Browse books

1084 books found.

• The Great Gatsby

  By F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Great Gatsby is a 1925 tragedy novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire obsessed with reuniting with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

  9 chapters · About 209 minutes of published text

• The Great God Pan

  By Arthur Machen

  The Great God Pan is an 1894 horror and fantasy novella by the Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the newspaper The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a teenager named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan.

  8 chapters · About 94 minutes of published text

• The Happy Prince, and Other Tales

  By Oscar Wilde

  The Happy Prince and Other Tales (or Stories) is a collection of bedtime stories for children by Oscar Wilde, first published in May 1888. It contains five stories that are highly popular among children and frequently read in schools: "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," "The Devoted Friend," and "The Remarkable Rocket." The short stories are valued for their morals, and have been made into animated films. In 2003, the second through fourth stories were adapted by Lupus Films and Terraglyph Interactive Studios into the three-part series Wilde Stories for Channel 4. The stories are regarded as classics of children's literature.

  5 chapters · About 70 minutes of published text

• The Hound of the Baskervilles

  By Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor, Devon, in England's West Country and follows Holmes and Watson investigating the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in The Final Problem and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival.

  15 chapters · About 257 minutes of published text

• The Hour of the Dragon

  By Robert E. Howard

  The Hour of the Dragon, also known as Conan the Conqueror, is a fantasy novel by American writer Robert E. Howard featuring his sword and sorcery hero Conan the Cimmerian. It was one of the last Conan stories published before Howard's suicide, although not the last to be written. The novel was first published in serial form in the December 1935 through April 1936 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The first book edition was published by Gnome Press in hardcover in 1950. The Gnome Press edition retitled the story Conan the Conqueror, a title retained by all subsequent editions until 1977, when the original title was restored in an edition published by Berkley/Putnam.

  22 chapters · About 315 minutes of published text

• The House of Mirth

  By Edith Wharton

  The House of Mirth is a tragedy about Lily Bart, a well-born but penniless young woman belonging to New York City's high society of the 1890s. Written by American author Edith Wharton, it came out October 14, 1905. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a lonely existence on the margins of society as she fails to marry a man of wealth and status to secure her a place in affluent society. Wharton uses Lily, in critic Shari Benstock's words, as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."

  29 chapters · About 562 minutes of published text

• The House of the Seven Gables

  By Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll, as well as ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

  21 chapters · About 444 minutes of published text

• The House of the Wolfings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse

  By William Morris

  A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark is a fantasy novel by William Morris, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature. It was first published in hardcover by Reeves and Turner in 1889.

  31 chapters · About 368 minutes of published text

• The House on the Borderland

  By William Hope Hodgson

  The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions.

  30 chapters · About 220 minutes of published text

• The Iliad

  By Homer (translated by Alexander Pope)

  In the tenth year of the siege of Troy, Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon and withdraws from the fighting, and the Greeks are driven back to their ships until the death of his friend Patroclus brings him back to kill Hector. Pope's heroic couplets, published between 1715 and 1720, made this the English Iliad for a century.

  24 chapters · About 658 minutes of published text

• The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

  By Oscar Wilde

  Algernon Moncrieff invents an ailing friend to escape tedious engagements, and his friend Jack Worthing has invented a wicked brother named Ernest to excuse his trips to town. Both are courting women who will love only a man called Ernest, and Wilde's comedy of epigrams and mistaken identities ends with a handbag, a baby and a very convenient truth.

  3 chapters · About 89 minutes of published text

• The innocence of Father Brown

  By G. K. Chesterton

  G. K. Chesterton's 1911 collection introduces Father Brown, a mild priest who solves crimes by understanding human sin from the inside. A reader finds twelve ingenious, paradoxical stories, including the Blue Cross and the Invisible Man.

  12 chapters · About 343 minutes of published text

• The Invisible Man

  By H. G. Wells

  The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, an optical scientist who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.

  28 chapters · About 209 minutes of published text

• The iron heel

  By Jack London

  The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London. Published in 1908, it recounts a tumultuous period in the first half of 20th-century America in which a rising socialist movement threatens to win national elections and take power, but then is crushed by a corporate-controlled oligarchy known as the "Iron Heel". The events in the book are told via a long-lost manuscript, written by the wife of a key socialist leader, that is discovered and analyzed centuries later.

  25 chapters · About 376 minutes of published text

• The Island of Doctor Moreau

  By H. G. Wells

  The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction horror novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was published on 1 January 1896. The novel is set between 1 February 1887 and 5 January 1888. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat. He is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, human interference with nature, and the effects of trauma. Wells described it as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy."

  22 chapters · About 186 minutes of published text

• The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

  By William John Locke

  William J. Locke's 1912 collection about Aristide Pujol, a cheerful, resourceful, perpetually penniless Gascon who talks his way through the south of France and beyond. Each chapter is a small comedy of his schemes and his big heart. Light and charming.

  9 chapters · About 299 minutes of published text

• The Jungle Book

  By Rudyard Kipling

  The Jungle Book is an 1894 collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Most stories are set in a dry forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seeonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

  7 chapters · About 221 minutes of published text

• The King in Yellow

  By Robert W. Chambers

  The King in Yellow is a short story collection by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895 (316 pages). The book contains nine short stories and a sequence of poems; while the first stories belong to the genres of supernatural horror and weird fiction, The King in Yellow progressively transitions towards a more light-hearted tone, ending with romantic stories devoid of horror or supernatural elements. The horror stories are highly esteemed, and it has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler, S. T. Joshi, and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural.

  10 chapters · About 311 minutes of published text

• The Knights of the Cross, or, Krzyzacy: Historical Romance

  By Henryk Sienkiewicz (translated by Samuel Augustus Binion)

  In late-fourteenth-century Poland, young Zbyszko swears a knight's oath to win the hand of Danusia and runs up against the Teutonic Order. Henryk Sienkiewicz's long historical romance leads from forest feuds to the great battle of Grunwald.

  59 chapters · About 942 minutes of published text

• The Lady of the Lake

  By Walter Scott

  In six cantos Scott sends a hunting king, disguised as a knight, into the Highlands, where Ellen Douglas lives on an island in Loch Katrine and the clans are about to rise against him. The chase, the feud and the love story made the Trossachs famous and gave the Highland chieftain his romantic name.

  6 chapters · About 188 minutes of published text

• The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

  By Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (translated by Constance Garnett)

  Chekhov's best-known tale of a married man and woman who meet on holiday at Yalta and cannot let each other go, with other stories of provincial life, ambition and loneliness. Constance Garnett's translation keeps his light, painful touch.

  9 chapters · About 311 minutes of published text

• The Land That Time Forgot

  By Edgar Rice Burroughs

  The Land That Time Forgot is a fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Caspak trilogy. His working title for the story was "The Lost U-Boat". The sequence was first published in Blue Book Magazine as a three-part serial in the issues for August (vol. 27 #4), October (vol. 27 #6), and December (vol. 28 #2) 1918. The complete trilogy was later combined for publication in book form under the title of the first part by A. C. McClurg in June 1924. Beginning with the Ace Books editions of the 1960s, the three segments have usually been issued as separate short novels.

  10 chapters · About 162 minutes of published text

• The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757

  By James Fenimore Cooper

  The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is an 1826 historical romance novel by James Fenimore Cooper. It is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known to contemporary audiences. The Pathfinder, published 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel; its prequel, The Deerslayer, was published a year after The Pathfinder. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years' War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America.

  33 chapters · About 639 minutes of published text

• The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

  By Daniel Defoe

  Robinson Crusoe (KROO-soh, zoh) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and has been described as the first novel, or at least the first English novel – although these labels are disputed.

  20 chapters · About 525 minutes of published text