This sweeping family saga now moves to the lives and loves of the Cherrells in the early 30s, cousins by marriage to the Forsytes. An old English family, their one constant in an age of change and uncertainty is their ancestral home, Condaford Grange. It is especially precious to young Elizabeth Cherrell, or 'Dinny'…Read More »
Marian expects that Robin Hood and his Merry Men can help her gain information that can secure her liberty. What she doesn't expect is to fall in love with the leader of that merry band. Despite their political differences, which sometimes result in fierce arguments between the sharp-tongued duo, the lovers hatch a …Read More »
Collected radio talks by the celebrated English essayist and humorist Sir Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm returned to England from his home in Rapallo in Italy in about 1935 when his wife, Florence Kahn was cast in a revival of Peer Gynt on the London stage. At this time he resumed writing essays when the BBC invited him to …Read More »
In this classic, Sinclair Lewis shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire. Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early 20th Century mid western village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to …Read More »
Allan Quatermain has determined to go farther afield than he had ever traveled before, into the depths of the African jungle – on a march inland to the hills between lands controlled by the chiefs Wambe and Nala. Quatermain has heard of the elephants dwelling in the dense forests at the foot of the mountains edging…Read More »
When a Salvation Army officer learns that her father, a wealthy armaments manufacturer, has donated lots of money to her organization, she resigns in disgust but eventually sees the truth of her father's reasoning that social iniquity derives from poverty; it is only through accumulating wealth and power that people…Read More »
Wilbraham was obviously a sentimentalist and an enthusiast; there was the extraordinary case shortly after I first met him of his championship of X., a man who had been caught card-sharping and received a year's imprisonment for it. On X. leaving prison, Wilbraham championed and defended him, put him up for months i…Read More »
Perry and Lester invent things: seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems. When Kodak and Duracell are broken up for parts by sharp venture capitalists, Perry and Lester help to invent the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era…Read More »
Perhaps the most light-hearted of all Chesterton’s "serious" works, in Manalive we follow the madcap adventure of Innocent Smith. Innocent Smith is a man who keeps the commandments but breaks all the conventions, and while doing so he shows us just how absurd those conventions are. Follow him as he breaks into his o…Read More »
After the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the joint ward of two men: the respectable Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner, author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'. Believing marriage would prevent him from achieving his higher intellectual and political ambitions, Tanner is horrified to discover that Ann int…Read More »
Certain wholesale aspects of man-making with a skin of infinite delicacy that life will harden very speedily, with a discomforted writhing little body, with a weak and wailing outcry that stirs the heart, the creature comes protesting into the world, and unless death win a victory, we and chance and the forces of li…Read More »
A poor young girl, Fanny, is sheltered by Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, her uncle and aunt) along with their four children, Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia, in their house at Mansfield Park. Treated less preferably to the other children, she is provided support by Edmund, whose kindness leads her to fall in love with hi…Read More »
A story of flying, drug smuggling and murder in the 1920s. Pilot Philip Stenning crashes his aircraft while flying from London to Devon. He is rescued by escaped prisoner Denis Compton, who claims he was sent to prison for embezzlement after being framed by his half-brother, Italian baron Rodrigo Mattani. Owing Comp…Read More »
Barrie's autobiography of his mother, published after her death, and which tells a lot of Barrie's early emotional life. Barrie descibes how strong minded and intelligent she was and how she wanted everything done done her way.
Before there was Indiana Jones there was Allan Quartermain: the original explorer, treasure hunter, and adventurer. The Quartermain books have captivated readers for more than a century, spawning more than a dozen movies and a host of imitators. Here is the story of Allan's first true love, Marie Marais. Famed explo…Read More »
Timothy O'Clerigh is cheated out of his inheritance by an unscrupulous woman. His efforts to ragain his lost fortune leads him to the South American continent and into the midsts a mysterious cult leader. There he meets and falls in love with the cultist's daughter, for which he is taken prisoner…
Dickens turns his satirical eye on America in "Martin Chuzzlewit", when young Martin embarks on a voyage that is destined to affect the fortunes of his family and his love. A story about the contrasting destinies of two descendants of the brothers Chuzzlewit, both born and bred to the same heritage of selfishness - …Read More »
Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel about a struggling young writer, is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome hi…Read More »
Martin Rattler was a very bad boy. At least his aunt, Mrs. Dorothy Grumbit, said so; and certainly she ought to have known, if anybody should, for Martin lived with her, and was, as she herself expressed it, "the bane of her existence; the very torment of her life." No doubt of it whatever, according to Aunt Dorothy…Read More »
Set in Manchester in the 1840s, Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself–a factor…Read More »
Eleanor H. Porter's novel Mary Marie tackles an issue that is as relevant as ever: divorce and its impact on the children in the family that has been torn asunder. Groundbreaking at the time of its original publication, the novel tells the story of a young girl whose divorced parents can't agree on anything about …Read More »
Haggard's penultimate novel! _His cousin Algernon was different indeed. To begin with, his attire was faultless, made by the best tailor in London and apparently put on new that moment. Within this perfect outer casing was a short, pale-eyed, lack-lustre young man with straight, sandy hair and no eyebrows, one whose…Read More »
Jarvis Hilton is in charge of a handpicked team of scientists – and a navy warship on a deep space mission, dubbed Project Theta Orionis. On the outbound journey, automatic sensors drop their ship – the Perseus – into normal space for an encounter with a mysterious skeletal object. The encounter leaves them baffl…Read More »
This shocking tale of father-daughter incest, by the author of Frankenstein, was suppressed for over a century. Mathilda's adoration of her beloved father veers into tragedy in this High Romantic tale of forbidden passion. Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, was so repulsed by the story that it laid unpublished u…Read More »
Max and Moritz is an illustrated story in verse; highly inventive, blackly humorous tale, told entirely in rhymed couplets, written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch. It is among the early works of Busch, nevertheless it already features many substantial, effectually aesthetic and formal regularities, procedures an…Read More »
Geothe's fourteen hundred Maxims and Reflections reveal some of his deepest thought on art, ethics, literature and natural science, but also his immediate reactions to books, chance encounters or his administrative work. Although variable in quality, the vast majority have a freshness and immediacy which vividly con…Read More »
This astonishing science-fiction classic begins like a prophecy of today's space achievements–a missile is fired from Earth to hit the surface of the Moon. It is successful and the misslemen are heroes, until…the Moon fires back! Terrible Lunar missiles blast New York, London, and Paris. And an ultimatum is deliv…Read More »
This graphic depiction of urban American life centers around McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a parsimonious young woman who wins a lar…Read More »
In the Duke's absence from Vienna, his strict deputy Angelo revives an ancient law forbidding sex outside marriage. The young Claudio, whose fiancée is pregnant, is condemned to death by the law. His sister Isabella, soon to become a nun, pleads with Lord Angelo for her brother's life. But her purity so excites Ange…Read More »
The whole artist, whose work we are about to study side by side with his life, is summed up in this anecdote. It reveals one of the most typical sides of his temperament, and, consequently, of his talent: a constant and scrupulous endeavour, maintained even at the price of sacrifices that would seem excessive to the…Read More »