with the authorities.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Little Demon

Author: Fyodor Sologub

Description: Ardalyon Borisitch Peredonov believes himself better than his job as a teacher, and hopes that the Princess will be able to promote him to the position of Inspector. Unfortunately for him his connection to the Princess is through his fiancée Varvara, and she has her own plans. With little sign of the desired position his life of petty cruelty escalates, even as his grip on reality begins to break apart and his paranoia manifests itself in hallucinations of a shadowy creature. Finished in 1907, The Little Demon (alternatively translated as The Petty Demon) is Fyodor Sologub’s most famous novel, and received both popular and critical attention on its publication despite its less-than-favorable depictions of provincial Russian life. Its portrayal of Peredonov as a paranoid character simultaneously both banal and bereft of goodness is an essay on the Russian concept of poshlost; a theme that makes an appearance in many other Russian novels, not least Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls. This translation (primarily by John Cournos) was published in 1916, and includes a preface by Sologub for the English-speaking reader.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Prince and the Pauper

Author: Mark Twain

Description: The Prince and the Pauper remains one of Twain’s more popular novels, having been adapted many times for the stage, screen, and elsewhere. When Tom Canty, a young pauper in London, meets Prince Edward, the two switch clothes and assume the other’s identity. Tom then learns the life of royalty, while the true prince discovers the troubles of commoners. As usual, Twain delivers both humor and social commentary in abundance. Although aimed at children, Pauper provides moral and social criticism of topics like the justice system and inequality, and deals with themes which appeal to readers of all ages.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Crystal Stopper

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: Arsène Lupin’s attempted robbery of the deputy Daubrecq has gone horribly wrong, leaving behind a murdered man and two of his accomplices in the hands of the police. Now he finds himself pulled into an ever more conspiratorial spiral as he attempts to gain leverage over the people who can free his men. Set before the events of the preceding 813, this again portrays Lupin in a much different light to the earlier books. At times almost coming to despair, this story shows him grappling with his personal morals whilst trying to do the best for those closest to him. The story was originally serialised in Le Journal in 1912, before being published as a novel in both the original French and this English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos in 1913.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Return of Sherlock Holmes is the third collection of Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1905. It includes stories published in The Strand Magazine in 1903 and 1904, bringing Holmes for the first time into the twentieth century. Doyle had memorably “killed off” Holmes in a struggle with his nemesis Professor Moriarty in the story “The Final Problem,” which had appeared in 1893 (and which is included in the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes). Intense public demand for more Holmes material after that had led to Doyle writing the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and then finally to return to writing Holmes short stories once more. The first story in this collection, “The Adventure of the Empty House” finds Dr. Watson united once again with his old friend Sherlock Holmes, who explains how and why he faked his death at Reichenbach Falls. Apart from the leading story which “resurrects” Holmes, this collection contains a number of the best-known Holmes stories. “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” has Holmes deciphering a cryptogram to solve a mystery; encountering a callous blackmailer in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton;” working out why cheap busts of Napoleon are being shattered all over London; and possibly averting a major European war in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The House of Mirth

Author: Edith Wharton

Description: The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s biting critique of New York’s upper classes around the end of the 19th century. The novel follows socialite Lily Bart as she struggles to maintain a precarious position among her wealthy friends in the face of her own diminished finances and fading youth. Lily has resolved to gain social and financial security by marrying into wealth, but callous rivals and her own second thoughts undermine Lily’s plans. harton’s insights into high society were largely built on her own experiences growing up among the upper crust, and her confident portrayal of a morally lax aristocracy found an eager audience. The novel sold over a hundred thousand copies within a few months of its release and became her first great success as a published author.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Kipps

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: Kipps is the story of Arthur “Artie” Kipps, an illegitimate orphan raised by his aunt and uncle on the southern coast of England in the town of New Romney. Kipps falls in love with neighbor friend Ann Pornick but soon loses touch with her as he begins an apprenticeship at a drapery establishment in the port town of Folkestone. After a drunken evening with his new friend Chitterlow, an aspiring playwright, Kipps discovers he is to inherit a house and sizable income from his grandfather. Kipps then struggles to understand what his new-found wealth means in terms of his place in society and his love life. hile today H. G. Wells is best known for his “scientific romances” such as The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells considered Kipps his favorite work. Wells worked closely with (some say pestered) his publisher Macmillan to employ creative promotional schemes, and thanks to a cheap edition sales blossomed to over 200,000 during the first two decades of publication. It was during this period that his prior futuristic works became more available and popular with American audiences.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Grand Babylon Hotel

Author: Arnold Bennett

Description: hen Theodore Racksole—one of the richest men in America, and consequently the world—sits down in London’s Grand Babylon Hotel and orders a beefsteak and a bottle of beer, he isn’t aware that he’s about to become part of a plot involving blackmail, espionage, murder, the royal families of Europe and his daughter Nella. As he’s sucked in to the inner workings of the hotel and its staff he has to make a series of stark choices for the safety of his family and guests. The Grand Babylon Hotel proceeds at a pace that betrays the novel’s roots: it was originally serialized in 1901 in the Golden Penny. It was Arnold Bennett’s second novel, and was followed by at least forty works of fiction along with numerous plays and non-fiction works. Since its original publication The Grand Babylon Hotel has remained in print, and it has also been adapted for film and radio.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Fables

Author: Aesop

Description: Whether it’s the benefits of taking it slow and steady (“The Tortoise and the Hare”), the necessity of invention (“The Crow and the Pitcher”), or the problems of cognitive dissonance (“The Fox and the Grapes”), Aesop has a fable for every occasion. Aesop lived in Greece in the 6th century BCE, far enough in the past that it’s become impossible to ascribe all these fables to him. Some were certainly retellings of older myths, some share their roots in collections of fables from India and further afield, and many were added well after his time. However, they all share a certain quality of prose that marks them out as belonging to the collection regardless of authorship. It’s that quality, combined with their insight into the human character, that has meant that they’ve stood the test of time for twenty-five centuries. This collection is the 1912 translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, comprising two hundred and eighty-four of the fables.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Author: Ulysses S. Grant

Description: The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses Simpson Grant are an American classic. In them Grant, the most able General of the Civil War, tells the story of his life and experiences, covering his birth, early youth, military training at West Point, his involvement as a Lieutenant in the Mexican War of 1847–48, and of course, his role in the Civil War of 1861–65, during which he rose to become the supreme commander of the Northern forces. After the Mexican War, Grant had left military service and became, essentially, an unsuccessful shopkeeper. Re-enlisting at the start of the Civil War, he rose to his ultimate position entirely on his own merits, showing himself to be a skilled strategist and a master of logistics. hat distinguishes Grant’s Personal Memoirs, and makes them a clear candidate for being considered a part of American literature, is the high quality and interest of the writing, for which Grant clearly had a talent. Though he goes into an extremely high level of detail about the military movements and struggles of the Civil War, the book is full of interest, and in parts is as gripping as a novel. Obviously, Grant tells only his own part of the story and from the perspective of the ultimately successful forces; but his humanity shows through in the respect he offers to those on the other side, and in his acknowledgement of their sufferings, despite his clear condemnation of their cause of preserving slavery. He is generous in awarding due credit to others on his own side, and where blame is due tempering it with his understanding of that person’s character, background and circumstances. After the war, Grant served two terms as President of the United States between 1869–77, but his Memoirs do not deal with this period. He began writing the book on his retirement, and completed it only after suffering from severe illness and not long before his death from throat cancer. The first edition was published in two volumes by Mark Twain in 1885. This Standard Ebooks edition includes 43 maps reproduced from the 1895 edition of the Memoirs.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Brontë

Description: Returning from Liverpool, Mr. Earnshaw brings with him a dirty, ragged, black-haired child called Heathcliff, and sets into motion a tale of destructive passions. The book’s two locations, the genteel Thrushcross Grange and the wild Wuthering Heights, serve as matching backgrounds to the characters of their occupants, as they struggle to gain the upper hand in marriage and power. All the while, the ghosts of the past seem to drive revenge more than inspire forgiveness. uthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s sole published novel before her early death at the age of 30. Published under the pen name of Ellis Bell, a shared surname with the pen names of her sisters, many assumed that such a book could only have been written by a man. Reviewers of the time praised its emotional power but were also shocked at the actions of its characters, and most agreed that it was impossible to put down. After the novel’s original publication in 1847 it was revised into a single volume in 1850, and over time has become a classic of English literature. The story has been reworked into plays, operas, films, TV dramatisations and a ballet, and has inspired many further works of art, music and literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: 813

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: When Arsène Lupin disappeared at the end of The Hollow Needle the public and police assumed he was dead; but it turns out he was just biding his time and waiting for the right opponent to face off against. Luckily, a secret involving a stash of hidden papers and Europe’s aristocratic families is more than enough to pique the interests of Lupin and his unknown competitor. This novel is told more from Lupin’s point of view than the previous stories, and that reduces some of the omnipotence bestowed upon him by Leblanc while highlighting his more emotional qualities. Originally serialized in Le Journal, 813 was published in novel form in 1910. At more than 500 pages, it was deemed a little heavy and was subsequently split into two volumes in 1917 along with slight editing to increase the timely anti-German sentiment. Presented here is the 1910 English translation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Awakening

Author: Kate Chopin

Description: The Awakening charts Edna Pontellier’s journey of self-discovery. The time spent with a younger friend on a summer holiday on Grand Isle in Lousiana unlocks a feeling in her that she can’t close away again. On returning to her family home in New Orleans, she starts to transition from unthinking housewife and mother into something freer and more confident, although this doesn’t meet with the full approval of the society she’s a part of. Kate Chopin had written a novel previously, but she was mostly known as a writer of Louisiana-set short stories. The Awakening, while keeping the setting, charted new territory with its themes of marital infidelity and less-than-perfect devotion of a mother to her children. The consequent critical reception was less than enthusiastic—hardly surprising given the prevailing moral atmosphere of the time—and her next novel was cancelled. The Awakening was rediscovered in the 1960s and is now regarded as an important early example of American feminist literature.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Woodlanders

Author: Thomas Hardy

Description: Grace Melbury, daughter of a rich local wood-trader, has been raised beyond her family through years of expensive education. Coming home, she finds herself pulled between her love for her childhood friend Giles Winterborne, and the allure of the enigmatic Doctor Fitzpiers. Giles and Edgar have their own admirers too, and the backdrop of the bucolic pastures and woodlands of an impressionistic take on south-west England provides the perfect setting for their story. The Woodlanders was commissioned by Macmillan’s Magazine in 1884, and was serialized and later published as a novel in 1887. The story’s themes of infidelity and less-than-blissful marriage were unusual for the time and drew ire from campaigners, but on its publication it garnered immediate critical acclaim. Thomas Hardy later regarded it as the favorite of his stories, and it’s remained perennially popular as a novel and as a series of adaptations to theatre, opera and film.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Little White Bird

Author: J. M. Barrie

Description: The Little White Bird is generally divided into three sections: the first chronicles the narrator’s life in London, beginning with how he came to know a little boy named David (who joins him on his adventures), and describes other matters of his everyday life. The second section tells the story of how Peter Pan came to be a “betwixt-and-between” and his adventures in Kensington Gardens, including his interactions with the birds as well as the fairies hidden in the park. Finally, the third section of the book revisits London with the narrator and David. The two make brief visits to Kensington Gardens and embark on a new adventure to Patagonia. The Little White Bird is the first story to include the famous Peter Pan character, two years before Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, the play that made the character famous. While The Little White Bird can be described as a prelude to the play, inconsistencies such as Peter Pan’s age make the two stories incompatible.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894, is the second collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published in book form. All of the stories included in the collection previously appeared in The Strand Magazine between 1892 and 1893. They purport to be the accounts given by Dr. John Watson of the more remarkable cases in which his friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes becomes involved in his role as a consulting detective. This collection has several memorable features. The first British edition omitted the story “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” which appeared in The Strand in 1893. This story did appear in the very first American edition of the collection, immediately following “Silver Blaze,” but it was quickly replaced by a revised edition which omitted it. Apparently these omissions were at the specific request of the author, who was concerned that its inclusion of the theme of adultery would make it unsuitable for younger readers. The story was, however, eventually included in the later collection His Last Bow, but it is out of chronological position there. In this Standard Ebooks edition (as in most modern British editions), we have included this story to restore it to its correct chronological place in the Holmes canon. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is also notable because by this time Doyle had tired of the Holmes character and decided to kill him off, so that this was intended to be the last Holmes collection ever to be published. It contains several of the best-known Holmes stories, including “Silver Blaze,” “The Musgrave Ritual,” and “The Greek Interpreter,” which introduces Sherlock’s brother Mycroft; and of course “The Final Problem” in which Holmes struggles with his nemesis Professor Moriarty.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: A General View of Positivism

Author: Auguste Comte

Description: Auguste Comte, considered by some to be the first “philosopher of science,” was perhaps most famous for founding the theory of Positivism: a framework of thinking and living meant to engender unity across humanity, backed by love, science, and intellect. Positivism itself is a combination philosophy and way of life. Here Comte lays down the various tenets of the philosophy, describing what he views as the six major characteristics of the system. Comte goes into surprising detail, going so far as to describe minutiae like how children should be educated, the structure of a unified global committee of nations, new flags, calendars, the role of the arts, and so on. He ends the book with what he calls the “Religion of Humanity,” a secular religion meant to replace the traditional religions that people of the time were becoming disillusioned with. The book and the theory are both very much products of the time. Comte was born around the end of the French Revolution, and lived in Paris during that time when republican ideas, respect for science, and a revolutionary and forward-thinking spirit made fertile ground for change. He viewed Positivism as the single solution to most of the problems of the day, including Communism, the plight of the working class, the shift away from traditional religion, and the constant war and strife that had plagued humanity. Comte’s theories gained a huge following: you might even recognize the Positivist motto, “Order and Progress,” inscribed on Brazil’s national flag. While Positivism and its executive arm, the Church of Humanity, today only seem to survive in any significant number in Brazil—and even there in a greatly declined state—its theories were hugely influential in the emergence of many “ethical societies” and secular church movements around the globe.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Poetry

Author: Wilfred Owen

Description: Wilfred Owen was a soldier and poet during the second half of the first World War. His poetry, contrary to the propaganda of the time, dealt with the horrors of front-line trench warfare and was written at least partially out of a sense of duty to tell of the realities of war. Most of his poetry was published posthumously in 1920 after his death in combat in November 1918, a mere week before the armistice was signed. His poetry, along with that of his close friend Siegfried Sassoon, is now regarded as an authentic voice of the experiences of the soldiers of the War. Held in especially high regard are Dulce Et Decorum Est with its vivid description of a gas attack, and Anthem for Doomed Youth. The poems are here presented in chronological order according to the date of final revision.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Railway Children

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: The Railway Children is Edith Nesbit’s most well-known and well-loved book for young readers. Since its first book publication in 1906, it has been made into movies, radio plays and television series several times, dramatised in the theatre, performed in actual railway stations, and even turned into a musical. It tells the story of three children: Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, who with their mother are forced to leave their comfortable suburban home and go to live in a small cottage in the country, after their father is taken away from them for what at first seem inexplicable reasons. They live there very quietly, not going to school, whilst their mother writes stories and poems to earn a small income. The children’s lives, however, are greatly enlivened by their proximity to a nearby railway line and station, in which they take great interest. They befriend the railway staff and have several adventures in which they demonstrate considerable initiative and courage. One unusual topic touched on by the book is the then-current Russia-Japan war, which divided opinion in England. Nesbit was clearly opposed to the actions of the Tsarist government of Russia, and she introduces into the story a Tolstoy-like Russian writer who has escaped from a prison camp in Siberia, to which he was condemned for publishing a book espousing his liberal views.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Black Tulip

Author: Alexandre Dumas

Description: After the conviction of two prominent politicians for sedition, story focuses on the trial of an accused collaborator: one Cornelius van Baerle, whose only wish is to grow his tulips in peace. His crowning achievement is set to be the impossible black tulip, a feat worth one hundred thousand guilders from the Horticultural Society of Haarlem, but before he can sprout the bulb he’s imprisoned with only the daughter of the prison warden to give him a glimmer of hope. Set a few decades after the tulip mania of the 1630s, Alexandre Dumas’s novel opens with a historical incident: the mob killing of Johan and Cornelius de Witt, then high up in the government. Dumas successfully balances the romance of the protagonist’s love for both the heroine and his precious tulip with a quest to prove his innocence and thwart the schemes of his rival tulip-fancier Boxtel. The Black Tulip was originally published in three volumes in French in 1850; presented here is the 1902 translation by publisher P. F. Collier Son.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories Conan Doyle published in book form, following the popular success of the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which introduced the characters of Dr. John Watson and the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes. The collection contains twelve stories, all originally published in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892. Narrated by the first-person voice of Dr. Watson, they involve him and Holmes solving a series of mysterious cases. Some of the more well-known stories in this collection are “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in which Holmes comes up against a worthy opponent in the form of Irene Adler, whom Holmes forever after admiringly refers to as the woman; “The Redheaded League,” involving a bizarre scheme offering a well-paid sinecure to redheaded men; and “The Speckled Band,” in which Holmes and Watson save a young woman from a terrible death.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The Wonderful Visit

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: The Wonderful Visit is an early work by H. G. Wells, published in the same year as The Time Machine. It takes a gentle, semi-comic approach to some of Wells’ social concerns by using the device of an angel fallen into our world from the Land of Dreams. This external observer, largely ignorant of the ways of humans and our society, is able to focus an unbiased eye on our failings. The story opens with a strange glare over the little village of Sidderford one night, observed by only a few. But then reports arise of a Strange Bird being seen in the woods. The Rev. Hilyer, the Vicar of Sidderford, is a keen ornithologist. He takes his gun and goes out to hunt this unusual specimen for his collection. He does indeed see a strange flying creature, shoots at it, and brings it down. To his horror, he finds that he has shot and wounded a man-like creature with wings—in fact, an Angel. The Vicar restores the Angel to health, but finds himself incapable of convincing others that this person really is an angel. The continuing clashes of the Angel’s idealistic points of view with the harsh reality of the human world are the core of this story. The Wonderful Visit was well-received by critics and Wells’ contemporaries. Joseph Conrad praised it for its imaginative approach in a personal letter to Wells.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Ivanhoe

Author: Walter Scott

Description: Set in 12th-century England, Prince John rules while his brother King Richard is away during the Crusades. During his reign, Prince John and others of Norman nobility abuse their power over the Saxons, forcing Saxons off their lands and many Saxon nobles into serfdom. Ivanhoe, a man disowned by his own Saxon father for going to war alongside the Norman King Richard, returns from the Crusades in disguise and appears in a tournament at Ashby. After revealing himself, Prince John and his advisors learn that King Richard, too, has returned from the crusades. Foiling Prince John’s plot against King Richard’s return to power, King Richard battles against Prince John’s allies, and executes the most guilty of his conspirators. After the events of the story, Ivanhoe leads a heroic career under King Richard until the king’s untimely death. Ivanhoe is the first novel to feature the character Robin Hood, his merry men, and Friar Tuck, and serves as the basis for the portrayals of his character we still see in many modern adaptations.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The History of Mr. Polly

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: This work by H. G. Wells was first published in 1910. In contrast to Wells’ early speculative fiction works like The Time Machine, this is a comic novel set in the everyday world of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era in England. Despite the less than happy life-story of Mr. Polly, it is an amusing book, enlivened by Polly’s inventive attitude towards the English language. Alfred Polly’s mother dies when he is only seven, and he is brought up by his father and a stern aunt. He is indifferently educated, and leaves school in his early teens to be employed as a draper’s assistant. As the years pass, he finds himself more and more disenchanted with his occupation, but it is too late to change it. Eventually his father dies and leaves him a legacy which may be enough to set up in business for himself. He sets up his own shop in a small town and stumbles into an unhappy marriage. The business is not profitable, and in his middle-age, unhappy and dyspeptic, Mr. Polly comes up with an idea to bring an end to his troubles. Things, however, do not go as he planned, and lead to an unexpected result. ells’ later work often displays his passion for social reform. Here, that passion is less obvious, but nevertheless he demonstrates his sympathy for middle-class people raised like Mr. Polly with but a poor education and trapped into either dead-end jobs or in failing retail businesses. The History of Mr. Polly was well-received by critics at the time of publication and was subsequently made into both a film and two different BBC television serials.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Haunted Bookshop

Author: Christopher Morley

Description: “This shop is haunted” reads the sign on the front of the bookshop; not by the ghost of a person from the past, but by the ghosts of all great literature which haunt all libraries and bookstores. The owner of the bookshop is so focused on his books that he cannot see the unusual things that are going on in his shop. It takes a young advertising salesman who is seeking new business and the daughter of a rich client who has been sent to earn a living for herself in the bookshop to discover the plot that’s brewing amongst the bookshelves. The Haunted Bookshop is a gentle mystery story which is full of wonderful literary references. It is set in the aftermath of the First World War before the Paris Peace Conference took place in an age where the “Lost and Found” columns are the place to look for significant information.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Hollow Needle

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: In this first full-length Arsène Lupin novel the gentleman-thief remains a shadowy figure for most of the novel, working two steps beyond the law with a hidden aim. To fight against this anti-hero, Leblanc introduces Isidore Beautrelet, the prodigious school-boy detective. Also making an appearance are old foes Detective Ganimard and (in yet another copyright-defeating name change) Holmlock Shears. The battle of wills that ensues pulls Isidore through rural France as he tries to get to the bottom of Lupin’s motives. The Hollow Needle was originally serialized in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1908 to 1909, and was translated into English in 1910. Arsène Lupin starred in many further stories and plays, and a direct sequel to this story, Le second visage d’Arsène Lupin, was written by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud in 1975.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: King Solomon’s Mines

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Description: King Solomon’s Mines was published in September 1885, becoming an immediate best seller by tapping into people’s excitement for the unknown: in this case, the unexplored regions of Africa. Haggard wrote the novel in a very short period, between six and sixteen months, on a bet with his brother to try to match Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the process he created a new literary genre known as the “Lost World” genre, which would later influence other writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft. The book tells the tale of Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and hunter, who is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good to help them find Curtis’ lost brother, who went missing while trying to find the fabled King Solomon’s Mines. This book has spawned multiple adaptations in the form of movies, comics, and TV shows.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Nostromo

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Originally published as a serial, Nostromo is set in a fictional South American country where the outbreak of civil war puts the mining town of Sulaco in turmoil. Giovanni Battista Fidanza, known as Nostromo, is given the task of smuggling out a large amount of silver to keep it from the revolutionaries. Conrad was inspired to write the book when he read, in a sailor’s memoir, the tale of a man who singlehandedly stole a boatload of silver. He had first heard the same story a quarter of a century earlier as a young sailor. Nostromo has met with critical acclaim: it is often regarded as Conrad’s greatest novel and Francis Scott Fitzgerald said he would rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Kidnapped

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Written in 1886, Kidnapped is an adventure novel set in Scotland in the mid-1700s, not long after the Jacobite rebellion in the Highlands which had attempted to set Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne. This rebellion was put down brutally and afterwards the Government imposed strict controls on Highlanders, outlawing many clan leaders. The protagonist of Stevenson’s novel is young David Balfour, who is in his late teens. David sets off from his hometown after the death of both of his parents to seek out his sole remaining relative, his uncle Ebenezer. Expecting to be welcomed, he is shocked by the hostile reception he is given by the old man, who is a hermit much despised by his neighbours. Ebenezer tricks young David and arranges for him to be kidnapped and taken to be sold into slavery. A series of unexpected events occur, however, and David finds himself at large in the Highlands, seeking the help of the outlaw Alan Breck Stewart, who entangles him in further complications. Kidnapped is one of Stevenson’s most popular novels for young people, and has been adapted several times for movies and television.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: The Great Impersonation

Author: E. Phillips Oppenheim

Description: It’s 1913, and war is on the horizon. The disgraced English aristocrat, Everard Dominey, is stumbling through East Africa when he comes across his old classmate and lookalike—the German Baron von Ragastein. Shortly after their chance encounter, Dominey returns to England. But is it really him, or a German secret agent, looking to infiltrate English society? As Dominey attempts to resume his life, he must reacquaint himself with his insane and murderous wife, the passionate ex-lover that recognizes him, and uncover the mystery of the death that led to his exile. Oppenheim’s classic spy-thriller was enormously popular when it was first published in 1920, selling over a million copies, and leading to three major motion pictures. It is featured on The Guardian’s list of “1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: When God Laughs

Author: Jack London

Description: Released in 1911, When God Laughs, and Other Stories is the eleventh collection of short stories by Jack London. The book consists of twelve short stories that range from humorous to shocking. The titular story deals with themes of idealism set against human nature while others explore themes like the struggles of the working poor, societal norms and expectations, and colonization.

Subjects: adventure, fiction, shorts

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Title: The Forerunner

Author: Khalil Gibran

Description: Published in 1920, The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems is the second collection of philosophical poetry and short stories by Lebanese author Khalil Gibran. A spiritual successor to The Madman, The Forerunner consists of 25 poems and parables relating to spirituality, love, our greater selves.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: A Christmas Carol

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 and the first edition, published on 19th December, was so successful that it sold out in just six days. The publishers had to produce two further editions between Christmas and the new year to meet the demand, and the novella has never been out of print. A Christmas Carol tells the story of a greedy money-lender, Ebenezer Scrooge, who is first visited by the ghost of his former business partner and then by three spirits—the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. They show Scrooge’s lack of compassion to him, compelling him to act more compassionately in the future and to honor Christmas in his heart.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Robert E. Howard

Description: Best known for his character Conan the Barbarian, during his short life Robert E. Howard also wrote prolifically in other genres, including horror, adventure, western and historical fiction. Foreign lands, sorcery and gritty characters are hallmarks of Howard’s literary work. Although the themes and contents of several stories have since become offensive, his corpus is a good representation of the culture and beliefs of his time. Collected here are some of Howard’s short stories known to be public domain. The stories were first published mainly in newspapers and pulp magazines of the time, especially Weird Tales.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Sign of the Four

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: The Sign of the Four, initially titled just The Sign of Four, is the second of Doyle’s novels to feature the analytical detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and chronicler Dr. Watson. The action takes place not long after the events in A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, and that prior case is referred to frequently at the beginning of this one. Holmes is consulted by a young woman about a strange communication she has received. Ten years previously her father Captain Morstan went missing the night after returning from service in the Far East before his daughter could travel to meet him. He has never been seen or heard of ever since. But a few years after his disappearance, Miss Morstan was startled to receive a precious pearl in the mail, with no sender’s name or address and no accompanying message. A similar pearl has arrived each subsequent year. Finally, she received an anonymous letter begging her to come to a meeting outside a London theater that very evening. She may bring two companions. Naturally, Holmes and Watson accompany the young woman to the mysterious meeting, and are subsequently involved in the unveiling of a complex story of treasure and betrayal.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Arsène Lupin Versus Herlock Sholmes

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: Arsène Lupin takes on his most fearsome opponent yet in this second collection of his larcenous adventures. More a loving homage than a straight copy, Herlock Sholmes (changed just enough to avoid fallout from a copyright claim by Conan Doyle) and his companion Wilson are summoned to France initially to throw light on the case of the Blonde Lady. Having encountered Arsène Lupin before, Sholmes is only too happy to get a chance of revenge. This collection of two stories were originally serialised in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1906 to 1907, and were translated into English in 1910. After an earlier story with an unauthorised Sherlock Holmes, Maurice Leblanc was forced to rename his antagonist for these stories.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: A Study in Scarlet

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: A Study in Scarlet is the novel which first introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was published in 1887 in a popular magazine, Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It attracted little public attention at the time, but interest in Holmes continued to build with the subsequent series of short stories Doyle wrote featuring the austere, analytical detective—now one of the most well-known characters in all of English literature. A Study in Scarlet is told from the point of view of Dr. John Watson, a medical doctor who has recently returned to London after suffering serious injury and illness as part of the Army Medical Department deployed to Afghanistan. In precarious health and even more precarious financial straits, he’s looking for cheap lodgings when a friend introduces him to Sherlock Holmes. The pair agree to share the rent of a flat Holmes has found. atson is baffled by his companion’s strange nature, his peculiar interests, his unusual breadth of knowledge in certain fields alongside his shocking ignorance in others, and his many strange visitors. Only eventually does Watson discover that Holmes has set himself up as the world’s first “consulting detective,” and it’s not long before Watson finds himself assisting Holmes in a mysterious case. The body of a man has been found in an abandoned house, without wounds or other marks of injury. But on the wall, scrawled in blood, is the word RACHE. The subsequent unravelling of the mystery takes many unexpected turns.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Description: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the most influential writers of horror fiction in the early 20th century. His fame is mostly posthumous: he was only published in pulp magazines in his lifetime, and never saw financial success. Despite that, Lovecraft’s unique blend of gothicism, horror, and the supernatural, set in an imagined but eerily real New England, marked a gold standard for horror fiction for decades after his death. Readers of modern fantasy and horror fiction will certainly recognize Cthulhu, the tentacle-mouthed god who lies asleep in a sunken Atlantean ruin; the Necronomicon, a grimoire of unspeakable power and horror penned by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred; and the dark, twisted New England countryside of the Miskatonic Valley. These and other features take shape in Lovecraft’s stories, creating a backdrop of the bizarre and evil behind seemingly day-to-day lives. A thread of cosmic horror soon turns anything normal towards madness. This edition is small because verifying the U.S. public domain status of Lovecraft’s corpus is a difficult, if not impossible, academic exercise, and finding first-edition copies to transcribe is also difficult. This edition will be updated as more transcriptions become verified and available. Included in this edition are some of Lovecraft’s juvenilia—in particular, “The Alchemist” was written when he was just seventeen or eighteen.

Subjects: horror, shorts

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Title: The Madman

Author: Khalil Gibran

Description: Published in 1918, The Madman: His Parables and Poems is the first collection of philosophical poetry and short stories by Lebanese author Khalil Gibran. The Madman is the first work by Gibran that was originally published in English, as compared to his earlier works which were written originally in his native Arabic. The Madman deals with themes of love, loss, spirituality, and the nature of truth.

Subjects: shorts

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Title: The Enchanted Castle

Author: E. Nesbit

Description: The Enchanted Castle is a novel for young readers by Edith Nesbit, who was writing in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era in Britain. As in her other children’s books, it begins in the everyday world but quickly brings in the fantastical and magical. A large part of the delight of Nesbit’s books is that her children behave in quite ordinary ways, getting into scrapes, getting dirty and their clothes torn, making decisions which seem right to them at the time but which are generally wrong-headed. It’s the contrast between the ordinariness of the children and the magical adventures they become involved in which makes the books so charming. The Enchanted Castle was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine alongside stories by Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. The first book edition was published in 1907. In the story, Kathleen and her brothers Gerald and Jimmy find a way into a remarkable garden designed to create a Palladian landscape, full of statues and pseudo-Classical temples and buildings. It is not long before they come across a sleeping Princess. They wake her, and she introduces them to an item of real magical value, a ring which makes its wearer invisible. But once on, the ring won’t come off! “Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible companion will not need to be told how awkward the whole business is,” comments the author, which is indicative of the simple and direct language she uses, and the humor of the books. Even the invisibility ring, however, is not quite as simple as it seems; and many interesting and amusing adventures follow.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Of Human Bondage

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Description: Considered by many to be Maugham’s masterpiece, Of Human Bondage is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale. The novel follows Philip, a sensitive young man interested in literature and art, as he searches for happiness in London and Paris. Philip, the ostensible stand-in for Maugham, suffers from a club foot, a physical representation of the stutter that Maugham himself suffered. Philip’s love life, a central aspect to the book, also mirrors Maugham’s own stormy affairs. Maugham originally titled the book “Beauty from Ashes” before settling on the final title, taken from a section of Spinoza’s Ethics in which he discusses how one’s inability to control one’s emotions results in a form of bondage.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Just So Stories

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Description: Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1902, is now considered to be a classic of children’s literature. The twelve tales included are all humorous “origin” stories purporting to tell how certain animals gained their distinctive features. For example, “The Elephant’s Child” tells how the elephant gained its long trunk because of a baby elephant having its nose pulled and stretched by a crocodile. The stories originated as bedtime tales Kipling invented for his daughter and told to her each night. The stories had to be told in exactly the same words each night—“just so”—or his daughter would complain. Early editions of Just So Stories were illustrated in black and white by Kipling himself, which lends the collection a certain charm. We have reproduced these illustrations in the Standard Ebooks edition of the book.

Subjects: children’s, fiction, shorts

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Title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar

Author: Maurice Leblanc

Description: Arsène Lupin, with his characteristic wit, plots over the course of nine short stories to steal many of France’s best antiques and artworks from under their owners’ noses. Only his classic opponent Detective Ganimard has the brilliance to attempt to foil Arsène’s plans, albeit with mixed results. This first collection of nine Arsène Lupin stories were originally serialised in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1905 and translated into English in 1910. The final story of the set features Herlock Sholmes. In the original printings, Sholmes was simply an unauthorized Sherlock Holmes, but this appearance annoyed Arthur Conan Doyle; the character’s name was changed to “Herlock Sholmes” for later printings and future stories. Arsène Lupin later went on to feature in over fifty stories by Maurice Leblanc along with many other books, films and plays around the world.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Moby Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Description: “Call me Ishmael” says Moby Dick’s protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook, and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbor in Nantucket, he signs up for a three-year term without meeting the captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It’s only well into the voyage that Ahab’s thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dick—and the consequences—become clear. The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years traveling the world in the early 1840s. Melville used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopedic quality. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships’ provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted. Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Legends of Vancouver

Author: E. Pauline Johnson

Description: Emily Pauline Johnson, who was also known by the Mohawk name Tekahionwake, was a Canadian poet and author born in 1861. Born to a Mohawk father and an English mother, she was known for introducing indigenous culture to a wider North American and European audience. In Legends of Vancouver, perhaps her best-known prose work, Johnson tells stories of the Squamish people, as relayed to her by Chief Joe Capilano, whom she befriended upon moving to Vancouver in 1909. She provides her own framing for these stories, placing them in the context of her relationship with the Squamish people. In 1911, a group of Johnson’s friends collected this series of stories, that had previously been published in the Daily Province, in order to raise funds to support her as she struggled with poverty and health issues. In the intervening years, Legends of Vancouver has become a foundational piece of Vancouver’s literary heritage.

Subjects: nonfiction, shorts

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Title: The Story of Gösta Berling

Author: Selma Lagerlöf

Description: Set in the 1820s in central Sweden, The Story of Gösta Berling follows the saga of the titular character as he falls from the priesthood and is rescued by the owner of a local estate. Joining the other saved souls in the pensioners’ wing of the mansion, he embarks upon a series of larger-than-life stories that tell of adventure, revelry, romance and sadness. Gösta Berling was the eventual Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf’s first published novel, and was written as an entry to a magazine competition. The richly detailed landscapes of Värmland were drawn from her own upbringing there, and the local folk tales inspired many of the individual stories in the book. The novel was published in Swedish in 1891; this edition is based on the 1898 English translation by Pauline Bancroft Flach. In 1924 the story was made into a silent film, launching the career of Greta Garbo.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Emma

Author: Jane Austen

Description: Emma is one of Jane Austen’s best-loved novels. Its eponymous heroine, Emma Woodhouse, has lived a pampered, protected life and consequently is somewhat unrealistic when she sets her sights on becoming a matchmaker for a young friend. The novel provides a light-hearted insight into the distinctions of the rigid class structure of England in the Regency period, and the social barriers to marriage between persons considered to be of superior and inferior rank. Emma was published in 1815, the last of Austen’s novels to be published while she still lived. It received a generally very positive reception, and was well reviewed (though anonymously) by Sir Walter Scott. Criticisms of the novel, such as they were, centered around its supposed lack of plot, though its treatment of character was recognized and applauded. Today it is regarded as one of Austen’s best works. The novel has been adapted many times for theater, movies and television.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Inferno

Author: August Strindberg

Description: The narrator of The Inferno—ostensibly August Strindberg himself—has not had an easy recent past, and a move to Paris is not helping. As his mania overtakes his ability to function in the society of artists, writers, scientists and philosophers he’d like to be part of, he turns to more unconventional methods to help make sense of his world. ritten in diary form, The Inferno is a semi-autobiographical work that blends self-deprecating humour with a whirl of neurosis and attempted rationalisation. The novel, with a certain amount of exaggeration for literary effect, charts two years of Strindberg’s life in the 1890s. Presented here is Claud Field’s 1913 translation from the original French.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Three Lives

Author: Gertrude Stein

Description: In Three Lives are the stories of three working-class woman from Bridgepoint—a town loosely based on Baltimore—in the early twentieth century. Each story tells of the hopes, loves, romances and sadnesses of the women as they live their lives. ritten in a unconventional style, the lives of the three women are uncovered through their layered conversations and interactions more than through detailed depictions. The book is notable for its descriptions of homosexual romance, something that at the time in the USA wasn’t accepted (indeed, Gertrude Stein moved with her partner to Paris to be able to live openly). Three Lives was Gertrude Stein’s first published book, and although the sales weren’t as expected it was generally well received by critics. It’s considered today to be among her more accessible books, and is a regular on English literature curricula.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Author: Washington Irving

Description: Initially published throughout 1819 and 1820, The Sketchbook is a collection of 34 essays and short stories, collected and ordered according to the Author’s Revised Edition published in 1848. The Sketchbook is the first publication to use Irving’s pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, which he would carry into later works. The stories vary in nature, from the comical “The Mutability of Literature” to the eerie and seemingly supernatural “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but the personality of their narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, connects the stories and attracts their readers. Some stories are written on American topics, forming the need for separate American and English editions, and others consist of English life and landscape, written from the perspective of living in England for a time. Two of the stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” are Irving’s most well-known works, and are presented as posthumous writings of fictional Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. From these stories came the iconic characters Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: Barchester Towers

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: Barchester Towers, published in 1857, is the sequel to Trollope’s The Warden and continues the story of the clerical doings in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. As this novel opens, the old Bishop of Barchester lies dying, and there is considerable doubt as to who will replace him. The Bishop’s son Dr. Grantly, the Archdeacon, has high hopes of succeeding him, but these hopes are dashed and a new Bishop, Dr. Proudie, is appointed. Along with Dr. Proudie comes his domineering wife and their ambitious chaplain the Reverend Mr. Slope. The old clerical party headed by Dr. Grantly and the new, championed by Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope, are soon in contention over Church matters. These two parties represent a then-significant struggle between different evangelical approaches in the Church of England. One local issue in particular is fought over—the appointment of a new Warden for Hiram’s Hospital, the focus of the preceding book. Mrs. Eleanor Bold is the daughter of Mr. Harding, the prior Warden. She has recently been widowed. The wealth she inherited from her late husband makes her an attractive match, and her affections are in contention from several prospective suitors, including the oily Mr. Slope. All of this lends itself to considerable humor and interest. Though not well received by critics on its initial publication, Barchester Towers is now regarded as one of Trollope’s most popular novels. Together with The Warden, it was made into a very successful television series by the BBC in 1982.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Warden

Author: Anthony Trollope

Description: The Warden is concerned with the unassuming Rev. Septimus Harding, who has for many years been the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital in the fictional town of Barchester. This “hospital” is what we would today probably call an aged-care or retirement home. It was established under the provisions of a will to look after the needs of old men too feeble to work any longer and unable to support themselves. Mr. Harding benefits financially from his position, though the duties are very slight. A local doctor, though sweet on Mr. Harding’s daughter Eleanor, is nevertheless a keen reformer, zealous to overturn what he sees as corrupt patronage in the Church. He investigates the terms of Hiram’s will and concludes that the money intended for the benefit of the aged wool-carders is unfairly being consumed by the salary of the Warden. He proceeds to pursue this issue through the pages of a crusading journal, The Jupiter. Though strongly defended by the Church authorities, including his son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly, Mr. Harding has long struggles with his conscience because of this imputation. The Warden, published in 1855, was Trollope’s first major writing success, and formed the basis for a series of six novels set in the same fictional county and its cathedral city of Barchester, now known as the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.”

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Vsevolod Garshin

Description: Vsevolod Garshin’s literary career followed a stint as a infantry soldier and later an officer, and he received both public and critical acclaim in the 1880s. Before his sadly early death at the age of thirty-three after a lifelong battle with mental illness he wrote and published nineteen short stories. He drew on his military career and life in St. Petersburg as initial source material, and his varied cast of characters includes soldiers, painters, architects, madmen, bears, frogs and even flowers and trees. All are written with a depth of feeling and sympathy that marks Garshin out from his contemporaries. Collected here are the seventeen translations into English by Rowland Smith of Garshin’s short stories and novellas, in chronological order of the original Russian publication.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Phantastes

Author: George MacDonald

Description: Phantastes was published in 1858. It tells the story of Anodos, who, on coming of age, is examining the effects of his deceased father. To his astonishment, in doing so he sees an apparition of a fairy woman, who tells him that he has some fairy blood and conveys him to Fairy Land. In Fairy Land Anodos undergoes a long series of strange adventures and spiritual experiences. He is frequently under threat, at first from malevolent trees, and later from his own evil Shadow. At one point he discovers Pygmalion’s cave and sees the form of a beautiful woman enclosed in transparent alabaster. He falls instantly in love with this woman and contrives to free her from the stone, but she flees from him. Later, he encounters the Arthurian knight Sir Percivale, who has just come off the worst of an encounter with the evil Maid of the Alder-Tree. Eventually, after many trials and hazards, Anodos encounters Sir Percivale again and becomes his squire. Together they carry out deeds of chivalry before Anodos eventually returns to the mundane world. Phantastes is now regarded as a classic of the fantasy genre and has been an important influence on later generations of fantasy writers, including such names as C. S. Lewis.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Flatland

Author: Edwin A. Abbott

Description: Flatland is uniquely both a social critique and a primer on multi-dimensional geometry. Written in two parts in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott, an English mathematician and theologian, it tells the story of a square living in Flatland: a two-dimensional realm. After a dream of a restrictive one-dimensional existence and the difficulties this poses, he is visited by a sphere from a three-dimensional space who wishes to enlighten him into the ways of “Upward, yet not Northward.” Edwin A. Abbott wrote other theological fiction and non-fiction (including several biographies), but he is best remembered for Flatland. While it was mostly forgotten after publication, it received a revived interest from the 1960s onwards, and has more recently had several sequels and film adaptations. This edition of Flatland is based on the second published edition and includes its preface, which in part attempts to address some of the contemporary accusations of misogyny.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Author: John Buchan

Description: Published in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps is a thriller set in Britain on the eve of the First World War. The novel’s protagonist, Richard Hannay, is an expatriate Scot who has just returned to London after many years in South Africa working in the mining industry. He finds England extremely dull and is just considering returning to South Africa when he is accosted by another inhabitant of the block of flats where he is living. This man, Scudder, tells Hannay he knows of a fantastical plot by England’s enemies to create a diplomatic scandal. Hannay, at first skeptical, eventually accepts that there is something in it and harbours Scudder in his own flat. Returning to his flat some days later, Hannay is horrified to find Scudder stabbed to death. Realising that he will be suspected by the police, and that he may also be in danger from the plotters, Hannay flees London. hat follows is an exciting chase across Scotland, with Hannay frequently coming close to capture. The Thirty-Nine Steps was immediately popular, particularly with troops in the trenches of the First World War. It has remained popular and has been used as the basis for several movies including one directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. It could also be seen as the prototype of several similarly themed movies and television shows such as The Fugitive. John Buchan continued the adventures of Richard Hannay in a series of sequels. He also had a highly distinguished government and diplomatic career, ultimately becoming Governor General of Canada.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Hound of the Baskervilles

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: It would be hard to nominate a more well-known character in English literature than that of the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1880s. Holmes, alongside his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson, appeared in two initial novels and dozens of short stories serialized in popular magazines, attracting a devoted, almost fanatical following which continues to this day. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–1902, was the third novel featuring Holmes and Watson. Sherlock Holmes is consulted in his Baker Street apartment by Dr. Mortimer, a physician now living on the fringes of Dartmoor. He gives Holmes and Watson an account of a centuries-old legend, in which a hell-hound slaughtered the debauched heir of the Baskerville family who had been in lecherous pursuit of an innocent maiden across the moor. The same hound is reputed to have harrowed several of the subsequent heirs to the estate. This ancient story might be dismissed as mere fancy, but for the fact that the elderly Sir Charles Baskerville recently died in very mysterious circumstances, apparently fleeing in terror from something which came from the moor. Dr. Mortimer is concerned that the new heir, Sir Henry, just returned from Canada, may be at risk from this supernatural beast. Holmes is intrigued, but being too busy to go himself, sends Dr. Watson to accompany Sir Henry to the ancestral home on Dartmoor and to report anything suspicious. The Hound of the Baskervilles is arguably the best, and certainly the most popular, of Doyle’s novels featuring his iconic detective. It has been translated into almost every language in the world and been the basis of dozens of movies (starting as early as 1914), radio plays and comic books.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: This Side of Paradise

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Description: This Side of Paradise chronicles the coming of age of Amory Blaine, born to a wealthy midwestern family. It begins with Amory as a spoiled youth, doted on by his eccentric mother Beatrice. It follows him as he attends preparatory school and Princeton, and then briefly attempts but quickly abandons at a career in advertising. His service in World War I is mentioned but mostly glossed over. Covered in much more detail are his various romances: youthful dalliances, a correspondence-based relationship that ends as soon as the couple spends time together in person, a deep love with the debutante sister of one of his close friends, and an intense summer fling. The book shows Amory’s attempts to define himself as a person and find his place in a world rapidly changing through World War, the “Jazz Age,” and Prohibition. It provides the reader with a good picture of what life was like for a privileged young man of the era. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise was published in 1920 when he was 23 years old, and was widely praised by critics. The semi-autobiographical work launched his career as one of America’s most well-known writers. As a direct result of the publishing of the novel, Zelda Sayre (the inspiration for the character of the debutante Rosalind Connage) agreed to marry Fitzgerald. The couple became an icon of the excesses of the Jazz Age.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Nightmare Abbey

Author: Thomas Love Peacock

Description: Published in 1818, Peacock’s novella Nightmare Abbey is a gentle satire of the then-popular gothic movement in literature. He pokes fun at the genre’s obsessions and most of the book’s characters are caricatures of well-known personages of the time. Young Scythrop is the only son of Mr. Glowry, living in the semi-ruined Nightmare Abbey on his estate in Lincolnshire. Mr. Glowry, the survivor of a miserable marriage, is addicted to the depressing and the morbid, surrounding himself with servants whose names, such as Raven, Graves and Skellet, reflect his obsessions. His friends, also, are chosen from those who best reflect his misanthropic views. Scythrop himself imagines himself a philosopher with a unique view of the world, and to this end has written a treatise titled “Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind.” Only seven copies of this treatise have ever been sold, and Scythrop dreams of being united with one of the buyers. His passions, though, become more earthy when he falls in love both with his cousin Marionetta and then also with a mysterious woman who appears in his apartment and begs him for asylum, thus creating a situation of romantic farce as he tries to decide between the two. These events are interleaved between entertaining discussions among the varied guests at Nightmare Abbey, richly filled with humor, allusions and quotation. Nightmare Abbey is probably Peacock’s most successful work of fiction, and helped establish his position as an important satirist of his times. His satire, though, is light-hearted rather than savage and is directed more at foolish opinions than attacking particular persons.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Nikolai Gogol

Description: Nikolai Gogol spent most of his literary career writing short stories, drawing inspiration from his childhood in Ukraine and his adult life in St. Petersburg. His stories are filled with larger than life yet relatable characters and perfectly described locations, and span many genres from historical epics to early horror and surrealism. His influence on Russian literature cannot be understated: Fyodor Dostoevsky is quoted as saying “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” (presented here as “The Mantle”) and mentioned him by name in Crime and Punishment; Mikhail Bulgakov stated that “no-one can compare with him,” and Vladimir Nabokov wrote a full biography. Many of the stories in this collection have been adapted for stage and film, including “The Nose” as an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Collected here are all of the public domain translations into English of Gogol’s short stories, in chronological order of the original Russian publication. They were translated by Claud Field, Isabel F. Hapgood, Vizetelly and Company, and George Tolstoy.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Love Among the Chickens

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Wodehouse once described his writing as “musical comedy without music,” and Love Among the Chickens is one of the earliest examples of his trademark style. The narrator, Jeremy Garnet, is a mild-mannered author attempting to finish his next novel in peace and quiet. Enter Stanley Ukridge, a man brimming with endless schemes, who draws the narrator into his latest, “the idea of a lifetime”—running a chicken farm. ith little practical knowledge, yet boundless ambition, they move to a country house and put the plan into action. Along the way, Garnet falls headlong in love with a woman on the train, and becomes consumed with winning her heart, despite formidable obstacles. The original edition of Love Among the Chickens was published in the UK in 1906. This newer edition dates from 1921 and is described as “entirely rewritten by the author.” It is the first introduction in print of the character Ukridge, who would appear again in other short stories and novels by Wodehouse.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Author: Daniel Defoe

Description: Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular books ever written in the English language, published in innumerable editions and translated into almost every language of the world, not to mention the many versions created in film, television and even radio. First published in 1719, it can also claim to be one of the first novels ever written in English. ritten in the form of an autobiography, it describes the life of the eponymous narrator Robinson Crusoe. A wild youth, he breaks away from his family to go to sea. After many adventures including being captured and made into a slave, he is eventually shipwrecked on a remote island off the coast of South America. Crusoe is the only survivor of the wreck. He is thus forced to find ways to survive on the island without any other assistance. His first years are miserable and hard, but he ultimately manages to domesticate goats and raise crops, making his life tolerable. While suffering from an illness, he undergoes a profound religious conversion, and begins to ascribe his survival to a beneficent Providence. Crusoe lives alone on the island for more than twenty years until his life changes dramatically after he discovers a human footprint in the sand, indicating the undeniable presence of other human beings. These, it turns out, are the native inhabitants of the mainland, who visit the island only occasionally. To Crusoe’s horror, he discovers that these people practice cannibalism. He rescues one of their prisoners, who becomes his servant (or “man”) Friday, named for the day of the week on which he rescued him, and together, their adventures continue.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Uncle Silas

Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Description: Uncle Silas is told from the account of Maud Ruthyn, an heiress living with her reclusive father, Austin Ruthyn. She learns about her uncle, Silas Ruthyn, and his past reputation marred by gambling and the apparent suicide of a man to which Silas owed a large gambling debt that occurred in a locked room in Silas’ residence. In order to clear the Ruthyn name of the rumors of Silas’ past, Austin names Silas as Maud’s guardian through Austin’s will upon his death. Also noted in Austin’s will, Silas would inherit the fortune left to Maud should she die while under his ward. Maud befriends her cousin Millicent and quickly adjusts to life under Silas’ care, despite his often frightening demeanor. Although Silas has proclaimed that he’s a newly reformed Christian, Maud becomes increasingly suspicious of her uncle’s motives as life for her becomes increasingly unpleasant. The story of Maud Ruthyn and her uncle Silas evolved through multiple iterations, beginning with the short story “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” in 1839, before ultimately becoming the three-volume novel published in 1864. This ebook reproduces a revised, two-volume version released a year later.

Subjects: mystery

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Title: Sonnets from the Portuguese

Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Description: Sonnets from the Portuguese is a collection of forty-four love sonnets. Despite what the title suggests, Browning in fact composed the sonnets in English. She decided to frame them as “translations” because she was concerned they may have been too personal to publish. Fortunately her husband, Robert Browning, convinced her to publish them, and they went on to become some of the most famous and critically acclaimed love sonnets to this day.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Moonstone

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: The “Moonstone” of the title is a large but flawed diamond, looted from India at the time of the Mutiny by an unscrupulous British officer. Many years later, estranged from his family due to his licentious lifestyle, the officer bequeaths the diamond to his sister’s daughter, Rachel Verrinder, to be given to her on her 18th birthday. Due to the ill-omens surrounding the gem, this may have been an act of revenge rather than reconciliation. The diamond, it appears, was taken from a statue of the Moon God worshipped by a Hindu cult, and it has long been sought by a group of Brahmins determined to return it to their temple. On the night of the birthday party the gem mysteriously disappears from Rachel’s room. While the first suspicions naturally fall on these Indians, they are eventually exculpated. Rachel becomes hysterical and angry when questioned about the theft and refuses to assist the police. Active efforts to assist them are taken up by Rachel’s cousin (and sweetheart) Franklin Blake. These efforts simply drive Rachel into further fury, and she becomes completely estranged from him. Suspicion thus falls on her as having some secret reason for wishing to raise money on the diamond. The novel proceeds to slowly uncover the mysteries involved. Published in 1868, The Moonstone is often considered as one of the precursors of the modern detective novel, though this is a label which would not have been used by its author Wilkie Collins and his contemporaries. While it is true that the plot revolves around the mystery of a theft, and that it features Sergeant Cuff “in the Detective Force of Scotland Yard,” the novel is much more about character and relationships than the mere revelation of secrets. It also has a good dose of Collins’ humour, as the story is told in large part by eccentric characters such as the old house-steward Gabriel Betteredge who regards Robinson Crusoe as an oracle; and the ultra-religious Miss Clack, determined to convert everyone to her views. Immensely popular at the time of its publication in serial form, The Moonstone is rightly considered to be one of Collins’ best works, and remains highly regarded today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Works of Max Beerbohm

Author: Max Beerbohm

Description: The Works of Max Beerbohm is a collection of satirical essays by Max Beerbohm. It was published in 1896 at The Bodley Head, his publisher John Lane contributing a detailed bibliography of the works of the author, then aged 24. Before their publication as a book, the essays had appeared in prominent literary periodicals such as The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Most of the essays were written while he was a student at Oxford, although he had left Merton College in 1894. By then he was already known as a caricaturist, parodist and essayist and well acquainted with the writers and artists connected with The Bodley Head, notably Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The essays can perhaps be best described as both elaborate parody and vicious satire. Beerbohm’s intimate knowledge of the social circles of the time and his penchant for pointed descriptions of character are always on display, dismantling the purported greatness that surrounds him.

Subjects: satire, shorts

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Title: Peter and Wendy

Author: J. M. Barrie

Description: Peter Pan, a young boy who refuses to grow up, takes Wendy to the lost boys on the fantasy island of the Neverland to be their mother. Wendy’s two brothers, John and Michael, accompany them on their many adventures, including skirmishes with the Native Americans who reside there, and battles with pirates, led by Pan’s nemesis Captain Hook, who is said to be feared even by Captain Flint and Long John Silver. Peter and Wendy, J. M. Barrie’s most famous work, was influenced by Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family and the death of his older brother, who, by dying in his youth, would remain a young boy forever. It began as a play first performed in 1904, and then was later published as a novel in 1911. A large number of adaptations including plays, television, and films have since been produced.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: Captain Blood

Author: Rafael Sabatini

Description: Peter Blood, with experience as a soldier and sailor, is practicing medicine in Bridgewater, England, when he inadvertently gets caught up in a rebellion being waged by the Duke of Monmouth. After being convicted of treason, Blood and some of the rebels are sentenced to slavery in the Caribbean. The year is 1688. During the course of Blood’s servitude, he works on the sugar plantation of Colonel Bishop and becomes infatuated with the colonel’s niece, Arabella. When Bishop realizes that Blood is an accomplished physician he “employs” Blood in that capacity. hen the colony is attacked by a Spanish force, Blood and some of the other slaves manage to escape and take over the Spanish ship. Several of the other escapees turn out to be experienced seaman, including as officers in the British navy. This group turns the Spanish ship into a very successful pirate ship, specializing in raiding Spanish shipping. This begins Captain Blood’s journey toward redemption and his “courtship” of Arabella. Sabatini based Blood’s character on several historical figures, including a doctor who was sentenced to slavery (but did not become a pirate), as well as Henry Morgan (who was a pirate). His most well known novel was Scaramouche. Sabatini also wrote a number of short stories about Captain Blood in the early 1920s.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Bleak House

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Bleak House, completed by Dickens in 1853, tells several interlocking story-lines and features a host of colorful characters. Though very difficult to summarise, the novel centers around the decades-long legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving the fair distribution of assets of a valuable estate. The case is mired in the legal quagmire of the Court of Chancery, whose byzantine and sluggish workings Dickens spares no effort to expose and condemn. Dickens also exposes the miserable condition of the poor, living in squalid, pestilential circumstances. The novel’s heroine is Esther Summerson, whose parentage is unclear and who has been brought up by a cold and strict godmother, who tells her only: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.” On the death of her godmother, she is given an education through the unexpected intervention of a Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, whom she has never met. When she comes of age, she is appointed as a companion to Ada, one of two young people who are “wards of Chancery,” whose fates depend on the outcome of the legal struggle and who are taken into guardianship by Mr. Jarndyce. The other ward Richard, despite Mr. Jarndyce’s frequent warnings, eventually goes astray by pinning all his hopes on a successful outcome of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. e are also introduced to Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, and to their cunning and suspicious lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn. He uncovers evidence that Lady Dedlock is not all she seems and determines to remorselessly pursue every lead to expose her secrets. The novel has a curious construction in that the first-person narrative of Esther, written in the past tense, is interleaved with many chapters written from the omniscient viewpoint and in the present tense. Several prominent critics such as G. K. Chesterton consider Bleak House to be Dickens’ finest novel, and it is often ranked among the best English-language novels of all time.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Parnassus on Wheels

Author: Christopher Morley

Description: Parnassus on Wheels is Christopher Morley’s first novel, and the first of two written from a woman’s perspective, the second being The Haunted Bookshop, this book’s sequel. Parnassus on Wheels was inspired by a novel by David Grayson (pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker) called The Friendly Road, and is prefaced by a letter to Grayson from Morley. The word “Parnassus” from the title refers to “Mount Parnassus,” the home of the Muses in Greek mythology. The protagonist is 39-year-old Helen McGill, who lives on a farm owned by her brother Andrew. The book’s Parnassus is a large, horse-drawn van owned by Roger Mifflin, out of which he buys and sells books while traveling around the New England countryside. Mifflin arrives at the McGill farm, looking to sell the business to someone interested in the noble cause of spreading literature to the common man. Helen is at first turned off by Mr. Mifflin, but decides on a whim that an escape from her dreadful farm—and her insufferable brother Andrew—is just what she needs. She buys the Parnassus, and embarks on exactly the type of adventure she had hoped for.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Through the Looking-Glass

Author: Lewis Carroll

Description: Alice dreams herself into a mirror version of Wonderland, a whimsical land of talking flowers, and chess pieces, and a fighting lion and unicorn, and crosses sections of a life-size chess board. Upon reaching the Eighth Square, she is crowned a queen and the Red and White Queens throw her her very own dinner party to celebrate. Through the Looking-Glass is a sequel to the wildly popular Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice finds herself in a mirror image of Wonderland, instead based on a chess board rather than a deck of cards, meeting mirror copies of her old friends.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: The Pit-Prop Syndicate

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Description: The Pit-Prop Syndicate is a story from the beginning of the golden age of crime fiction. Seymour Merriman, a British wine merchant on business in France, happens upon a syndicate manufacturing pit-props—beams used to prop up mine tunnels—but his eye is caught by one odd detail: their lorry’s number plate mysteriously changes. With the help of his friend Hilliard from the Excise department they dig deeper and uncover a dangerous conspiracy. Freeman Wills Crofts was a civil engineer, turned author of crime fiction. Though somewhat forgotten today, his style was widely appreciated at the time, and still finds fans of those who like a puzzle where all the loose ends are tied up. During his career he wrote over thirty crime novels; The Pit-Prop Syndicate, published in 1922, was his third.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: John Keats

Description: John Keats’ poems are a major part of the second wave of English Romantic poetry. They portray settings loaded with symbolism and sensuality, and draw heavily on Greek and Roman myth along with romanticised tales of chivalry. Keats died in 1821 at the young age of 25, having written the majority of his work in less than four years. While not appreciated during his lifetime, he has gone on to become one of the most loved of the Romantic poets, and has provided inspiration to authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen and Neil Gaiman. This collection includes among others early work such as “On Death,” the six odes written in 1819, his two epics Hyperion and Endymion, and “To Autumn,” now widely considered to be one of the best English short poems. Keats’ works are presented here in chronological order, and include the poems published in his lifetime and other unfinished fragments and posthumous verse.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Kim

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Description: Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, published in 1901, tells the story of Kimball O’Hara (“Kim”), the orphaned son of an Anglo-Irish soldier, who grows up as a street-urchin on the streets of Lahore in India during the time of the British Raj. Knowing little of his parentage, he is as much a native as his companions, speaking Hindi and Urdu rather than English, cunning and street-wise. At about the age of twelve, Kim encounters an old Tibetan lama on a pilgrimage in search of a holy river. He decides to fall in with the lama on his travels, and becomes in essence the old man’s disciple. Not long after, Kim is captured at an encampment of British soldiers under suspicion of being a thief. His parentage is discovered and the officers decide he must be raised as a “Sahib” (an Englishman) and sent off to school. The interest of the British officers in Kim is not entirely disinterested, however, as they see his potential for acting as a courier and spy as part of their “Great Game” of espionage against their bitter rivals the Russians, and ensure that he is trained accordingly. Kim is a well-loved book, often being listed as one of the best English-language novels. Its depiction of the India of the time, its varied races, religions, customs and scenery is detailed, rich and sympathetic. And the manoeuverings of the players in the Great Game make for an entertaining adventure story.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Island of Doctor Moreau

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: The Island of Doctor Moreau is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man who finds himself on a mysterious island full of humanoid animal creatures. He comes to find that these creatures are the work of Dr. Moreau, a man who experiments in vivisection, and his assistant Montgomery. The story of Dr. Moreau’s island began as an article in the January, 1895 issue of Saturday Review. It was later adapted into a novel. Its themes reflect concerns growing in the society of the day, like the cruelty of vivisection, degenerationism, and the theory of evolution.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Communist Manifesto

Author: Karl Marx

Description: Perhaps the most influential and widely read political work of the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Manifesto of the Communist Party succinctly lays out the political theory and history of class struggle. Following a short introduction, the Manifesto develops over four short chapters, discussing the historical background of class struggle, the relationship of Communists with other socialist and working class movements, a critical review of other contemporary socialist literature and thinking, and finally a brief summary of the Communist position related to the contemporary political situations in various European countries, concluding with the rousing call-to-arms, “Workingmen of all countries unite!” This edition, translated by Samuel Moore, includes Engels’ own Preface and footnote annotations written for the English edition of 1888.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Silas Marner

Author: George Eliot

Description: In Silas Marner, author George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) introduces an embittered linen weaver who withdraws from society after a betrayal of trust. He retreats to work his loom or count and re-count his accumulated gold and silver. The abrupt theft of his money sends Marner into despair, which is interrupted just as suddenly by the appearance of an abandoned infant on his hearth. Marner adopts and raises the child, finding a new place among his community. Silas Marner was well-received at the time of its release for its “fairy tale” charm, and has since gained appreciation for Eliot’s treatment of alienation, religious feeling and community. It has remained popular ever since its publication and has been adapted many times to stage and film.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Invisible Man

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: Griffin, a scientist, has devoted his life to the study of optics. As his work progresses, he invents a method of making a person invisible. After testing the experiment on himself, he comes to realize that while the experiment was a complete success, he has no way of reversing his invisibility. ritten in a time of rapid scientific progress and industrial development, Wells uses Griffin’s struggle with his condition and descent into obsession and madness to reflect on the dangers of unbridled scientific progress untempered by compassion or humanity. The Invisible Man was initially serialized in Pearson’s Weekly in 1897, after which it was published as a whole novel that same year.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Something New

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Something New is the first novel of what became known as the “Blandings Castle Saga” by P. G. Wodehouse and was published in the United States in 1915. Two Americans, Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine, endeavor to retrieve a scarab pilfered from an American millionaire by the absent-minded Lord Emsworth. Marson and Valentine soon find themselves impersonating servants while evading the Efficient Baxter. The story was originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post as Something Fresh in 1915. It introduced who would become the recurring characters of Blandings Castle: Lord Emsworth, Freddie Threepwood, Rupert Baxter, and Sebastian Beach.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: Alice Adams

Author: Booth Tarkington

Description: Alice Adams is Booth Tarkington’s second novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, just three years after his novel The Magnificent Ambersons won it. The novel tells the story of Alice, a Midwestern girl who grows up in a lower-middle-class family just after World War I. Alice meets a wealthy young man and tries to win his affection, despite her lower-class upbringing. Alice Adams was twice adapted for film, with the second adaptation starring Katherine Hepburn and earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Poetry

Author: T. S. Eliot

Description: Poetry of T. S. Eliot collects all of his early work through “The Hollow Men.” Poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Whispers of Immortality,” and “Gerontion” ponder aging and mortality, while “Sweeney Erect,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Service,” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” sketch the temptations and agonies of the modern man in the character of Sweeney. oven throughout with allusions to works in six foreign languages and sporting over fifty footnotes by the author, “The Waste Land” is as notorious for its bleak picture of a post-war world as it is for its density and difficulty. “The Hollow Men” ends with one of the most famous stanzas in English poetry. Eliot’s flashes of insight bring the everyday into stark relief. Whether suffering an insufferable bore, observing the lives of strangers on the streets, or juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, his sometimes autobiographical vignettes of modern life still feel current a century after they were penned.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Woman in White

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: The Woman in White tells the story of Walter Hartright, a young and impoverished drawing teacher who falls in love with his aristocratic pupil, Laura Fairlie. He cannot hope to marry her, however, and she is married off against her will to a baronet, Sir Percival Glyde, who is seeking her fortune. The terms of her marriage settlement prevent Glyde accessing her money while she lives, so together with his deceptively charming and cunning friend, Count Fosco, they hatch an unscrupulous deception to do so nonetheless. In an early 19th Century version of “identity theft,” they contrive to fake Laura’s death and confine her to a mental asylum. Their plot is eventually uncovered and exposed by Hartright with the help of Laura’s resourceful half-sister, Marian Halcombe. The Woman in White was the most popular of Wilkie Collins’ novels in the genre then known as “sensation fiction.” It has never been out of print and is frequently included in lists of the best novels of all time. Published initially in serial form in 1859–60, it achieved an early and remarkable following, probably because of the strength of its characters, in particular the smooth and charming but utterly wicked villain Count Fosco, and the intelligent and steadfast Marian Halcombe opposed to him.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Wisdom of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton’s crime-solving Catholic priest, is back in this second collection of Father Brown short stories. In this collection, Brown is joined by his sidekick, the former arch-criminal Flambeau. Brown is directly involved in the investigations less frequently than in The Innocence of Father Brown, and several of the stories don’t even feature murder. Despite this, the shorts each feature Brown solving a mystery using his characteristic insight into human nature and morality. The stories in this collection were initially published in various serials, including McClure’s Magazine and The Pall Mall Magazine. Chesterton arranged them in this collection almost in order of publication.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: Crime and Punishment

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Description: Crime and Punishment tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, an ex-student who plans to murder a pawnbroker to test his theory of personality. Having accomplished the deed, Raskolnikov struggles with mental anguish while trying to both avoid the consequences and hide his guilt from his friends and family. Dostoevsky’s original idea for the novel centered on the Marmeladov family and the impact of alcoholism in Russia, but inspired by a double murder in France he decided to rework it around the new character of Raskolnikov. The novel was first serialized in The Russian Messenger over the course of 1866, where it was an instant success. It was published in a single volume in 1867. Presented here is Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: No Name

Author: Wilkie Collins

Description: No Name is set in England during the 1840s. It follows the fortunes of two sisters, Magdalen Vanstone and her older sister Norah. Their comfortable upper-middle-class lives are shockingly disrupted when, after the sudden deaths of their parents, they discover that they are disinherited and left without either name or fortune. The headstrong Magdalen vows to recover their inheritance, by fair means or foul. Her increasing desperation makes her vulnerable to a wily confidence trickster, Captain Wragge, who promises to assist her in return for a cut of the profits. No Name was published in serial form like many of Wilkie Collins’ other works. They were tremendously popular in their time, with long queues forming awaiting the publication of each episode. Though not as well known as his The Woman in White and The Moonstone, No Name is their equal in boasting a gripping plot and strong women characters (a rarity in the Victorian era). Collins’ mentor Charles Dickens is on record as considering it to be far the superior of The Woman in White.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Vanity Fair

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Description: Vanity Fair is perhaps Thackeray’s most famous novel. First serialized over the course of 19 volumes in Punch Magazine and first printed as a single volume in 1849, the novel cemented Thackeray’s literary fame and kept him busy with frequent revisions and even lecture circuits. The story is framed as a puppet play, narrated by an unreliable narrator, that presents the story of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley and the people in their lives as they struggle through the Napoleonic Wars. The story itself, like many other Thackeray novels, is a satire of the lives of the Victorian English of a certain class. Thackeray packed the novel with allusions, many of which were difficult even for his contemporary readers; part of the heavy revisions he later made were making the allusions more accessible to his evolving audience. As part of his satirical bent, Thackeray made a point to make each character flawed, so that there are no “heroes” in the book—hence the subtitle “A Novel Without a Hero.” Thackeray’s goal was not only to entertain, but to instruct; to that end, he wanted the reader to look within themselves after finishing the unhappy conclusion, in which there’s no hint as to how society might be able to improve on the evils shadowed in the events of the novel. Vanity Fair received glowing praise by its critical contemporaries, and remains a popular book well into modern times, having been adapted repeatedly for film, radio, and television.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Master Flea

Author: E. T. A. Hoffmann

Description: Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a contemporary of Ludwig von Beethoven: a composer himself, a music critic, and a late-German-Romantic-movement writer of novels and numerous short stories. His incisive wit and poetic imagery allow the reader to peer into the foibles of society and the follies of human psychology. (In fact, Hoffmann’s wit may have gotten him into a bit of legal trouble, as parts of Master Flea were censored and had to be reworked when authorities disliked certain satirical criticisms of contemporary dealings of the court system.) Join gentleman bachelor Peregrine Tyss as his life as a recluse takes a twist, when he gains an epic advantage of tiny proportions. Part proto-science-fiction and part Romantic fantasy, Master Flea follows the fate of a mysterious, captivating princess at the intersection of numerous suitors, human and insect. Like a lesson from a fable or a tale of classical mythology, Hoffmann’s fairy-tale allegory shows how seeking forbidden knowledge can poison the soul, and how following the heart can heal it.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: Little Fuzzy

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: Little Fuzzy is a science fiction novel set on the planet Zarathustra, a world rich in natural resources being exploited by a huge chartered company from Earth. Jack Holloway is a free-lance sunstone miner working on the outskirts of civilization when he encounters a small, fuzzy animal which turns out to be remarkably intelligent. He soon begins to suspect that “Little Fuzzy” and his family are more than just clever animals, but in fact a new sapient alien species. Such a proposition is directly opposed to the interests of the chartered Zarathustra Company, and conflict ensues. Published in 1962, Little Fuzzy rapidly gained popularity due to the charming nature of the little aliens and the well-handled tensions of the plot. It is today considered to be a classic of the genre, though perhaps considered to fall into the category of juvenile fiction. It was followed by a sequel, Fuzzy Sapiens in 1964.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Author: J. W. von Goethe

Description: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 leveled the city of Lisbon and surrounding areas, and killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people. It came at a decisive time in the history of western thought: the melding of Faith, Philosophy, and Science into a post-enlightenment rational view of the universe. In some sense mankind had just begun to believe he had the universe figured out when the universe struck back with a tragedy so terrible in scale it could not be fit into any box of understanding. It was not predicted. It could not have been prevented. It was not rational. And it certainly could not have been the will of a benevolent God. Lisbon was only one moment in a much larger context—industrialization was upending a pre-historic way of life, science was upending nature, and the first great republics in America and France were about to upend previously unchallenged forms of government. It was the awe, inspiration, and uncertainty of all this change that gave rise, ultimately, to Romanticism in art, literature, and music. J. W. von Goethe is, by some accounts, the father of the romantic period in literature, or at least the proto-romantic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) period. And The Sorrows of Young Werther was its genesis. It was Goethe’s first major work, an immediate sensation upon publication, and made Goethe a household name. hile Voltaire parodied rationalism in Candide, Goethe transcended it with the semi-autobiographical story of Werther, a young man governed more by his emotions than his reason, whose only employment is his delight in the romantic ideals of the pastoral lives he finds in the rural town of Walheim. There he also finds Charlotte, and in her an idealized but unobtainable old-world domesticity. Werther’s internal dialog about his growing obsession with Charlotte, and his inability to cope rationally with the fact that she is engaged to—and in love with—another man, form the bulk of the book in the form of a series of ever more intense letters to a friend. erther’s descent into sorrow has captivated readers for centuries, helped by Goethe’s intensely beautiful prose (translated here by R. D. Boylan), enchanting imagery, and obvious reverence for nature and a dying past.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Riddle of the Sands

Author: Erskine Childers

Description: The Riddle of the Sands is one of the earliest examples of the spy novel genre, and became hugely popular shortly after its publication. Childers carefully interweaves fiction with real-world places, events, and politics, making for an extremely convincing story of invasion—so convincing that some (perhaps erroneously) credit the novel with spurring the creation of new English naval bases. The framing device, where Childers pretends to be an editor presenting a factual account, only adds to the believability of the story. The novel begins with Carruthers, an official in the Foreign Office, accepting an invitation from his friend Davies for what he assumes is a pleasure trip on a sailboat in the Baltic sea. As the two embark on their journey, it quickly becomes apparent that not everything is at it seems on the German coast. Riddle helped energize the spy novel genre, providing a template for countless authors to come, including Ian Fleming and John le Carré, and has been adapted numerous times for film, television and radio.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Red Room

Author: August Strindberg

Description: August Strindberg’s novel The Red Room centers on the civil servant Arvid Falk as he tries to find meaning in his life through the pursuit of writing. He’s accompanied by a crew of painters, sculptors and philosophers each on their own journey for the truth, who meet in the “Red Room” of a local restaurant. Drawing heavily on August’s own experiences, The Red Room was published in Sweden in 1879. Its reception was less than complimentary in Sweden—a major newspaper called it “dirt”—but it fared better in the rest of Scandinavia and soon was recognized in his home country. Since then it has been translated into multiple languages, including the 1913 English translation by Ellie Schleussner presented here.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Cosmic Computer

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: The Cosmic Computer is a 1963 science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper based on his short story “Graveyard of Dreams,” which was published in the February 1958 issue of Galaxy Magazine. The action largely takes place on the planet Poictesme, which is full of abandoned military installations and equipment—hence the novel’s original name, Junkyard Planet. Young Conn Maxwell returns from Earth with long-awaited news about Merlin, a military computer with god-like abilities long rumored to be hidden somewhere on Poictesme. Though convinced that the story is just a myth, Conn and his father use the purported search for Merlin to drive the revitalization of the planet’s economy. In the process, they discover far more than they expected. As was typical for science fiction novels of the pulp era, there is little character development and women play a minor role, with romance given only a token treatment. The emphasis is on the conflicts over the spoils of the planet and the fiercely competitive search for the titular “cosmic computer.”

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

Author: Selma Lagerlöf

Description: In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf tells the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is transformed into an elf after a set of misdeeds. Escaping with his family’s farm goose he joins up with a flock of wild geese and travels with them across Sweden as they return to their annual nesting grounds in Lapland. The story was originally written as a commission for the Swedish National Teachers’ Association to write a geography book for children and has become a firm favourite in the country. It’s been adapted for screen many times, translated into over 30 languages and, until recently, was the artwork on the 20 krona banknote. Although originally published in English in two volumes—the second starting at “The Story of Karr and Grayskin”—here they are presented as a single combined story.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Lost Face

Author: Jack London

Description: The first anthology of short stories by Jack London, Lost Face tells seven stories about the Klondike gold rush. In “Lost Face,” the fur thief Subienkow faces gruesome torture and execution by a tribe of Indians, armed with only his wits. “Trust” is a story about the dangers of the Yukon River. Jack London’s best known short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells the story of a nameless man and his dog attempting to survive in the frozen Northern Territory. In “That Spot,” the eponymous Spot is a very unusual Yukon sled dog. “Flush of Gold” is a love story set against the harsh backdrop of the Yukon. “The Passing of Marcus O’Brien” deals the tale of the fair-but-tough Judge Marcus O’Brien in the settlement of Red Cow. “The Wit of Porportuk” tells the tale of El-Soo and Porportuk, two Indians among the white settlers.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Gitanjali

Author: Rabindranath Tagore

Description: idely regarded as one of the most important figures in Indian (and more specifically Bengali) literary history, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian—indeed, the first person outside Europe—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely in recognition of his “spiritual offering of songs,” Gitanjali. Tagore himself translated the poems from the original Bengali, taking many liberties in the process. His English translation is rightly recognized as a work distinct from the Bengali original, consisting of major revisions, many elisions, and many poems originally published in other collections. Tagore’s lyrical simplicity, vivid imagery, and themes of nature, spirituality, death, and transcendence combine to produce a truly unique, powerfully moving work of thoughtful beauty. For many who read it, Tagore’s words in Song XCVI ring true: “What I have seen is unsurpassable. I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus I am blessed.”

Subjects: fiction, poetry, spirituality

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Title: The Magnificent Ambersons

Author: Booth Tarkington

Description: The Magnificent Ambersons, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer prize, is considered by many to be Booth Tarkington’s finest novel and an American classic. The story is set in the Midwest, where George, the spoiled and oblivious scion of an old-money family, must cope with their waning fortunes and the rise of industry barons in the automobile age. George’s antiheroic struggles with modernity encapsulate a greater theme of change and renewal—specifically, the very American notion of a small community exploding into a dark and dirty city virtually overnight by virtue of industrial “progress.” Tarkington’s nuanced portrayal of the often-unlikable Amberson family and his paradoxical framing of progress as a destroyer of family, community, and environment, make The Magnificent Ambersons a fascinating and forward-thinking novel—certainly one with a permanent place in the American social canon. Despite the often heavy themes, Tarkington’s prose remains uniquely witty, charming, and brisk. The novel is the second in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy of novels, and has been adapted several times for radio, film, and television, including a 1942 Orson Welles adaptation that many consider one of the finest American films ever made.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Scaramouche

Author: Rafael Sabatini

Description: Scaramouche tells the tale of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in Brittany. When his friend is killed by an unremorseful landowner, Moreau swears revenge and begins a life of adventure on the run. His travels lead him to joining a traveling theater troupe, becoming a master swordsman, and even to revolution. hile the story of Scaramouche is fiction, Sabatini was always very careful to portray history as accurately as he could in his novels. Thus, the backdrop of the French Revolution is vibrant, immediate, and carefully described. In general Sabatini’s prose is sharp and entertaining. Scaramouche was incredibly popular in its day, and was Sabatini’s most famous novel. The first line is written on Sabatini’s grave.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Sartor Resartus

Author: Thomas Carlyle

Description: Sartor Resartus was a strange and new book when it was first published in 1833, and in many ways it remains a strange and new book today. The bulk of the novel takes the form of the a commentary on the life and works of the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a sort of renaissance-man German philosopher who develops a “Philosophy of Clothes.” The commentary is composed by a fictional English commentator, known only as the “Editor”; the Editor claims to have translated many of Teufelsdröckh’s ideas and quotes from German. As the commentary progresses, the Editor receives a bag of paper scraps on which are written various autobiographical fragments from Teufelsdröckh’s life. The Editor’s attempts to organize and interpret these scraps forms the second part of the novel. The work is multi-faceted: sometimes a parody, sometimes a comedy, sometimes a satire, and sometimes seriously philosophical. Some critics consider it an early existentialist text. At the very least its unique structure and use of meta-narrative is hugely influential to modern literature; Borges was said to have memorized entire pages, and modern texts like Nabokov’s Pale Fire borrow liberally from the concept of a meta-narrative organized on scraps of paper.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: A Room With a View

Author: E. M. Forster

Description: A Room With a View, perhaps E. M. Forster’s lightest novel, was also one long in gestation—he began it as early as 1901, and only published it in 1908. In it we meet young Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin Charlotte Bartlett, who have gone on tour to Italy. During their stay they meet a series of interesting characters, including George Emerson, the son of an eccentric gentleman. The conflict between Lucy’s choice of the unusual George, or her more conventional English suitor Cecil, forms the crux of Forster’s critique of contemporary English society. Despite the novel being a societal critique, the prose is light and studded with Forster’s easy witticisms. In 1958 Forster added an appendix elaborating on what occurred to the main characters after the novel’s end: the two world wars figure largely in their futures.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Dead Souls

Author: Nikolai Gogol

Description: Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s last novel, and follows the tale of Pavel Chichikov, a down-on-his-luck gentleman determined to improve his lot in life. The story charts his scheme to purchase dead souls—the titles of deceased serfs—from wealthy landowners. The novel’s satirical take on the state of Russian society at the time leads Chichikov into increasingly difficult circumstances, in his attempts to cheat both the system and the cavalcade of townspeople he meets along the way. Originally planned as a trilogy, Gogol apparently only completed the first two parts, and destroyed the latter half of the second part before his death. The novel as it stands ends in mid sentence but is regarded as complete.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Sons and Lovers

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Description: Sons and Lovers, a story of working-class England, is D. H. Lawrence’s third novel. It went through various drafts, and was titled “Paul Morel” until the final draft, before being published and met with an indifferent reaction from contemporary critics. Modern critics now consider it to be D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, with the Modern Library placing it ninth in its “100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century.” The novel follows the Morels, a family living in a coal town, and headed by a passionate but boorish miner. His wife, originally from a refined family, is dragged down by Morel’s classlessness, and finds her life’s joy in her children. As the children grow up and start leading lives of their own, they struggle against their mother’s emotional drain on them. Sons and Lovers was written during a period in Lawrence’s life when his own mother was gravely ill. Its exploration of the Oedipal instinct, frank depiction of working-class household unhappiness and violence, and accurate and colorful depiction of Nottinghamshire dialect, make it a fascinating window into the life of people not often chronicled in fiction of the day.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Zuleika Dobson

Author: Max Beerbohm

Description: Max Beerbohm earned his fame as a caricaturist and essayist, and Zuleika Dobson is his only novel. Despite that, Zuleika has earned no small measure of fame, with the Modern Library ranking it 59th in its “100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century.” Beerbohm’s essays were famous for their sharp wit and humor, and Zuleika follows in that tradition—Beerbohm himself called the novel “the work of a leisurely essayist amusing himself with a narrative idea.” The novel follows Zuleika Dobson, a rather talentless woman of middling looks who nonetheless holds an almost mystical power of attraction over the men she comes in contact with. When she begins attending Oxford, she catches the eye of not just the Duke of Dorset, but of the entire male class. Zuleika is both an easy comedy and a biting satire of Edwardian social mores and of the male-dominated Oxford student culture. Beerbohm also seems to forecast with eerie accuracy the cultural obsession with talentless celebrity that came to dominate the turn of the 21st century.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

Author: James De Mille

Description: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is perhaps James De Mille’s most popular book; sadly, De Mille didn’t get to see this novel grow in popularity, as it was first serialized posthumously, in Harper’s Weekly. De Mille had written the novel before the “lost world” genre had become saturated, meaning many of the ideas were fresh and original for the time in which it was written. But, since he didn’t succeed in publishing it during his lifetime, by the time the novel was made public other authors like H. Rider Haggard had made the ideas and plot clichéd. The novel itself tells the tale of a shipwrecked sailor, Adam More, who passes through a mysterious underground passage into a hidden land deep in the Antarctic, kept warm by a hidden volcano. The land is populated by an ancient civilization whose views on life and wealth are the polar opposite of those held in British society of the time—they view death and poverty as the highest religious and social achievements. As More adventures through the strange land, he encounters fantastic dinosaurs, lovelorn princesses, and the classic kind of adventure that foreshadows the pulp novels of the next century.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper

Author: Francisco de Quevedo

Description: Francisco de Quevedo holds the status of a man-of-letters in the same pantheon as Cervantes; but despite that, Pablo de Segovia is his only novel. Quevedo had circulated the manuscript privately for several years before it was published in 1626 without his permission. The novel is partly a satire of contemporary Spanish life, and a caricature of the various social strata Pablo encounters and emulates. Pablo himself is a low-born person who aspires to become a gentleman, but despite his best efforts he repeatedly fails and is eventually forced to become a “sharper,” or rogue. His failures give Quevedo an avenue to expound on his belief that attempting to break past your social class can only lead to disorder; and that despite one’s best efforts, bettering oneself is largely impossible. Pablo’s stumbling from misfortune to misfortune is a farce that helped cement Quevedo’s reputation as a literary giant.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: On Liberty

Author: John Stuart Mill

Description: John Stuart Mill was a prolific and well-regarded author and philosopher in his day, but perhaps his most enduring work is On Liberty, an essay developed over several years and with significant input from his wife. In it, he applies his views on the Utilitarian ethical theory to systems of society and governance. The result became one of the most influential essays on liberal political thought in modern history. In On Liberty Mill addresses such familiar concepts as freedom of speech, the importance of individuality, and the limits of society’s influence on the individual. He caps the discussion with an application of these principles to problems of the day, including education and the economy.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Gadfly

Author: Ethel Voynich

Description: The Gadfly is set in 1840s Italy, at a time when the country was chafing under Austrian rule. The titular character is a charming, witty writer of pointed political satires who finds himself running with a crowd of revolutionaries. The plot develops as the revolutionaries struggle against the government and as the Gadfly struggles with a mysterious hatred of the Church, and of a certain Cardinal. The novel, with its complex themes of loyalty, romance, revolution, and struggle against both establishment and religion, was very popular in its day both in its native Ireland and other countries like Russia and China. In Russia, the book was so popular that it became required reading. Since its publication it has also been adapted into film, opera, theater, and ballet, and its popularity spurred Voynich to write sequels and prequels.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Armageddon 2419 A.D.

Author: Philip Francis Nowlan

Description: Armageddon 2419 A.D. features the introduction of Buck Rogers, the famous sci-fi adventure hero of early comics and radio shows. Originally published in Amazing Stories in 1928, this novella was later combined with Nowlan’s sequel, The Airlords of Han, and re-published under this same title in the 1960s. In it we follow Buck Rogers and his mysterious transportation to far-future America. The land was conquered by the evil Han Empire centuries ago, and the local Americans, scattered into competing gangs, are now starting a rebellion. Buck meets the leaders of one of the gangs and is swept up in the events.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Shaving of Shagpat

Author: George Meredith

Description: The Shaving of Shagpat isn’t just George Meredith’s first published novel, it’s also his only foray into fantasy literature. Shagpat sold poorly in its day despite good reviews, and after its disappointing sales Meredith pursed a career as a writer of romantic fiction instead. Despite its poor financial reception, Shagpat enjoys a good modern reputation and remains a classic of fantasy literature, with George Eliot going so far as to call it a “work of genius.” The book is set in the medieval fantasy-Persia of the Arabian Nights and other oriental romances. Shibli Bagarag, a poor but talented barber, encounters a mystical crone named Noorna. Together they embark on a quest to save the city of Shagpat from a tyrant who holds the city under his command by virtue of the powers of his magical hair. On the way they battle genies and afreets, save princesses, hunt for treasures, and so on. Meredith’s language is purposefully florid, evoking the richness of the setting, and his frequent usage of quotations and aphorisms from “the poet” give the fantasy a decidedly literate air.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Secret Adversary

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie’s second novel, introduces Tommy and Tuppence, the two much-loved mystery-solving adventurers. The novel centers around a mysterious young girl, suffering from amnesia, who was present on the sinking of the Lusitania. As Tommy and Tuppence try to unravel the mystery, they find themselves embroiled with mysterious millionaires and the dangerous politics of nation-states. Contemporary reviews of The Secret Adversary were positive, and the success of the novel paved the way not just for future Tommy and Tuppence adventures, but for a long, storied career of literary success for Christie.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Castle of Otranto

Author: Horace Walpole

Description: The Castle of Otranto is considered to be the first “Gothic” novel—that is, containing a combination of tropes, like hidden passages, haunted paintings, mysterious sounds, skeletal ghosts, ancestral curses, and unexplained deaths, that essentially invented the genre later made famous by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, or Henry James. Walpole made a point of creating a novel that blends supernatural elements with more realistic depictions of characters and events. The plot centers around Manfred, the lord of Otranto Castle, who has just witnessed the death of his son under mysterious circumstances, just as his son was about to be married. Manfred is thrust into a galloping and melodramatic series of events that lean heavily on the supernatural. alpole initially published The Castle of Otranto under a pseudonym, claiming that his work was a translation of an ancient Italian manuscript. This framing, along with the purposely archaic writing style, gives the supernatural airs of the novel a decidedly authentic flavor. In later editions Walpole acknowledges his authorship. Otranto remains a fast-paced and familiar read, thanks to the variety of recognizable tropes it introduced and made popular.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Table-Talk

Author: William Hazlitt

Description: William Hazlitt was a well-regarded critic and essayist in his day, and Table-Talk, a collection of some of his more popular short essays, is perhaps his best-remembered work. The essays themselves range in subject from philosophy, to art, to literature, culture, society, and politics, with titles like “On the Pleasures of Painting” and “On Corporate Bodies.” Hazlitt’s intimate style and deep familiarity with many different aspects of art culture (not only was he a literary success, but he studied under Joshua Reynolds to be a portrait painter) make his essays fascinating multi-disciplinary reads. Table-Talk was originally published in two separate volumes, and, largely due to Hazlitt’s political activism, was received poorly by his contemporaries. Today it’s considered one of his masterpieces.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: Khaled

Author: F. Marion Crawford

Description: Khaled is a hard-working and faithful genie who, in his zeal, goes a little too far and kills a faithless man. This puts him under scrutiny from the powers above, who curse him to live as a human. Since genies have no souls, he will vanish from existence when he dies; but, if he can find true love, he’ll be granted a soul and thus be allowed into heaven. ritten in the style of the “oriental romances” popular in those days, Khaled was F. Marion Crawford’s favorite novel out of all of the ones he wrote in his successful career.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Princess and the Goblin

Author: George MacDonald

Description: The Princess and the Goblin is a children’s fantasy novel in the vein of the best classic fairy tales. The simple narrative follows Princess Irene as she discovers a ghostly relative living in a castle tower only she can access. During a walk outside one day, she encounters the threat of the lair of goblins living near the castle—and meets a new friend, a young miner named Curdie. She and Curdie must stop the goblin threat before they can carry out their evil plot.

Subjects: children’s, fantasy

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Title: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, like so many Chesterton novels, deftly straddles the fence between humor and philosophy. The place is London, in the far-future year of 1984. Inexplicably, not too much has changed since the turn of the century—except that the king is chosen at random. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the people randomly select an imbecile who only cares about a good joke. ith the new prankster king in place, the novel continues on with surprisingly action-packed breeziness, exploring themes of identity, patriotism, politics, and government.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Lost Continent

Author: C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

Description: The Lost Continent, initially published as a serial in 1899, remains one of the enduring classics of the “lost race” genre. In it we follow Deucalion, a warrior-priest on the lost continent of Atlantis, as he tries to battle the influence of an egotistical upstart empress. Featuring magic, intrigue, mythical monsters, and fearsome combat on both land and sea, the story is nothing if not a swashbuckling adventure. The Lost Continent was very influential on pulp fiction of the subsequent decades, and echoes of its style can be found in the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and others.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Secret Agent

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: The place is London, and the time is the late 1800s. Mr. Verloc appears to be an unassuming owner of a bric-a-brac store, but he’s actually a spy for an unnamed country. When he’s summoned by his superiors and ordered to plant a bomb to foment unrest in English politics and society, he finds himself stuck in a more-than-uncomfortable situation. Conrad’s novel is set against the background of the Greenwich Observatory bombing, in which an anarchist unsuccessfully tried to detonate a bomb near the building. Terrorist activity was on the rise, and Conrad uses the fear and uncertainty of the time to explore the meanings of duty and of evil, along with the influence politics and political movements have on terrorist violence. The Secret Agent is widely considered one of Conrad’s finest novels, with modern critics praising its prescient forecast of 20th century politics and society.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The King in Yellow

Author: Robert W. Chambers

Description: The King in Yellow is a fascinating, almost two-faced work. The first half consists of five legendary weird tales, loosely tied together by a fictional play—the eponymous King in Yellow—that drives those who read it mad. Celebrated by authors like H. P. Lovecraft and Lin Carter, these stories are classic tales of madness, despair, and strange happenings. ith the fifth tale the reader finds a sort of palate-cleansing collection of short prose-poems leading into the last four stories, which take a sharp turn away from the weird and into the romantic. The concluding tales are set in the Parisian art world. In modern times The King in Yellow enjoys a reputation largely due to the strength of its first half of macabre tales, but by no means does that make the second half less enjoyable. Both halves are written in a quick, light prose style that demonstrates why Chambers was a best-seller in his day.

Subjects: horror, shorts

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Title: The Wood Beyond the World

Author: William Morris

Description: William Morris is famous in no small part for his contributions to defining the genre of modern fantasy literature, and The Wood Beyond the World is a classic example of that influence. Written in a purposefully antiquated prose style reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory or other aged fairy tales, The Wood Beyond the World can be difficult for some readers; but those who follow through will enjoy a charming and influential series of picaresque adventures. The book follows Golden Walter, a man leaving home who finds himself swept away to an enchanted land. He encounters a fair maiden who is trapped by an enchantress and her consort. Walter must, like all good heroes, save the maiden and see if they can make it to happily ever after.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The House on the Borderland

Author: William Hope Hodgson

Description: The House on the Borderland is unique in several ways. The narrative itself is a double-frame narrative: the editor of the volume is presenting a manuscript he found under mysterious circumstances, describing the account of two fishermen who themselves discovered a hand-written account of the cosmic haunting of a recluse’s remote home. Additionally, the novel is one of the earliest examples of the departure of horror fiction from the Gothic style of supernatural, psychological hauntings, to more realist, science-fiction/cosmic horror themes. The recluse is, among other events, transported to a mysterious supra-universal plane populated by monsters and elder gods; and his house withstands assaults from legions of monsters as he travels across time and the solar system. The book was very influential on H. P. Lovecraft, who himself was famous for the cosmic horror themes in his work. The concept of an uncaring, and even evil, universe that Lovecraft found so disturbing is front and center in this supremely strange novel.

Subjects: horror, science fiction

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Title: A Voyage to Arcturus

Author: David Lindsay

Description: On hearing the title A Voyage to Arcturus, one might picture an astronaut strapping themselves into a rocket and flying into space for a swashbuckling adventure. Nothing could be further from what this book actually is. Voyage is in fact a fascinating, bizarre, bewildering, and thought-provoking sort of acid-fueled Pilgrim’s Progress: a philosophical allegory told through the frame of a psychedelic gender-bending journey to an alien planet. After a terrifying séance, the protagonist, Maskull, is offered the chance of an adventure on a different world. He agrees, and the reader follows him on his blood-soaked path through lands representing different philosophies and ways of life as he searches for the world’s godhead, Surtur. Or is it Crystalman? Voyage features fiction wildly ahead of its time, and is hardly classifiable as either science fiction or fantasy; one might even say that the book is better approached as a philosophical work than a straightforward narrative. It’s not a book for a reader seeking simple fiction, but rather for a reader seeking a thoughtful, imaginative, and totally unexpected exploration of philosophy and of life. Decades ahead of its time, Voyage was praised by contemporaries like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and by modern authors like Clive Barker and Alan Moore. Many modern reviewers consider it a masterpiece of 20th century fiction and the work of an underappreciated genius. A century later it boasts a significant cult following, having inspired movies, plays, albums, and even operas, as well as a modern sequel by famous literary critic Harold Bloom—the only work of fiction he ever wrote.

Subjects: fantasy, philosophy

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Title: The Religion of Nature Delineated

Author: William Wollaston

Description: Wollaston attempts to determine what rules for the conduct of life (that is, what religion) a conscientious and penetrating observer might derive simply from reasoning about the facts of the world around him, without benefit of divine revelation. He concludes that truth, reason, and morality coincide, and that the key to human happiness and ethical behavior is this: “let us by no act deny anything to be true which is true; that is: let us act according to reason.” This book was important to the intellectual foundations of the American Revolution (for example, the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” originates here). It also anticipates Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative and the modern libertarian non-aggression principle. This edition improves on its predecessors by, for the first time, providing both translations and sources for the over 650 footnotes that, in Wollaston’s original, are cryptically attributed Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Author: Benjamin Franklin

Description: Benjamin Franklin is a man who needs little introduction. He wore many hats over the course of his fascinating life, from that of a printer, to an inventor, to a scientist, to a politician, a founding father and statesman, and even a postmaster-general. He was famous for all of these things in his day, but he was also famed for his keen insight into people and human nature, and his sparkling talent as a conversationalist. Despite his accomplishments, Franklin seemed to keep a down-to-earth demeanor, favoring home-spun sayings and simple, direct, honest prose—the kind of prose that shines in this autobiography. The autobiography itself has a long and complex publication history. Franklin composed it in fits and spurts between 1771 and 1790, and never had a chance to complete it, let alone publish it, in his lifetime. It was first published as a poor French translation of an unrevised edition of the manuscript, and then as a heavily editorialized and inaccurate English edition by Franklin’s son, William Temple Franklin. In 1868 John Bigelow purchased the original copy of the autobiography and published the first accurate edition, which is what subsequent publications, including this one, are based on. Though incomplete, this autobiography is a highly readable and fascinating insight into the legendary life of the man some people call the “First American.”

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: The Kingdom of God Is Within You is the most influential work of Christian anarchism. It might be considered the founding work of that tradition if it didn’t itself claim to merely be pointing out Christian anarchism as the plain meaning of the gospels. Tolstoy argues that institutional Christianity with its doctrines, church hierarchies, and ritual practices, is anti-Christian. Christ, he says, explicitly told his followers to reject doctrines, church institutions and hierarchies, and ritual practices, and instead to love truth, to honor God, and to treat all people as your family and as you would want to be treated. Tolstoy says that a Christian cannot participate in the political system, which is based on the use of violence to enforce the separation of people and the privileging of some people over others, and at the same time follow Jesus in his command to love your neighbor.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Suspiria de Profundis

Author: Thomas De Quincey

Description: The Suspiria is a collection of prose poems, or what De Quincey called “impassioned prose,” erratically written and published starting in 1854. Each Suspiria is a short essay written in reflection of the opium dreams De Quincey would experience over the course of his lifetime addiction, and they are considered by some critics to be some of the finest examples of prose poetry in all of English literature. De Quincey originally planned them as a sequel of sorts to his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but the first set was published separately in Blackwood’s Magazine in the spring and summer of that 1854. De Quincey then published a revised version of those first Suspiria, along with several new ones, in his collected works. During his life he kept a master list of titles of the Suspiria he planned on writing, and completed several more before his death; those that survived time and fire were published posthumously in 1891.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Moon Pool

Author: A. Merritt

Description: The Moon Pool, in novel form, is a combination and fix-up of two previously published short stories: “The Moon Pool,” and “Conquest of the Moon Pool.” Initially serialized in All-Story Weekly, Merritt made the interesting choice of framing the novel as a sort of scientific retelling, going so far as to include footnotes from fictional scientists, to give this completely fantastic work an air of authenticity. In it we find the adventuresome botanist William T. Goodwin embarking on a quest to help his friend Throckmortin, whose wife and friends have fallen victim to a mysterious temple ruin on a remote South Pacific island. A series of coincidences provides Goodwin with a colorful cast of accompanying adventurers, and they soon find themselves in a mysterious futuristic underworld. The Moon Pool is an important entry in the Lost World genre, in no small part because it was a significant influence on H. P. Lovecraft—hints of The Moon Pool can be seen in his short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and hints of Merritt’s Nan-Madol can be seen in Lovecraft’s R’lyeh. Today, The Moon Pool is a pulp classic, featuring many of the themes, tropes, and archetypes that characterized so many of the pulp adventure works of the era.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: His Masterpiece

Author: Émile Zola

Description: His Masterpiece, sometimes translated as “The Work” or “The Masterpiece,” is Zola’s 14th entry in his Rougon-Macquart series of novels. In it we see Claude Lantier, a painter with obvious talent, struggle to leave a revolutionary mark on the art world of 19th-century Paris. The novel deftly explores the themes of genius, poverty, purity in art, art as a bureaucratic institution, obsession, and madness. The book is notable not just for its accurate portrayal of the art world of the time, but also for the interesting personal details Zola incorporated into the book. Lantier is a pastiche of several famous painters Zola personally knew, including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Édouard Manet; Lantier’s masterpiece is based on Manet’s revolutionary painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; and the novel’s accuracy is even blamed on ending the long friendship between Zola and Cézanne. Zola himself includes a self-portrait, as the character Pierre Sandoz. Vizetelly’s translation is fresh and readable, and Zola’s rendition of Paris and the surrounding countryside is vibrant and engrossing. Rarely do we get such a close and engaging window into bohemian life in old Paris.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Secret Garden

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Description: Mary’s parents fall ill and die, forcing her to be transplanted from India to the English countryside. She arrives at a strange and foreign country manor, where she discovers a long-neglected garden and hears strange sobbing noises at night. Thus begins The Secret Garden, a children’s book with an unusually dense collection of themes, symbols, and motifs. Mary’s personal development mirrors her unraveling the secret of the hidden garden, and a subtle backdrop of magical realism adds a mysterious air to the proceedings. Contemporary reception left The Secret Garden largely unnoticed, eclipsed by Hodgson’s other work, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Since then, however, the book’s reputation has steadily grown, with modern critics considering it one of the finest children’s books of the 20th century.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: A Journal of the Plague Year

Author: Daniel Defoe

Description: The Plague is a disease that has a long and tragic history alongside humanity’s development of tightly packed cities. A Journal of a Plague Year is a first-person narrative account of London’s last great plague outbreak in 1665, which killed an estimated 100,000 people in just 18 months. Though written in the first-person perspective by Daniel Defoe, he was only 5 years old during the outbreak. The initials at the end of the work, “H. F.,” suggest that Journal is based on accounts of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe. This highly readable short novel is fascinating not just as a historical account, but in its description of how people reacted to a deadly disease that they understood to be contagious, but yet had no cure for. Defoe derides quack doctors who killed more than they saved, and then themselves succumbed to plague. He tells of people turning to religion; of people driven mad by the death around them and raving in the streets; of people fleeing to the country, and of others barricading themselves in their homes. The ways people reacted in 1665 could be the very same ways people might have reacted today to a mysterious, deadly, and highly contagious outbreak.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The Mysterious Island

Author: Jules Verne

Description: The Mysterious Island tells the tale of five Americans who, in an attempt to escape the Civil War, pilot a hot-air balloon and find themselves crashed on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. Verne had been greatly influenced by works like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and that influence shines brightly in this novel of engineering ingenuity and adventure. Verne imparts the escapees with such over-the-top cleverness and so many luckily placed resources that modern readers might find the extent to which they tame the island comical. Despite that, the island contains genuine mysteries for the adventurers to solve. The standard translation of The Mysterious Island was produced in 1875, and is credited to W. H. G. Kingston. Despite its popularity, it’s widely criticized for abridging and Bowdlerizing important parts of the text. The translation presented here, produced by Stephen W. White in 1876, is considered a much more accurate translation, despite it also abridging some portions.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Cranford

Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

Description: Cranford was first serialized in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that Gaskell was busy writing her novel Ruth at the time the Cranford shorts were being published, suggests that she didn’t initially plan for Cranford to be a cohesive novel. The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fictional small English country town of Cranford. Gaskell drew from her own childhood in Knutsford to imbue her settings and characters with a nostalgic quality in a time when the societies and styles portrayed were already going out of fashion. Though not especially popular at the time of publication, Cranford has since gained an immense following, including at least three television adaptations.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Dialogues

Author: Seneca

Description: Seneca the Younger was a statesman and philosopher who lived in Rome around the dawn of the Common Era. Though he wrote a large amount of tragedies and other works, today he’s perhaps best known for his writing on Stoic philosophy and principles. Seneca didn’t write books about Stoicism; rather, he composed essays and sent letters over the course of his lifetime that addressed that philosophy. Since these essays and letters are addressed to his friends and contemporaries, they’re written in a conversational style, and thus referred to as his “Dialogues.” Some were written to friends on the death of their loved ones, in an effort to console and comfort them. Others were written to help friends with their personality flaws, like anger. One, “On Clemency,” was addressed to the emperor Nero as an effort to guide him on the path of good statesmanship. This collection contains all of his dialogues, including the longer “On Benefits.”

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu

Author: Sax Rohmer

Description: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, first published in the UK as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, is the first novel to introduce the inimitable Fu-Manchu, famous not just for his moustache, but for being a nigh-unstoppable criminal mastermind and part of the “Yellow Peril.” This novel is a collection of previously published short stories, slightly re-written by Rohmer to form a cohesive whole. The narrator, Dr. Petrie, is a sort of Watson to Nayland Smith’s Holmes; but Smith resembles more of a James Bond than a Sherlock Holmes as the two barrel through action scenes and near-death scenarios planned by Fu-Manchu, a master scientist, chemist, and poisoner. This novel was one of the first to popularize the trope of the “mysterious Chinaman,” an element that later became so clichéd that Ronald Knox, the famous detective story writer, declared that “no Chinaman must figure” in good detective stories. The casual racism evident in the characters and events is a symptom of the xenophobic climate in the UK at the time, which was precipitated by many things—the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese immigration, and other fears. Despite that racism, the plot remains fast-paced and engaging, and is lent a modern air by Fu-Manchu’s role as an early prototype for a Bond supervillain.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: Father Goriot

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Description: Father Goriot, today considered one of Balzac’s most important works, is part of his novel sequence The Human Comedy. It’s the first of Balzac’s novels to feature recurring characters, a technique that he famously developed in his subsequent novels. Set in Paris during the Bourbon Restoration of the early 1800s, Father Goriot follows Eugène de Rastignac, a student born to noble roots but little means, as he tries to climb the social ladder in Paris. The impoverished Goriot is staying at the same boardinghouse as Rastignac—and Rastignac sees opportunity in Goriot’s richly married and elegant daughters. The novel has been widely praised for its realist portrayal of Parisian life of various social classes, and its deep influence on French literature is still felt today. While it had chapter breaks when it was initially serialized, Balzac removed them when compiling his definitive edition of The Human Comedy, a change that is preserved in this edition.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Jungle Book

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Description: The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India. The stories were popular from the start, and have since been adapted in countless ways in print, screen, and other media.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Art of Money Getting

Author: P. T. Barnum

Description: P. T. Barnum, the legendary entertainer and co-founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, was not just a successful businessman, but a philanthropist and writer as well. This short, pamphlet-length work distills Barnum’s advice on achieving success and wealth, in his own words.

Subjects: nonfiction

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Title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Author: Samuel Johnson

Description: Rasselas is a fable-like story, more apologue than novel, written by Johnson in 1759 to help pay for the costs of his recently deceased mother’s funeral. While the plot is basic and the characters are thin, the work is an important philosophical piece exploring whether or not humanity can attain happiness. Rasselas, an Abyssinian prince, travels with his sister Nekayah, her handmaiden Pekuah, and the wise poet Imlac—a proxy for Johnson himself. Their exploration of happiness and the meaning of leading a happy life is a complex and subtle one, though the work ends with “nothing concluded.” Johnson leaves the reader to ponder: Can an individual ever attain happiness in any meaningful sense?

Subjects: satire

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Title: Little Women

Author: Louisa May Alcott

Description: Little Women is the classic coming-of-age tale of four sisters on their journey to adulthood. Though today it’s considered a classic, Little Women almost wasn’t written: Alcott wanted to publish a collection of short stories instead, but her publisher and her father pressed her to write a book that would appeal to a wide audience of young girls. The first volume was written quickly and published in 1868; it was a huge success, and Alcott composed the second volume just as quickly and published it in 1869. By her own account she didn’t enjoy writing them, and both she and her publisher agreed the first few chapters were dull—so it almost goes without saying she was pleasantly shocked at the positive reception the volumes received. By 1927 it had been acknowledged as one of the most widely read novels of the era, and remains widely read today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Innocence of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Father Brown is a Catholic priest, but a slightly unusual one in that he’s also an amateur detective. Unlike his more famous literary cousin Sherlock, Father Brown takes a less analytical and more intuition-oriented approach to solving the many murders that he happens to come across. This collection of short murder mysteries is Brown’s first appearance on the literary stage. In it we see him practicing his unique brand of sleuthing alongside his sometimes-partner, the reformed master criminal Flambeau.

Subjects: fiction, mystery, shorts

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Title: The War of the Worlds

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: H. G. Wells’ classic tale of alien invasion has to this day never been out of print. Like many works of the era, it was originally published as a serial—though the publisher, Pearson’s Magazine, demanded to know the ending before committing to publication. The War of the Worlds, with its matter-of-fact narrative style and deft mixture of contemporary science and fictionalized interstellar war machines, became an instant hit. Its themes of colonialism, social Darwinism, good and evil, and total war still resonate with modern-day readers, so much so that it’s been continuously adapted for screen, radio, television, comics, and print.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Luck of Barry Lyndon

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Description: The Luck of Barry Lyndon was first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine, then later as a complete volume entitled The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.—a title Thackeray disliked, but that was selected by his publisher. Thackeray had great difficulty composing the novel, and found himself frequently frustrated in his attempts to get Barry out of yet another jam. Ultimately he was displeased with his work, and considered it one of his lesser novels. Despite Thackeray’s neglect, Barry Lyndon is a bright satire filled with many genuinely funny moments. Barry is the quintessential unreliable narrator, and through his outrageous boasts and tall tales he becomes not just the target of the satire, but its very agent as well. Fortunately modern critics have viewed Barry Lyndon in a much more favorable light than Thackeray’s contemporaries, and even Thackeray himself: today it’s considered by some critics as one of his finest works.

Subjects: fiction, satire

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Title: Three Men in a Boat

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

Description: Three Men in a Boat is one of the most popular English travelogues, having never been out of print since its publication in 1889 and causing its publisher to comment, “I cannot imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them.” The novel itself is a brisk, light-hearted, and funny account of a two-week boating holiday taken by three friends up the Thames river. Jerome is a sort of everyman narrator, and even the stodgiest reader can sympathize with at least some of the situations and conundrums he and his friends find themselves in during their adventure. Interspersed between comic moments are slightly more serious descriptions of the picturesque villages and landscape the friends explore, making Three Men in a Boat not just a comic novel but an actual account of the life, times, and land of late 19th century greater London.

Subjects: comedy, fiction, travel

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Title: Don Quixote

Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Description: Don Quixote is a novel that doesn’t need much introduction. Not only is it widely considered the greatest Spanish literary work of all time, one of the greatest literary works in history, and a cornerstone of the Western literary canon, it’s also considered one of the first—if not the first—modern novels. This Standard Ebooks edition is believed to be the first ebook edition of Don Quixote to feature a full transcription of translator John Ormsby’s nearly 1,000 footnotes. Ormsby as an annotator deftly explains obscure passages, gives background on the life and times of 1600s Spain, references decisions from other contemporary translators, and doesn’t hold back from sharing his views on the genius—and flaws—of Cervantes’ greatest work. The story is of the eponymous Don Quixote, a country noble who, in his old age, reads too many chivalric romances and goes mad. After convincing his grubby servant, Sancho Panza, to join him as his squire, he embarks on an absurd and comic quest to do good and right wrongs. Today Don Quixote’s two volumes are published as a single work, but their publication came ten years apart. Cervantes saw great success with the publication of his first volume, and appeared to have little desire to write a second volume until a different author wrote a spurious, inferior sequel. This kicked Cervantes into gear and he wrote volume two, a more serious and philosophical volume than the largely comic first volume. Despite being written in 1605 and translated in 1885, Don Quixote contains a surprising amount of slapstick laughs—even for the modern reader—and narrative devices still seen in today’s fiction, including meta-narratives, frame narratives, and metafiction. Many scenes (like Quixote’s attack on the windmills) and characters (like Sancho Panza and Lothario) are so famous that they’re ingrained in our collective culture.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Space Viking

Author: H. Beam Piper

Description: Initially serialized in Analog magazine between 1962 and 1963, Space Viking takes place after the events of H. Beam Piper’s earlier serialization, The Cosmic Computer. Space Viking is a classic space opera: what begins as an interstellar tale of revenge turns into a swashbuckling adventure yarn, and finally into a meditation on empire-building and galactic governance with direct allusions to our modern history. This richness of content makes Space Viking a unique read. The reader begins by expecting a lighter sci-fi adventure, and early on the plot delivers; but as events transpire, the reader is deftly drawn away from action scenes and into a more nuanced discussion on governance and human nature.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Right Ho, Jeeves

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Description: Right Ho, Jeeves is the second novel to feature P. G. Wodehouse’s popular Bertie Wooster and Jeeves characters. Bertie, a member of the English upper class and one of the “idle rich,” tries his best to arrange relationships between two pairs of his friends. Though he means well, Bertie’s bumbling attempts wind up doing more harm than good (as usual), leaving it to his valet, Jeeves, to see if he can sort things out. A smooth, easy, and often hilarious read, Right Ho, Jeeves is an excellent example of why Bertie Wooster and Jeeves have become such iconic literary figures.

Subjects: comedy, fiction

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Title: Madame Bovary

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Description: Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin. The story was first serialized in Revue de Paris, where prosecutors tried to have it censored for obscenity, arguing that not only is the story immoral, but that realism as a literary style is an offence against art and decency. The trial only served to increase the story’s fame, and when it was published as a single novel it quickly became a bestseller. The novel is groundbreaking in its emphasis on the psychological and emotional lives of its characters. Literature up to then had mostly focusing on the external events that make characters react, instead of focusing on the internal thought processes of those characters. Madame Bovary changed that forever. It was also revolutionary in its criticism of the middle class, which at the time was a still-new social class vying for elbow room between the working poor and hereditary aristocracy. Flaubert critiqued the middle class as being ambitious, shallow, greedy, materialistic, and totally without culture; Emma’s burning desire to reach even higher social strata, contrasted against that satisfaction being fundamentally denied to her by her middle-class nature, is an early echo of Marx’s theory of alienation in industrial societies. Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Last of the Mohicans

Author: James Fenimore Cooper

Description: The Last of the Mohicans is one of the most famous tales of pioneer American adventure. Set during the French and Indian War, Mohicans tells the tale of the journey of two daughters to meet their father, a colonel, at Fort William Henry. The road is long and dangerous, and they, along with their American and Native guides, encounter adventure at each step. Mohicans is actually the second book in a pentalogy, the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy. While the pentalogy saw success in its time, today Mohicans is by far the best-known of the books.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: The Man Who Was Thursday

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Description: Sometimes described as thrilling, sometimes as comic, and sometimes as metaphysical or spiritual, The Man Who Was Thursday is perhaps a little of each. The tale begins when an undercover policeman infiltrates a mysterious Anarchist group. As the novel progresses, things become more comic and improbable, and eventually evolve in to a sort of abstract, dreamlike state. Filled with Christian allegory, Thursday is a glittering, fascinating exploration of good versus evil and theology through the lens of adventure, wit, and the surreal.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Philip K. Dick

Description: Philip K. Dick built an enduring literary reputation writing powerful science fiction in the pulp magazines of the 50s and beyond. This collection of several of his short works, arranged in chronological order and all published in now-defunct science fiction pulp magazines, is a slice from his early career. Many of these stories explore the themes of war and whether humanity is intrinsically violent and conflict-torn. Each of them is a fascinating jewel of speculative fiction.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: A Confession

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Description: Leo Tolstoy wrote this short meditation on sadness and the meaning of life when he was middle aged. He had already completed his masterworks, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, reared fourteen children, and gained fame and acclaim in Russia as a man of letters. But despite having attained that success, he still found himself unhappy and always returning to the disturbing idea that all achievement is meaningless. A Confession is his attempt to put these thoughts in words as he teetered on the brink of suicide. It forms the first in a four-volume series that included A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe (also known as My Religion or My Faith).

Subjects: philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Algis Budrys

Description: Algis Budrys’ science fiction writing career is long and storied. This collection of his early stories published in science fiction pulp magazines is a window into his imagination and style.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Big Time

Author: Fritz Leiber

Description: At the time of the release of this ebook edition of The Big Time, it remains the only Hugo Award–winning work in the public domain. That makes it a very special treasure indeed! The Big Time tells the tale of a group of servicemembers who work in facilities isolated from regular space-time. They’re involved in a war conducted by two shadowy groups that spans time itself, with all of humanity as pawns on an ever-changing historical battlefield. It explores a fascinating range of themes including time travel, the purpose of war, isolation, and love in the face of it all.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: The Gods of Pegāna

Author: Lord Dunsany

Description: The Gods of Pegāna, Lord Dunsany’s first published book, is a strange and wondrous creation. In it he creates the pantheon of gods who rule over the titular world. The prose alternates between being biblical, high-minded, and childish, with the gods frustrating their human subjects through their single-minded and often completely inscrutable actions. When they’re not busy being mysterious, they’re busy taking revenge on each other. It’s possible these short tales were written to convey lessons about life, death, and the nature of belief, though the rhythmic simplicity of the prose and the strange and often petty nature of the gods leaves that up to debate. Regardless, The Gods of Pegāna is a fascinating and influential read.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Wind in the Willows

Author: Kenneth Grahame

Description: The Wind in the Willows, the story of four animals and their adventures in the idyllic English countryside, started out as bedtime stories Grahame would tell his son. He eventually started writing them down, and finally produced this much-loved childrens classic. In continuous print since 1908, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated countless times and adapted to stage, radio, and screen.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Arthur Machen

Description: Arthur Machen was a Welsh man of letters who wrote his most famous works in the late 1890s and early 1900s. While his body of work is wide, he’s perhaps best known for his supernaturally flavored proto-horror short stories. The Great God Pan—perhaps his most famous work—along with “The Inmost Light” and The White People deeply influenced later writers like H. P. Lovecraft. Stephen King has gone so far as to call The Great God Pan “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language.” Besides his horror short stories, Machen also wrote a handful of post World War I supernatural shorts. One of these, “The Bowmen,” was published in a popular newspaper and was implied to be non-fiction, leading to the creation of the “Angels of Mons” urban legend. This collection includes several other World War I short stories published by Machen.

Subjects: fiction, horror, shorts

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Title: The Duel

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: The Duel is one of Chekhov’s longest works, skirting the edge between novel and novella. Like many of Chekhov’s works, it was first published as a serial. Laevsky is a womanizing drunkard, a slave to life’s vices. His wantonness clashes with the moralistic zoologist Von Koren, who grows to despise Laevsky. Their mutual enmity culminates in a duel—though neither they, nor their friends, really want it to happen.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Author: Mark Twain

Description: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of Mark Twain’s most enduring novels. During a stay at a modern-day English castle, the narrator meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, Hank Morgan, is an engineer from Connecticut, and proceeds to weave a satirical, biting, and hilarious tale of how he traveled back in time to find himself in the court of the legendary King Arthur. There he uses his modern-day knowledge to convince the locals that he’s a powerful magician. As the book progresses, Hank modernizes—and Americanizes—the lives of the locals. Twain’s talent for humor and satire are on full display in Yankee, and he doesn’t waste the opportunity to use Hank as a mouthpiece for his views on things like politics, capitalism, and justice. Many consider it to be his best work.

Subjects: fantasy

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Title: The Lost World

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: Even though Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he was also a prolific novelist, and The Lost World is one of his more famous non-Sherlock novels. Like many novels of the day, it was first published serially. In it we meet a group of adventurers who head to a deep South American jungle to explore rumors of long-lost dinosaurs. The plot is driven by their journey, discoveries, and subsequent narrow escape. Notably, The Lost World is the novel in which Doyle’s popular recurring character, Professor Challenger, is introduced. Doyle based many of the characters and locations on people and places he was familiar with: the journalist Ed Malone was modeled on E. D. Morel, and Lord John Roxton on Roger Casement; the Lost World itself was based on descriptions of Bolivia in letters sent to Doyle by his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett. The novel remains hugely influential and widely adapted today. The title might even remind modern readers of a certain very famous movie franchise about dinosaur theme parks!

Subjects: adventure, fantasy

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Title: David Copperfield

Author: Charles Dickens

Description: Like many of Dickens’ works, David Copperfield was published serially, then as a complete novel for the first time in 1850. Dickens himself thought of it as his favorite novel, writing in the preface that of all his works Copperfield was his favorite child. This isn’t surprising, considering that many of the events in the novel are semi-autobiographical accounts from Dickens’ own life. In David Copperfield we follow the life of the titular character as he makes a life for himself in England. He finds himself in the care of a cold stepfather who sends him to boarding school, and from there embarks on a journey filled with characters and events that can only be called “Dickensian” in their colorful and just-barely-probable portrayals.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Siddhartha

Author: Hermann Hesse

Description: Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha during a period in his life in which he suffered what he described as a “sickness with life.” He claimed to be unable to complete the book because he had not experienced the kind of nirvana that Siddhartha, the main character, wants to achieve—so Hesse surrounded himself with sacred Buddhist and Hindu teachings and lived as a recluse in order to complete this work. Siddhartha is a short, simple tale of a man’s quest to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Over twelve short chapters the reader follows Siddhartha through his time as a young adult, to his exploration of spirituality as a traveling ascetic, to his delvings in lust, business, and greed, to his time as an old man. At each stage of his life Siddhartha yearns for nirvana, finally achieving it only after realizing that it’s all of life’s experiences that form it, not the teachings of any one man. Today Siddhartha remains an influential text in new Western spirituality.

Subjects: fiction, spirituality

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Title: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the classic novella of split personality. Stevenson wrote it in just a few days while sick and bedridden, and famously burned the first draft after his wife suggested it should be written as an allegory and not as a story. He re-wrote it in three to six days, and after a few weeks of editing and revision he published what would become one of his most famous and best-selling works. The story follows a London lawyer as he investigates the relationship between a brilliant scientist and a misshapen misanthrope. As the link between the two becomes clearer, Jekyll and Hyde develops into an allegory on the nature of good and evil.

Subjects: horror, science fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum

Description: Stanley Weinbaum was an influential science fiction writer who died at an early age. His short story “A Martian Odyssey,” included in this collection, was praised by science fiction luminaries like Isaac Asimov, who said the story “had the effect on the field of an exploding grenade. With this single story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world’s best living science fiction writer, and at once almost every writer in the field tried to imitate him.” This collection includes all of Weinbaum’s short stories that are believed to be in the public domain.

Subjects: science fiction, shorts

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Title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author: Mark Twain

Description: One of the great American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his travels with Jim, an escaped slave. Roundly criticised by contemporary reviewers for its colorful and literal language and even banned by several libraries, it sealed its historical importance in part by being one of the first novels to be written entirely in American vernacular. hile Huck Finn is, on its face, an adventure tale for younger readers, it’s also a cutting satire and a nuanced examination of racism and morality. Hemingway called it “the best book we’ve had.”

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Description: Mary Shelley (then Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley were visiting their friend Lord Byron in Geneva one rainy summer. With the weather against them, they decided to spend their time writing ghost stories for each other. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s submission to their contest, later published anonymously in 1818. Victor Frankenstein, a strange but brilliant scientist, discovers a method of imparting life to inanimate matter. The Monster is thus born: a hideous, 8-foot-tall creature of muscle, speed, and intellect. Frankenstein’s rejection of his appalling creation sends it into a spiral of despair, and Frankenstein’s life is never the same. Considered by many to be the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein is a powerful narrative that explores complex themes of belonging, morality, and the consequences of the power over life and death. This edition is based on Shelley’s revised 1831 edition.

Subjects: horror, science fiction

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Title: Treasure Island

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Description: Treasure Island isn’t just one of the most famous coming-of-age tales in modern storytelling, it’s also the book that invented everything you know about pirates: Peg legs, parrots, treasure chests, tropical islands, Long John Silver, maps marked with an “X,” swashbuckling adventure, and “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.” Its brisk pace and easy tone have stood the test of the time—Treasure Island is as readable, enjoyable, and memorable today as it ever was.

Subjects: adventure, children’s, fiction

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Title: The Prince

Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

Description: The Prince is a book that was controversial before it had even been sent to the printer. Written in vernacular Italian instead of Latin, dedicated to a member of one of the most powerful Italian families of the day, and only printed after Machiavelli’s death, this treatise on how to tyrannize effectively was considered shocking even by his contemporaries. The discussion of its morality that continues to this day gives us the modern-day word Machiavellian. The book is organized into several sections, each one giving direction on the ruthless rule of principalities that Machiavelli based on both reading and personal experience. Despite its controversial nature, The Prince is often cited as one of the first examples of modern philosophical thought, and the “advice” contained within is still quoted as relevant today.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Author: Omar Khayyám

Description: Omar Khayyám was a medieval Iranian mathematician, philosopher, scholar, and poet. He was thought to have composed over 1,000 rubáiyát, or quatrains, in his lifetime. Many different scholars have translated selections of Khayyám’s quatrains, but Edward FitzGerald’s translation remains the most beloved. FitzGerald’s translation is interesting in that it isn’t a literal translation—rather, FitzGerald took significant artistic license in his interpretation. Thus it’s tough to say if we should call this a translation of the Rubáiyát, or poems by FitzGerald based on or inspired by Khayyám’s quatrains. hatever we call it, this translation is a bright and lyrical celebration of the joys and beauties of everyday life. FitzGerald’s work has remained popular for hundreds of years precisely because of its uplifting and wondrous quality. This ebook is based on the fifth edition, which is very similar to the fourth edition, the last edition to be published in FitzGerald’s lifetime. The fifth edition was published posthumously based on FitzGerald’s notes.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: The Importance of Being Earnest

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s most popular play today, enduring thanks to its easy humor, witty dialog, and clever satire. It was also one of his more successful plays, despite its first run being prematurely ended after only 86 performances. The main characters pretend to be other people in order to escape social obligations, with the resulting confusion of identities driving the plot and the humor behind it. Earnest also holds the sad distinction of being Wilde’s last published play. A feud with an aristocrat whose son was Wilde’s lover led to a court case revealing Wilde as a homosexual—a crime in those days, and punishable by imprisonment with hard labor.

Subjects: comedy, drama, satire

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Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

Description: The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published as a serial in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, and the publishers thought it would so offend readers that they removed nearly 500 words without Wilde’s approval. Wilde soon expanded it and republished it as a novel, including a short preface justifying his art. Even though his contemporaries considered it so offensive that some argued for his prosecution, Dorian Gray today survives as a classic philosophical novel that explores themes of aestheticism and double lives. Couched in Wilde’s trademark cutting wit, Dorian Gray is still being adapted today, with Dorian and his moldering portrait remaining cultural touchstones.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Author: Agatha Christie

Description: The Mysterious Affair at Styles isn’t just Agatha Christie’s first Poirot novel, it was the only Poirot novel in the public domain until 2019. It was written on a bet that Christie couldn’t write a detective novel in which the reader couldn’t deduce the criminal. Her attempt laid the foundation for one of literature’s most famous detectives. In this novel we’re introduced to Poirot as he’s settling in to a new life in England. After a woman is murdered at the country estate he’s visiting, he has to use his detective skills to catch the criminal. The Mysterious Affair at Styles sets the stage for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and has everything you’d expect from a story rich in those classic detective fiction tropes.

Subjects: fiction, mystery

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Title: The Call of the Wild

Author: Jack London

Description: Jack London spent nearly a year in Alaska and the Klondike, mining for gold and braving the Alaskan winter. There he was inspired to write what would become The Call of the Wild, one of his most famous novels. The Call of the Wild tells the tale of a domesticated dog stolen from his California family and sold to sledders in Alaska. As he adapts to the harsh and wild environment, he slowly sheds domestication and returns to his primal roots. The Call of the Wild was London’s first major success, ensuring he’d have a readership for his future writing and paving the way for him to become one of the first writers to amass a fortune from just his fiction.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: White Fang

Author: Jack London

Description: hite Fang is Jack London’s companion novel to The Call of the Wild. In The Call of the Wild we follow a dog’s journey from domestication to wilderness, but in White Fang we see the opposite: a wild wolf-dog captured by men and eventually domesticated. hite Fang’s journey isn’t an easy one; both the wild and civilization have their share of brutal violence. But he eventually seems happy in a home with a loving family. When read side-by-side with The Call of the Wild, White Fang poses an interesting question: is wilderness really an improvement over civilization? Is there one right way to live?

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Idylls of the King

Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Description: The Idylls are a series of twelve long blank verse poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, telling the tale of Arthur and his round table. While some of them are stories of adventure and daring of the kind you’d expect from an Arthurian epic, many take on a darker tone, relating how Arthur was betrayed and how his kingdom grew decadent and eventually fell. The poems stand on their own as carefully constructed and masterful examples of long-form blank-verse poetry, and they’re engaging to read strictly as tales of knighthood and intrigue—but many also read the Idylls as allegorical references to Victorian societal mores.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Lyrical Ballads

Author: William Wordsworth

Description: Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and his friend and contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A hugely influential work, Lyrical Ballads is generally acknowledged to have started the Romantic movement in English literature—a period marked by a departure from the stiff and unapproachable poetry of earlier times, and by a focus on readable, relatable verse written in everyday language. Many of Wordsworth’s poems focus on the natural world and the down-to-earth people of the country, another far departure from the rational and dry literature of old. Romanticism was one of the largest sea changes in modern English literature, and Lyrical Ballads was its catalyst. This ebook edition is based on the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and features the famous poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Tintern Abbey,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “Lucy Gray,” and many others.

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Dubliners

Author: James Joyce

Description: Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times. It took Joyce nine years to finally see his stories in print, but not before seeing a printer burn all but one copy of the proofs. Today Dubliners survives as a rich example of not just literary excellence, but of what everyday life was like for average Dubliners in their day.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Pride and Prejudice

Author: Jane Austen

Description: Pride and Prejudice may today be one of Jane Austen’s most enduring novels, having been widely adapted to stage, screen, and other media since its publication in 1813. The novel tells the tale of five unmarried sisters and how their lives change when a wealthy eligible bachelor moves in to their neighborhood.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: Short Fiction

Author: Anton Chekhov

Description: Anton Chekhov is widely considered to be one of the greatest short story writers in history. A physician by day, he’s famously quoted as saying, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.” Chekhov wrote nearly 300 short stories in his long writing career; while at first he wrote mainly to make a profit, as his interest in writing—and his skill—grew, he wrote stories that heavily influenced the modern development of the form. His stories are famous for, among other things, their ambiguous morality and their often inconclusive nature. Chekhov was a firm believer that the role of the artist was to correctly pose a question, but not necessarily to answer it. This collection contains all of his short stories and two novellas, all translated by Constance Garnett, and arranged by the date they were originally published.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: The Worst Journey in the World

Author: Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Description: In 1910 famous explorer Robert Falcon Scott led the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The expedition was part scientific and part adventure: Scott wanted to be the first to reach the pole. The expedition was beset by hardship from the beginning, and after realizing that they had been beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian Expedition, the party suffered a final tragedy: the loss of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic cold on their return journey to base camp. The Worst Journey in the World is an autobiographical account of one of the survivors of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It’s a unique combination of fascinating scientific documentary, adventure novel, and with the inclusion of Scott’s final journal entries, horror story. Journey is peppered throughout with journal entries, illustrations, and pictures from Cherry-Garrard’s companions, making it a fascinating window into the majesty and danger of the Antarctic.

Subjects: memoir, nonfiction, travel

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Title: North of Boston

Author: Robert Frost

Description: North of Boston is Robert Frost’s second collection of poetry. It includes some of his more famous poems, like “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking.”

Subjects: poetry

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Title: Heart of Darkness

Author: Joseph Conrad

Description: Originally published serially as a three-part story, Heart of Darkness is a short but thematically complex novel exploring colonialism, humanity, and what constitutes a savage society. Set in the Congo in Central Africa, the tale is told in the frame of the recollections of one Charles Marlow, a captain of an ivory steamer. Marlow’s search for the mysterious and powerful “first-class agent” Kurtz gives way to a nuanced and powerful commentary on the horrors of colonialism, called by some the most analyzed work at university-level instruction.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Author: Rudolph Erich Raspe

Description: Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, was an actual baron living in 18th-century Hanover famous for entertaining his guests with outrageously embellished tales of his wartime exploits—so much so that his nickname in German is Lügenbaron, or “Baron of Lies.” When Rudolph Eric Raspe, a writer and scientist living in England, heard of the Baron’s tales, he wrote his own versions centered around a fictional Baron Munchausen. hile the real Baron wasn’t amused to have his name attached to a silly character famous for his bald-faced lies, Raspe’s tales became hugely popular, reprinted for hundreds of years and illustrated just as many times. These very short tales were originally intended as contemporary satire, but their outrageous silliness is still entertaining today.

Subjects: comedy, fantasy, satire

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Title: Around the World in Eighty Days

Author: Jules Verne

Description: Jules Verne’s most-acclaimed novel remains a cultural cornerstone to this day. The story of Phileas Fogg’s spectacular journey by then-novel technologies is a fast-paced, colorful, and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the British empire at the height of its power. Originally published as a serial so believable that readers at the time placed bets on whether Fogg would succeed or not, Verne’s adventure epic continues to inspire travelers and adventurers even in modern times.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Description: Beyond Good and Evil, one of Nietzsche’s four “late period” works, is a philosophical treatise organized into nine parts and 296 short individual sections. In it he explores the concept of morality as taken for granted by contemporary philosophers, and whether “good” and “evil” should be considered just two sides of the same coin.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Description: Dracula is one of the most famous horror novels, responsible not just for introducing the eponymous Count Dracula, but for laying the foundations for many of the common tropes we see in modern horror fiction. Count Dracula isn’t the first vampire to have graced the pages of Western literature—that honor belongs to Lord Ruthven in “The Vampire,” a short story by John William Polidori—but Dracula is the vampire on which the modern vampire trope is based. Dracula wasn’t as famous in its day as it is today; readers of the time seemed to enjoy it as nothing more than a good story, and Stoker died nearly penniless. But its long-lasting influence is undeniable, and for all its age Dracula remains a gripping, fast-paced, and enjoyable read.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: Tao Te Ching

Author: Laozi

Description: The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text written around the 6th century BC by Laozi, a Zhou-dynasty courtier. While its authorship is debated, the text remains a fundamental building block of Taoism and one of the most influential works of its time. Today it’s one of the most-translated works in the world. The work itself is a series of 81 short poetic sections, each one written in a fluid, ambiguous style, leaving them open to wide interpretation. Subjects range from advice to those in power to advice to regular people and adages for daily living. Because of its ambiguous nature the Tao Te Ching is famously difficult to translate, and many, if not all, translations are significantly influenced by the translator’s state of mind. This translation is by James Legge, a famous Scottish sinologist and the first professor of Chinese at Oxford University.

Subjects: philosophy, spirituality

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Title: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Author: Thomas De Quincey

Description: Thomas De Quincey spent much of his life addicted to the powerful drug opium. This book, first published anonymously in the London Magazine, is the autobiographical account of his addiction. De Quincey’s compelling language and frankness give the reader a window in to both the strange pleasures and the horrible pains of that famous drug. As the science of addiction was an unheard of thing at the time, De Quincey’s account became a sort of authoritative reference for decades, with people going so far as to denounce the book for presenting too pleasurable a picture of opium use. His work stands as a fascinating window into the life of a Georgian-era addict in one of the busiest cities in the world.

Subjects: autobiography, nonfiction

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Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Author: Lewis Carroll

Description: Everyone’s familiar with Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s classic and the huge influence it’s had on modern culture. The Mad Hatter, the Duchess, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar—all of these strange and familiar creatures appear in Alice, and the nonsensical style, memorable poems, and colorful set pieces are just as influential. The book was originally written as gift to Alice Liddel, the daughter of one of Carroll’s friends. Carroll had told the story to Alice during a rainy-day boat trip up a river. It stuck in his mind, and a few years later the completed manuscript was published in 1865. More than 150 years later, it’s just as popular as it ever was.

Subjects: children’s, fiction

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Title: The Book of Wonder

Author: Lord Dunsany

Description: The Book of Wonder is one of Lord Dunsany’s many collections of fantasy short stories. While many of his collections were illustrated, this particular one is different—the illustrations were completed first. Dunsany then used the illustrations as inspirations for the stories around them. This collection features fourteen short stories, all of them whimsical, imaginative, and deeply strange. Dunsany writes stories that don’t always have a happy ending, and these are no exception—though they’re written in an almost fairytale or allegorical style, they each have a melancholy, vengeful, or even mad edge to them.

Subjects: fantasy, shorts

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Title: The Jungle

Author: Upton Sinclair

Description: The Jungle is one of the most famous muckraking novels in modern history. Set in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century, it tells the story of an immigrant Lithuanian family trying to make it in a new world both cruel and full of opportunity. Their struggles are in part a vehicle for Sinclair to shine a spotlight on the monstrous conditions of the meatpacking industry, to expose the brutal exploitation of immigrants and workers, and to espouse his more socialist worldview. The novel is in part responsible for the passage of the revolutionary Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, and thus the establishment of the modern-day Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. Its impact is in no small part due to the direct and powerful prose Sinclair employs: the horrors of commercial meat production are presented in full and glistening detail, and the tragedies and misfortunes of the Rudkus family are direct and relatable even today.

Subjects: fiction

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Title: The Time Machine

Author: H. G. Wells

Description: The Time Machine is the novel that gave us the concept of—and even the word for—a “time machine.” While it’s not Wells’ first story involving time travel, it is the one that most fully fleshes out the concept of a device that can send a person backwards and forwards in time with complete precision. Time machines have since become a staple of the science fiction and fantasy genres, making The Time Machine one of the most deeply influential science fiction novels of the era.

Subjects: science fiction

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Title: Meditations

Author: Marcus Aurelius

Description: Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus was the model of what we call a philosopher-king. Though his rule was troubled by war and conflict, he remained a thoughtful and even-handed ruler. Meditations isn’t a complete book, but rather a collection of his personal diary entries written over a ten-year campaign in Greece. The entries were never meant to be published; instead, they were a reminder to himself of how to remain calm, tranquil, and kind, even in the worst of situations. In them we see the emperor working out how to deal with the everyday problems all of us face: annoying coworkers, difficult family members, the expectations of others, unrealized goals and achievements, and, ultimately, happiness. The episodic nature of Meditations makes it hard to follow at times, but in exchange we get a deeply personal window into the life of one of Rome’s most unique emperors, and more importantly, a handbook of thoughtful advice on how to live a tranquil, satisfied, and productive life.

Subjects: philosophy

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Title: Candide

Author: Voltaire

Description: Candide is the picaresque tale of the titular character’s fantastical journey from an insular, idealized life in a picturesque castle through the difficulties and evils of the real world. Satirical, comical, witty, and cutting, Candide was widely banned in its day for containing blasphemous and seditious concepts. Despite that, it survived controversy to become an important book in the Western literary heritage. Today Candide remains a breezy and darkly funny read.

Subjects: satire

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Title: The Lady of the Barge

Author: W. W. Jacobs

Description: W. W. Jacobs was a prolific writer of short stories. His topics were typically humorous and nautical in nature, but they weren’t exclusively so. This anthology includes some of his most famous short stories, including “The Monkey’s Paw,” a story of the supernatural in which a monkey’s hand grants three wishes to its owner, but at huge cost.

Subjects: fiction, shorts

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Title: Walden

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Description: Walden is one of the more famous transcendentalist tracts in modern American literature. First published in 1854, Walden is an account of Thoreau’s famous experiment in solitude: spending over two years alone in a cabin near the wilderness. alden is broken into sections that meditate on single themes: economy, reading, sounds, solitude, visitors, and so on. The style is complex, weaving back and forth between simple, home-spun prose and complex allegory, metaphor, and allusion. This makes Walden an interesting read because while it may seem accessible on the surface, it’s a book that requires deep and repeated reading to fully appreciate its many complexities.

Subjects: nonfiction, philosophy

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Title: The Turn of the Screw

Author: Henry James

Description: One of the most famous ghost stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw earned its place in the annals of influential English novellas not for its qualities as a gothic ghost story, but rather for the many complex and subtle ways the reader can come to opposing conclusions as to tale’s very nature. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they figments of her quiet insanity? The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serial, and later went through many revisions by James himself. Though there aren’t any overt suggestion that James intended his novella to be anything but a simple ghost story, the ambiguity in the narrative has captured the imagination of generations of readers and critics.

Subjects: fiction, horror

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Title: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Description: Edgar Allan Poe is famed for his unsettling short stories, but he also wrote a full-length novel, his only one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Framed as the recollections of an adventurous stowaway, Pym begins as a swashbuckling adventure novel, and after growing increasingly weirder, ends on a surreal note worthy of the best of Poe’s short stories. Despite Poe himself calling it a “a very silly book,” Pym went on to become one of his most-translated and influential works, coloring the themes of future adventure and weird fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft. It continues to influence writers to this day.

Subjects: adventure, fiction

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Title: A Princess of Mars

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Description: In A Princess of Mars, John Carter is transported to a Mars inhabited by strange civilizations and embarks on various adventures on his quest home. Often held up as a seminal example of pulp science fiction, A Princess of Mars is the first entry in Burroughs’ epic Martian series, and the first to feature the character of John Carter. Though often categorized as just a pulp adventure tale, A Princess of Mars was hugely influential on many budding science fiction writers, professional scientists, and explorers of the day. The novel remains a light, fast-paced, and enjoyable read, and continues to inspire adaptations nearly a hundred years after its publication.

Subjects: fantasy

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