The Fall of the House of UsherEdgar Allan Poe
Follow the macabre events that sweep the narrator into the haunted world of Roderick Usher--a morbid recluse and slave to fear--whose descent into madness inevitably brings the great House of Usher to its most sinister fate. read more »
The RavenEdgar Allan Poe
The Raven is noted for its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere, it tells of the mysterious visit of a talking raven to a distraught lover, tracing his slow descent into madness. This illustrated version contains detailed, masterly engravings by Gustave Dorés, from a 19th-century edition of The... read more »
The JobSinclair Lewis
Three years before the civic-minded Carol Kennicott came to life in Main Street, Una Golden was confronting the male dinosaurs of business. Like Carol, the heroine of The Job is one of Sinclair Lewis's most fully realized creations and was his first controversial novel. A "working girl" in New York City, Una... read more »
The Napoleon of Notting HillG. K. Chesterton
In a London of the future, the drudgery of capitalism and bureaucracy have worn the human spirit down to the point where it can barely stand. When a pint-sized clerk named Auberon Quinn is randomly selected as head of state, he decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement. One man, Adam... read more »
The Purloined LetterEdgar Allan Poe
The Purloined Letter is the third of the three stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. These stories are considered important forerunners of the modern detective story. The method Poe's detective, Dupin, uses to solve the... read more »
The Confessions of Arsène LupinMaurice Leblanc
This collection of ten new adventures in the career of Lupin, the gentleman burglar, presents more puzzling criminal involvements of the classic French hero-thief and his men.
**Contents**: Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!; The Wedding-ring; The Sign Of The Shadow; The Infernal Trap; The Red Silk Scarf; Shadowed... read more »
The Book of TeaKakuzō Okakura
At the turn of the 20th century, in Boston, a small esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great... read more »
The Vortex BlasterE. E. "Doc" Smith
One man against the basic energy of the universe, unleashed in ravening fury that was Storm Cloud. Unique was the only way to describe him, yet alone in his single-handed battle. The appalling destructiveness of a loose atomic vortex could be cancelled out only by destroying the vortex itself. While not even the... read more »
Quo VadisHenryk Sienkiewicz
Quo Vadis is a love story of Marcus Vinicius, a passionate young Roman tribune, and Lygia Callina, a beautiful and gentle Christian maiden of royal Lygian descent and a hostage of Rome, raised in a patrician home. At first Marcus, a typical aristocratic Roman libertine of his time, has no notion of love and merely... read more »
The People Of The MistH. Rider Haggard
Leonard Outram, a young Englishman who's just lost his fortune along with and his fiancee's hand, makes an oath: he'll win back his home and live happily ever after. Really! Well, sort of. Leonard ends up in Africa, which, at that point in history, was the place to win your fortune back for the gods of fate. Leonard... read more »
Jacob's RoomVirginia Woolf
Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in... read more »
The Sleeper AwakesH. G. Wells
A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to... read more »
The TrialFranz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as... read more »
The Man Who Knew Too MuchG. K. Chesterton
Horne Fisher is the man who 'knows too much...and all the wrong things'. He and his trusty companion Harold March take on the world of crime among societies most eminent members in eight classic mysteries. Fisher has a brilliant mind and powers of deduction - but he always faces a moral dilemma. read more »
The Shadow LineJoseph Conrad
Conrad's autobiographical novella of a young man in his first command as a sea captain. A series of crises prove incredibly difficult for his new authority, for the sea is curiously becalmed and the crew is weakened by feverish malaria. When the first mate's fear convinces many that the ship is haunted and cursed by... read more »
The RainbowD. H. Lawrence
Lush with religious and metaphysical imagery, this is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, set against the decline of the rural English midlands. It peers into a family's sexual mores, exposing the sexual dynamics of marriage and physical love. D.H. Lawrence explores the lives of three generations... read more »
Annabel LeeEdgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s dream poem is as close to music as words can ever come. First published on October 9, 1849 – two days after Poe’s death – this haunting, lyric poem is thought to have been written in memory of Poe’s young wife, Virginia. The narrator, who fell in love with Annabel Lee when they were... read more »
The Valley of DecisionEdith Wharton
This two part romance chronicles the rise to power of Odo Valsecca during the intellectual and political tumult which preceded the French Revolution. During his childhood and early manhood, Odo comes in close contact with all the major factions the peasantry, the clergy, the liberal freethinkers, and the nobility... read more »
Captain BloodRafael Sabatini
Peter Blood, a physician and English gentleman, turned pirate out of a rankling sense of injustice. Barely escaping the gallows after his arrest for treating wounded rebels, Blood is enslaved on a Barbados plantation. When he escapes, no ship sailing the Spanish Main is safe from Blood and his men. This classic... read more »
At FaultKate Chopin
Thérèse Lafirme, a beautiful and resourceful Creole woman, is widowed at age thirty-two and left alone to run her Louisiana plantation. When Thérèse falls in love with David Hosmer, a divorced businessman, her strong moral and religious convictions make it impossible for her to accept his marriage proposal. Her... read more »
Ranson's FollyRichard Harding Davis
Ranson's Folly is about the audacious, dare-devil exploits of a junior officer in the U.S. Army, whose position and influence secure a lieutenancy in a Western post. The monotony of the life and its regularity finally drive him into the folly of donning the disguise of a band of notorious highwaymen, and holding up... read more »
Hop-FrogEdgar Allan Poe
A dwarf is taken from his homeland and becomes the jester of a king particularly fond of practical jokes. Taking revenge on the king and his cabinet for striking his friend and fellow dwarf Trippetta, he dresses them as orangutans for a masquerade. In front of the king's guests, Hop-Frog murders them all before... read more »
Uncle SilasSheridan Le Fanu
In Uncle Silas, Sheridan Le Fanu's most celebrated novel, Maud Ruthyn, the young, naïve heroine, is plagued by Madame de la Rougierre from the moment the enigmatic older woman is hired as her governess. A liar, bully, and spy, when Madame leaves the house, she takes her dark secret with her. But when Maud is... read more »
The Mad KingEdgar Rice Burroughs
All Ludstadt was in an uproar. The mad king had escaped. For ten years no man of them all had set eyes upon the face of the boy-king who had been hastened to the grim castle of Blentz upon the death of the old king, his father. Into this troubled country came Barney Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, a virtual twin of... read more »
The Variable ManPhilip K. Dick
The Terran system is growing and expanding all the time. But an old and corrupt Centaurian Empire is holding Terra down, as it encircles the Terran system and will not let the humans grow out of their current empire. For this reason Terra is at war with Proxima Centauri and is trying to find a way of breaking free... read more »
The InnocentsSinclair Lewis
If this were a ponderous work of realism, such as the author has attempted to write, and will doubtless essay again, it would be perilous to dedicate it to the splendid assembly of young British writers, lest the critics search for Influences and Imitations. But since this is a flagrant excursion, a tale for people... read more »
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor FetherEdgar Allan Poe
The story follows an unnamed narrator who visits a mental institution in southern France known for a revolutionary new method of treating mental illnesses called the "system of soothing." A companion with whom he is travelling knows Monsieur Maillard, the originator of the system, and makes introductions before... read more »
The House of the Seven GablesNathaniel Hawthorne
The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style... read more »
Eugenics and Other EvilsG. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils. Its advocates regarded eugenics as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.Today it is widely regarded as a brutal... read more »
A Tale of the Ragged MountainsEdgar Allan Poe
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains highlights scientific theories of Poe's day, engages with British imperial history, and forecasts contemporary interest in psychoactive drugs, the transmigration of the soul, and the dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship. This is a short story partially based on Edgar Allan Poe's... read more »