Browse books
1084 books found.
Candida
By Bernard Shaw
The Reverend James Morell, a popular socialist preacher, is sure of the love of his wife Candida until a young poet, Eugene Marchbanks, tells him how little he understands her. She is asked to choose between them, and her choice is not the one the men expect.
3 chapters · About 98 minutes of published text
Candide, ou l'optimisme
By Voltaire
Candide, raised in a Westphalian castle by a tutor who teaches that all is for the best, is kicked out for kissing the baron's daughter. His travels through war, earthquake, shipwreck and the Inquisition put that philosophy to a long and comic test.
30 chapters · About 143 minutes of published text
Carl Svenske: Historisk berättelse från frihetstiden
By Gustaf Björlin
Sweden in the early 1740s is split between the warlike Hats and the cautious Caps, and the Hats are pushing the country toward a war of revenge on Russia. Gustaf Björlin follows the young Carl Svenske through the party intrigues of Stockholm and the campaign in Finland that came of them, in an illustrated historical tale of the Age of Liberty.
26 chapters · About 508 minutes of published text
Carlota Ângela
By Camilo Castelo Branco
In Porto in 1806 the wealthy Norberto de Meirelles and his wife watch their fortune grow along with their only daughter, who is being adorned to attract a rich husband. Camilo tells the story of the girl and the choices made for her with a narrator who jokes about how to begin.
19 chapters · About 206 minutes of published text
Carmen
By Prosper Mérimée (translated by Mary Loyd)
Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella, the source of the opera, tells of an antiquarian who meets the bandit Don Jose and the gypsy Carmen in Andalusia. A reader finds a short, fierce tale of love and jealousy.
4 chapters · About 104 minutes of published text
Carmilla
By J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla is an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A foundational work of English-language vampire literature, it predated Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 25 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue from 1871–72, the novella subsequently appeared in Le Fanu’s short story collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872. Set in 19th-century Styria, it is the story of a young woman who is pursued by the vampire Carmilla. Since its initial publication, Carmilla has often been regarded as one of the most influential vampire stories of all time; its title character is the literary prototype for the female and lesbian vampires in fiction.
16 chapters · About 121 minutes of published text
Cartas desde mi celda
By Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Nine letters written from the monastery of Veruela, where the poet went to recover his health, describe the Moncayo mountains, their legends and the people who live there. Bécquer's lyrical prose mixes landscape, folk tale and memory.
9 chapters · About 156 minutes of published text
Casa de Pensão
By Aluísio Azevedo
Amâncio, a young man from Maranhão sent to Rio de Janeiro to study medicine, falls into the hands of a boarding-house keeper, Madame Brizard, and a circle of hangers-on. Aluísio Azevedo's novel of 1884, based on a scandal of the day, follows the slow ruin of a spoiled young provincial in the city.
22 chapters · About 415 minutes of published text
Caspar Hauser; oder, Die Trägheit des Herzens, Roman
By Jakob Wassermann
In 1828 a strange youth appears in Nuremberg, barely able to speak or walk, holding a letter that explains nothing. Wassermann's novel follows Caspar as teachers, officials and a mysterious English lord take him up, study him and use him, while rumours of noble birth gather around him. A story about innocence and the cold hearts of those meant to protect it.
25 chapters · About 572 minutes of published text
Catriona
By Robert Louis Stevenson
Catriona (also known as David Balfour) is an 1893 novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson as a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped (1886). It was first published in the magazine Atalanta from December 1892 to September 1893. The novel continues the story of the central character in Kidnapped, David Balfour.
30 chapters · About 436 minutes of published text
Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel
By Cirilo Villaverde
In colonial Havana in the 1830s, the beautiful mixed-race Cecilia Valdés catches the eye of Leonardo Gamboa, son of a rich slave-trading family. Their romance unfolds against a society built on slavery and the colour line, which Villaverde paints in great detail.
45 chapters · About 821 minutes of published text
Cenas da Foz
By Camilo Castelo Branco
In 1825 a family from Amarante comes to take the sea air at São João da Foz, bringing a mother and daughter with a great many surnames, maids, dogs and a Galician stable-hand. A comic novel of manners seen from a narrator who also lodges there.
39 chapters · About 222 minutes of published text
Cham
By Eliza Orzeszkowa
Paweł Kobycki, a silent widowed fisherman, lives on the high bank of the Niemen and prefers the river to the loom and the farm. Orzeszkowa's short novel of 1888 follows his life with Franka among the villagers of the river, and closes years later with the old fisherman and a fair-haired boy in his boat.
6 chapters · About 264 minutes of published text
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
By Lord Byron
Byron's Childe Harold, a world-weary young man, travels through Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy and the Alps, and the narrator's meditations on ruins, battles and liberty become the poem. The first two cantos made Byron famous overnight in 1812, and the last two were written in exile.
4 chapters · About 161 minutes of published text
Chłopi
By Władysław Reymont
In the village of Lipce, the rich widower Maciej Boryna marries the beautiful Jagna, and the match shakes his family, his neighbours and his own son. Reymont's Nobel Prize novel follows the village through autumn, winter, spring and summer, in the rhythm of the land and the church.
49 chapters · About 1369 minutes of published text
Cinco Minutos
By José de Alencar
Alencar's first novel is a confidence written to a cousin: the narrator tells how a missed omnibus at the Rocio, five minutes late, started a love story he insists is a history and not a novel. Short, ironic and quick, it is an early picture of Rio in the 1850s.
10 chapters · About 62 minutes of published text
Clara dos Anjos
By Lima Barreto
Clara, a sheltered girl in a modest family of the Rio de Janeiro suburbs, grows up among serenades and respectable neighbours, while Cassi Jones, a guitar-playing young man with a reputation, takes notice of her. Lima Barreto's last novel is a plain and angry picture of the lives of poor black and mixed-race families in the city.
10 chapters · About 219 minutes of published text
Cognac-idillek: novellák
By Tamás Kóbor
Short fiction by the Budapest novelist and journalist Tamás Kóbor. It opens with the Cognac Idylls, ten linked pieces told by a sleepless narrator, and goes on to stories and brief tales of city people, their marriages and their small misfortunes.
39 chapters · About 272 minutes of published text
Colomba
By Prosper Mérimée
Colomba is a novella by Prosper Mérimée. The novella first appeared on 1 July 1840 in the Revue des Deux Mondes and was collected with two other stories, "La Vénus d'Ille" and "Les Ames du Purgatoire", under the title Colomba, published in 1841 by Magen et Comon.
21 chapters · About 201 minutes of published text
Contes cruels
By Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Contes cruels (Cruel Tales) is a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier. The title was taken from Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, of whom Mirbeau was a friend and admirer.
28 chapters · About 310 minutes of published text
Contos
By Eça de Queirós
A collection of Eça de Queirós's short fiction, gathered after his death. It ranges from realist sketches of Portuguese life to legends and parables, among them the tale of a treasure that turns three brothers against one another.
12 chapters · About 299 minutes of published text
Contos
By Fialho de Almeida
The first book of tales by Fialho de Almeida, published at Porto in 1881, gathers thirteen stories, among them A Ruiva, Sempre Amigos, O Tio da América and O Milagre do Convento. They are early, lively and sometimes sentimental pictures of love, money and small-town life.
13 chapters · About 331 minutes of published text
Contos e Fantasias
By Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho
A collection by Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho. The first part gathers short stories, among them Uma História Verdadeira, O Tio Sebastião and A Morte de Bertha, and the second adds literary and biographical sketches such as Madame de Balzac and Lincoln e Grant.
15 chapters · About 222 minutes of published text
Contos e Lendas
By Luís Augusto Rebelo da Silva
Four historical tales and legends by Rebelo da Silva: A Torre de Caim, O Castelo de Almourol, A Camisa do Noivado and a story of the last bullfight at Salvaterra. They tell of knights, monks and kings of Portugal's past in the romantic manner of the 1850s.
4 chapters · About 133 minutes of published text