Browse books
853 books found.
Lágrimas Abençoadas
By Camilo Castelo Branco
The book opens at the christening of a girl nine days old, over whom the onlookers say a mysterious light shines, and her godmother is Our Lady of the Conception. It then follows her life in a long run of very short chapters in Camilo's sentimental vein.
96 chapters · About 194 minutes of published text
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
By John Keats
The last book of poems Keats saw into print, in 1820, gathers three long verse tales of love and enchantment with the great odes, from the nightingale and the Grecian urn to autumn, and the unfinished epic Hyperion. This is the poems alone, from the 1909 Oxford edition, without the editor's introduction and notes.
13 chapters · About 98 minutes of published text
Lapsia
By Teuvo Pakkala
Ten stories about children in a small Finnish town: a boy whose Christmas surprise goes wrong, two girls accused of lying, a maid left alone with the coffee pot, the eldest child of a poor family sent out to beg. Pakkala writes from inside a child's view, with humour and without sentiment.
10 chapters · About 78 minutes of published text
Lastuja I-III
By Juhani Aho
Juhani Aho called his short prose pieces lastuja, the chips that fly from a carpenter's knife. This edition gathers the first three collections: scenes of country life, hunting and animal tales, childhood and school memories, sketches of Helsinki and sharp little satires, more than eighty pieces in all.
83 chapters · About 453 minutes of published text
Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta
By Johannes Linnankoski
Olavi, a young log driver on the rivers of Finland, is a charming wanderer who finds a new girl at every landing and moves on with the timber. The novel follows his roaming summers on the rapids and the women he loves and leaves, and asks what such a man will do when love finally asks something of him. It became one of the best-loved Finnish novels of its time.
33 chapters · About 228 minutes of published text
Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino
By Carlo Collodi
The carpenter Geppetto carves a puppet from a piece of wood that laughs and cries, and the puppet runs off almost as soon as he can stand. Pinocchio lies, skips school and falls in with swindlers, a puppet master and a fairy with blue hair, in the original Italian of Collodi's classic.
36 chapters · About 188 minutes of published text
Le capitaine Fracasse
By Théophile Gautier
The young Baron de Sigognac lives in poverty in a crumbling castle in Gascony, until a company of travelling actors stops there for a night. He joins them on the road, takes the stage name Captain Fracasse, and falls in love with one of the actresses.
22 chapters · About 812 minutes of published text
Le cas étrange du docteur Jekyll; Un logement pour la nuit
By Robert Louis Stevenson (translated by B. J. Lowe)
A French translation of Stevenson's tale of a respected London doctor and the brutal stranger who seems to hold power over him. It is followed by his short story of the poet François Villon on a winter night in medieval Paris.
11 chapters · About 147 minutes of published text
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra
By Gaston Leroux
The Phantom of the Opera is a Gothic horror novel by French author Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909 to 8 January 1910, and was released in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century, and by an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil's skeleton in an 1841 production of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. It has been successfully adapted into various stage and film adaptations, most notable of which are the 1925 film depiction featuring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical.
27 chapters · About 430 minutes of published text
Le Grand Meaulnes
By Alain-Fournier
Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the first month of World War I. The novel, published in 1913, a year before the author's death, is somewhat autobiographical, especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, for whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as the latter searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.
45 chapters · About 278 minutes of published text
Le Horla
By Guy de Maupassant
The collection opens with Le Horla, the diary of a man in a quiet Norman house who becomes convinced that an invisible being lives beside him and feeds on his life. Thirteen more tales follow, of love, cruelty and country life, in Maupassant's plain and piercing style.
14 chapters · About 179 minutes of published text
Le mystère de la chambre jaune
By Gaston Leroux
A scientist's daughter is attacked in a bedroom locked from the inside, and her attacker vanishes. The young reporter Joseph Rouletabille sets out to solve the puzzle before a famous police detective does.
29 chapters · About 358 minutes of published text
Le Novelle della Pescara
By Gabriele D'Annunzio
Eighteen stories of the Abruzzo coast and countryside around Pescara, from the lives of two devout sisters, Orsola and Anna, to feuding village idolaters, a ferryman, a ship's surgeon and the wanderer Turlendana. D'Annunzio's early tales are violent, sensual and steeped in local belief.
18 chapters · About 354 minutes of published text
Le portrait de Dorian Gray
By Oscar Wilde (translated by Albert Savine)
A French translation of Oscar Wilde's novel. A beautiful young man, admired by a painter and led on by a witty lord, wishes that his portrait could grow old in his place, and the wish is granted.
20 chapters · About 330 minutes of published text
Le rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siècle
By Stendhal
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son with a quick mind and an admiration for Napoleon, becomes tutor in the house of a provincial mayor. He sets out to rise in a society where the army is closed to him and the Church is the only open road.
75 chapters · About 746 minutes of published text
Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
By Jules Verne
Phileas Fogg, a London gentleman who lives by the clock, bets his fellow club members that he can travel round the world in eighty days. He sets off at once with his new French servant Passepartout, followed by a detective who believes he is a bank robber.
37 chapters · About 289 minutes of published text
Leaves of Grass
By Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. After self-publishing it in 1855, he spent most of his professional life writing, revising, and expanding the collection until his death in 1892. Either six or nine separate editions of the book were produced, depending on how one defines a new edition. The continual modifications to Leaves of Grass resulted in vastly different copies of it circulating in Whitman's lifetime. The first edition was a slim tract of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400 poems.
34 chapters · About 528 minutes of published text
Légy jó mindhalálig
By Zsigmond Móricz
Misi Nyilas, a poor twelve-year-old at the old Reformed College in Debrecen, tries to live up to the school's strict code of honour. When he becomes tangled up in the business of a lost lottery ticket, the adult world turns out to be far less honest than the one he believes in.
12 chapters · About 358 minutes of published text
Les diaboliques
By J. Barbey d'Aurevilly
Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) is a collection of short stories written by Barbey d'Aurevilly and published in France in 1874. Each story features a woman who commits an act of violence, or revenge, or some other crime. It is considered d'Aurevilly's masterpiece.
6 chapters · About 424 minutes of published text
Les Dieux ont soif
By Anatole France
In Paris during the Terror, Évariste Gamelin, a poor and idealistic painter, is appointed a juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal. His faith in the Republic grows harder as the guillotine works ever faster.
29 chapters · About 292 minutes of published text
Les Mémoires d'un Parapluie
By Elisabeth Galos Houdetot
An umbrella tells its own life story, from its first days in a shop to the many hands it passes through: raffled at a party, stolen, pawned, and carried into rich homes and poor garrets. Through its owners, the Comtesse de Houdetot draws a gentle moral portrait of French families for young readers.
11 chapters · About 95 minutes of published text
Les mille et une nuits: contes choisis
By Anonymous (translated by Antoine Galland)
Antoine Galland's French version of tales from the Thousand and One Nights, the version that first brought them to Europe. Scheherazade tells story after story to the sultan to keep herself alive.
26 chapters · About 616 minutes of published text
Les Misérables
By Victor Hugo (translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood)
Les Misérables is a French epic historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published on 31 March 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television, and the stage, including a musical.
365 chapters · About 2436 minutes of published text
Les trois mousquetaires
By Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet
A hot-headed young Gascon rides to Paris to join the king's musketeers and, within a day, has arranged duels with three of them. Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan become inseparable and are drawn into the rivalry between the queen and Cardinal Richelieu.
67 chapters · About 972 minutes of published text