"There’s nothing––absolutely nothing––half so much worth doing as messing about in boats." Mole is a good-natured, home-loving mole, who has never gone anywhere. But one Spring he ...

"There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not ...

Recovering from a miscarriage and a bad marriage, author Katherine Mansfield, barely 21, wrote these excellent short stories around the time she was staying in a spa town in German ...

"Are we rising again?''No. On the contrary.' 'Are we descending?' 'Worse than that, captain! We are falling!" Five prisoners of war escape in an air balloon during a siege. They ar ...

Phileas Fogg is English exactitude personified. He eats breakfast at 8:23, shaves at 9:37, and leaves for the Reform club at 11:30. He reads, eats, and doesn’t travel. But one day, ...

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men."Over a shared bottle of win ...

"Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others."Charlie Marlow from Conrad’s previous adventure novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’, is back, and he is trying to piece togeth ...

"He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself ...

When Lemuel Gulliver wakes up on an island after a shipwreck, tied on his hands and feet and with arrows pointed at him, you would think all hope is lost. But his captors are the ...

In a time when poor Irish families struggled to feed their children, Jonathan Swift wrote an essay, which he published anonymously, making a few suggestions. He called it ‘A Modest ...

The Idiot is anything but, yet that is how his fellow boarders at Mrs. Smithers Pedagog's home for single gentlemen see him. His brand of creative thought is dismissed as foolishne ...

Gerard is a downright legend. At least in his own mind. Old and retired, the French brigadier muses over past adventures serving in the Napoleonic wars, and while he certainly shou ...

Wanting to impress a woman, journalist Ned Malone sets out to interview the hostile professor George Challenger, who claims to have discovered living dinosaurs in South America. Th ...

The supernatural is an everyday occurrence for John Kendrick Bangs, who just can’t avoid seeing ghosts everywhere! A witty, turn-of-the-century spoof of the gothic horror anthology ...

"I returned to the City about three o’clock on that Monday afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it." So opens ...

Sense and Sensibility (1811) was Jane Austen´s first published novel. When their father dies the Dashwood sisters and their mother find themselves destitute and soon, under the inf ...

´It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.` So opens Jane Austen´s second novel Pride and Prejudice, whic ...

Finally returning from the horrors of World War I, James Hall and Charles Nordhoff follow their dream of touring the South Pacific. A fascinating non-fiction account of two america ...

For pilots in the First World War even getting through training was a matter of survival. Ashamed that the US was not yet in the war, American author James Norman Hall volunteered ...

Judge Temple and his daughter, Elizabeth, are making their way home when a deer crosses their path and the Judge decides to take a few blind shots at it. He fails in killing the de ...

"I too can play the madman, the fool, the hero; in short, any or everything to rescue her I love."The war between the British and the French is raging in North America. Amidst the ...

The elephant hunter, Allan Quartermain, is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good in Africa, asking for his help finding Sir Henry’s brother, who has gone missi ...

"I think Silas Marner holds a higher place than any of the author's works," said Henry James of this classic George Eliot novel. When a little girl wanders into a random house one ...

History comes to life! Meet George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. Exciting, fun, and educational, "Four Great Americans" is a turn-of-the-centu ...

Dive into history with this classic collection of fascinating stories, retold by the master children’s author James Baldwin at the turn of the century. Meet Alexander the Great and ...