"Family Happiness" is a relationship novel which tells the story of the seventeen-year-old Mashechka and the thirty-six-year-old Sergey. Their passionate love leads to marriage but ...

A typical Byronic-hero novel, Lermontov’s protagonist bombards the reader with his bipolar behavior: both sensitive and cynical, his extreme arrogance borders on deep melancholy. A ...

The sly fox, the greedy wolf and the diligent ant are among the most iconic and loved characters from Aesop’s fables. Who doesn’t love discovering knowledge in the ancient tales? I ...

"The Recruit" is a short story from Balzac’s "Philosophical studies", set during the horrors of the Reign of Terror. An aristocratic mother is desperately awaiting the return of he ...

"The Marriage Contract" is included in "Scenes from Private Life" and follows the marriage of a Parisian gentleman to beautiful Spanish girl, who comes into a lot of money. Present ...

The short story collection "The Belkin Tales" consists of five unrelated stories told by various narrators to a landowner who has recently died. Ivan Belkin, the landowner, was a s ...

"The Undertaker" is a supernatural gothic tale by Pushkin, which features Adrian Prokhorov, an undertaker, who comes to a new place. He is a very straight-forward man, and does not ...

What seems to be quite an ordinary short story of a seduction and abduction of a young girl, "The Stationmaster" proves to be one of Pushkin’s best tales. At first sight an innocen ...

Being the last tale from the collection "The Belkin Tales", "The Squire’s Daughter" is a story about disguises and playing tricks on people. The heroine Lizaveta decides to fool th ...

A powerful and emotionally-tinged anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" is teeming with memorable and richly drawn characters. A moving, provocative, and tearful narrative of ill ...

"New Yorker Stories" offers a colourful description of O.Henry’s favourite city, together with the emotional states of New Yorkers at the turn of the twentieth century. Some of O.H ...

O. Henry is deservedly famous for his vivacious, humorous, ironic, but utterly realistic short stories, and this collection is no exception. Offering deep insights into the human s ...

"To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart."Master Humphrey is an old, crippled man living i ...

"The couple who dote upon their children have usually a great many of them (...) The children are either the healthiest in all the world, or the most unfortunate in existence. In e ...

The narrator has gone out to a garden in the middle of the night. But the garden, under the light of the moon, doesn’t seem like a usual garden. Everything seems a little weird and ...

When captain James P. Orne and his crew kill a strange and enormous animal in the sea, they are confused. They have never seen anything like this before – the animal looks like a g ...

It is the time to celebrate Yuletide – a festival that ancient Germanic people celebrated during the darkest times of the year. A man returns to his home town to share this special ...

"To the Last Man" tells us the story of an ancient altercation between two frontier families – the Jorths, hardworking sheepherders led by Lee Jorth, and the Isbels, crooked cattle ...

Glenn Kilbourne is a sick and injured man who returns to New York to his fiancée Carley Burch, after fighting in France in World War I. He decides to move to Arizona in order to re ...

"The Mysterious Rider" is a Western novel published in 1921. The novel tells us the complex story of a girl named Columbine who grew up on Bill Bellounds’, her adoptive father’s, r ...

"But while she was still very young, oh, very, very young, the sister drooped, and came to be so weak that she could no longer stand in the window at night."Every night, a brother ...

"The Garnet Bracelet" is a rather short novel by Alexander Kuprin, exploring the romantic, yet unrequited emotions of the protagonist towards the love of his life. Written at the b ...

"White Nights" is the story about a melancholic daydreamer, who spends his life idling in St. Petersburg and indulging in existential questions. He is so much in a world of his own ...

A short story written in the vein of the Gothic tradition, "The Black Monk" tells of a Kovrin, a Russian scholar, who is suffering from stress and overworking. He goes to the count ...

"Doubrovsky" is an unfinished novel by Pushkin, published after his death, and follows the adventures of a Russian Robin-Hood-like figure, whose land is confiscated by a shady aris ...