Relates the fortunes of a shipwrecked family as they imaginatively adapt to life on an island with abundant animal and plant life.

Captains Courageous is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The book's title comes from the ballad "Mary Ambree", which starts, "When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt". Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers,...

Life in the small English town of Cranford seems very quiet and peaceful. The ladies of Cranford lead tidy, regular lives. They make their visits between the hours of twelve and three, give little evening parties, and worry about their maid-servants. But life is not always smooth - there are little arguments and jealousies, sudden deaths and unexpected marriages... Mrs Gaskell's timeless picture of small-town life in the first half of the nineteenth...

Relates the experiences of Bathsheba Everdene as she is courted and married to three different men. Bathsheba Everdene and the three men who love her move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century agrarian landscape, still almost untouched by the industrial revolution, and the encroachment of modern life. Takes place in Wessex in the 1840s.

Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...

Provides a translation of Aristotle's classic study of the nature of poetry.

A Modern Utopia is a novel by H. G. Wells. Because of the complexity and sophistication of its narrative structure A Modern Utopia has been called "not so much a modern as a postmodern utopia." The novel is best known for its notion that a voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static" world state so as to solve "the problem of combining progress with political stability." To this planet "out beyond...

The Golden Bowl comes in the first years of the 20th-century: the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, decided never to serialise it and published it in New York in December 1904 in two volumes. After just a few months, in February 1905, also Methuen published the novel in London in a one-volume edition. In 1909, a revised edition appeared as volumes 23 and 24 of the New York edition, and James this time also prepared the preface, in which he reflected...

The dead arise from their sleep in the cemetery of a small town to tell their individual stories about an entire community caught in a web of scandal, sin, and vice in the early twentieth century.

The Lair of the White Worm (1911) is a novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Published only a year before Stoker's death, The Lair of the White Worm helped to establish the Irish master of Gothic horror's reputation as a leading writer of the early-twentieth century. The novel is partly based on the legend of the Lambton Worm, a story from popular English folklore dating back to at least the 14th century. In 1860, an Australian named Adam Salton is...