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1084 books found.
La Regenta
By Leopoldo Alas
Ana Ozores, the bored and idealistic wife of the former magistrate of Vetusta, is courted by the town's Don Juan and by its ambitious canon. Clarín's long masterpiece lays bare the gossip, hypocrisy and religious fervour of a provincial cathedral city.
30 chapters · About 1314 minutes of published text
La Reĝo de la Montoj
By Edmond About (translated by Gaston Moch)
Edmond About's comic adventure in Gaston Moch's 1909 Esperanto translation. In 1856 a young German botanist collecting plants in the hills outside Athens is captured, along with two English ladies, by Hadgi-Stavros, the polished and businesslike king of the mountain brigands. Told as a story within a story, it makes fun of ransom, diplomacy and romantic ideas about Greek banditry alike.
10 chapters · About 273 minutes of published text
La tierra de todos
By Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
In the years after the First World War, adventurers and exiles cross each other's paths in Europe and America, seeking a place that is theirs. Blasco Ibáñez's novel follows the restless wanderers of a world that has lost its old homes.
20 chapters · About 400 minutes of published text
La Tribuna
By Emilia Pardo Bazán
Amparo, a cigar-maker of Marineda, takes up the republican speeches of 1868 and wins the nickname La Tribuna, until a young officer and a pregnancy test her convictions. Pardo Bazán's novel is one of the first Spanish studies of a working woman's life and of the tobacco factory.
39 chapters · About 282 minutes of published text
La vida es sueño
By Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Segismundo, a prince locked in a tower since birth because the stars foretold he would be a tyrant, is brought to the court for one day to test the prophecy. Calderón's play asks whether life itself is only a dream, in the finest drama of the Spanish Golden Age.
3 chapters · About 77 minutes of published text
Laara: Kuvaus Savon kansan elämästä
By Kauppis-Heikki
In a frost year, when the crops have failed across Finland, the cottager woman Laara sets out to find a better life for herself and her family. Kauppis-Heikki follows her ambition, her marriages and her hard bargains over two parts and many years of Savo village life, in a frank picture of the rural poor.
13 chapters · About 97 minutes of published text
Lady Audley's Secret
By M. E. Braddon
Lady Audley's Secret is a sensation novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon published on 1 October 1862. It was Braddon's most successful and well-known novel. Critic John Sutherland (1989) described the work as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". The plot centres on "accidental bigamy" which was in literary fashion in the early 1860s. The plot was summarised by literary critic Elaine Showalter (1982): "Braddon's bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are residing".
41 chapters · About 647 minutes of published text
Lady Chatterley's lover
By D. H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover is the final novel by the English author D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928, in Florence, Italy, and in 1929, in Paris, France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan.
19 chapters · About 511 minutes of published text
Lady Windermere's Fan
By Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere learns that her husband has been paying money to a woman with a past, and resolves to confront the woman at her birthday ball. Mrs Erlynne, who is not what she seems, steps in to save the marriage for a reason Wilde keeps back until the last act.
4 chapters · About 85 minutes of published text
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
Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino
By Juan Valera
Faustino, a young man of fine talents and a poor sense of the real world, drifts from a provincial town to Madrid with grand ambitions and a long line of romantic illusions. Valera's long novel is a gentle, ironical portrait of a generation raised on romanticism.
32 chapters · About 515 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
Lato leśnych ludzi
By Maria Rodziewiczówna
A year in the life of a company of people who settle in the forest, from early spring to the departure of the birds, with days named for the nicknames of its members, such as the Swift Panther, the Watchful Crane and the Cunning Wolverine. Rodziewiczówna's novel of 1920 is a hymn to the forest and to a life close to the land.
17 chapters · About 208 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
Lawah-Lawah Merah
On the Pearl River between Macao and Canton, Lin holds his wedding feast without having seen his bride, Liou Siou, whose red slipper is smaller than any foot he knows. The Malay retelling of a Chinese tale, printed in 1875, follows the bride and a shopkeeper nicknamed the Red Spider.
4 chapters · About 31 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