No undue liberties with history have been attempted in this romance. Few characters in the story are purely imaginary. Doubtless the fastidious reader will distinguish these intruders at a glance, and very properly ignore them. For they, and what they never were, and what they never did, merely sugar-coat a dose disguised, and gild the solid pill of fact with tinselled fiction. But from the...

This is a book full of folk tales that every child should know. They are drawn from all over the world, and while a few of them are well-known, most of them are more obscure. It's a great introduction and starting point for world folk-lore, and a group of well-written stories to boot. Contains the following stories: Hans in Luck Why the Sea is Salt The Lad Who Went to the North Wind The...

The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941), published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the US in 1920 by Doran. Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to...

Master of the World (French: Maître du monde), published in 1904, is one of the last novels by French pioneer science fiction writer, Jules Verne, and is a sequel to Robur the Conqueror. At the time Verne wrote the novel, his health was failing, and Master of the World is a "black novel," filled with the fear of the coming of tyrants like the novel's villain, Robur, and totalitarianism. A...

The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) is typically categorized as a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Written from 1874 to 1876, the poem borrows the setting, some creatures, and eightportmanteau words from Carroll's earlier poem "Jabberwocky" in his children's novel Through the Looking Glass (1871). Henry Holiday, the illustrator of the...

The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a celebrated English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the “Arabian Nights”) – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...

American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June, 1842. Whilst there he acted as a critical observer of North American society, almost as if returning a status report on their progress. This can be compared to the style of his Pictures from Italy written four years later, where he wrote far more like a tourist. His...

The Trial (original German title: Der Process, later Der Prozess, Der Proceß and Der Prozeß) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 but not published until 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader. Like Kafka's other...

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the...

The Soul of Man under Socialism is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde in which he expounds a libertarian socialist worldview and a critique of charity. The writing of The Soul of Man followed Wilde's conversion to anarchist philosophy, following his reading of the works of Peter Kropotkin.  In The Soul of Man Wilde argues that,...

The Merry-Go-Round, an early and largely forgotten novel from W. Somerset Maugham is not considered his best, but it’s one of my favourites. The Merry-Go-Round was written in 1904 following Mrs Craddock (another great favourite) in 1902. The main character in Mrs Craddock is Bertha Ley, and she’s the niece of Miss Mary Ley, the main character in The Merry-Go-Round. Set in Edwardian...

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story by American author Washington Irving, contained in his collection of 34 essays and short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Written while Irving was living abroad in Birmingham, England, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was first published in 1820. Along with Irving's companion piece "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"...

Ayesha, the Return of She is a gothic-fantasy novel by the popular Victorian author H. Rider Haggard, published in 1905, as a sequel to his far more popular and well known novel, She. It was serialised in the Windsor Magazine in 1904-5. Its significance was recognised by its republication by the Newcastle Publishing Company as the fourteenth volume of the celebrated Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy...

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing his autobiography long before the 1906 publications of these Chapters from my Autobiography. He originally planned to have his memoirs published only after his death but realized, once he’d passed his 70th year, that a lot of the material might be OK to publish before his departure. These chapters were published in serial form in the North American...

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

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his famous detective, and illustrated by Sidney Paget. The eponymous 1939 film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce was based on the stage play by William Gillette and was not a direct adaptation of the book. The 12 stories in this collection are: A Scandal in Bohemia; Client: The...

A Princess of Mars (1917) is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century pulp fiction. It is also a seminal instance of the planetary romance, a subgenre of science fantasy that became highly popular in the decades following its publication. Its early chapters also...

Dickens told one of his biographers that as a child he used to wander at night about a churchyard, near their home, with his sister. This sister died only two years before this poetic fantasy was written. Perhaps it was the sincerity of his grief for this lost sister which keeps this story as simple as it is in its sentiment. It is a fable, a lovely apologue, slight in substance and yet adequate...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an 1891 philosophical novel by Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde. It was first published as aserial story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. As submitted by Wilde to the magazine, the editors feared the story was indecent, and deleted five hundred words before publication - without Wilde’s knowledge. Despite that censorship, The...

Moonfleet is a tale of smuggling by the English novelist J. Meade Falkner, first published in 1898. The book was extremely popular among children worldwide up until the 1970s, mostly for its themes of adventure and gripping storyline. It remains a popular story widely read and is still sometimes studied in schools.  In 1757, Moonfleet is a small village near the sea in the south of England....