Mattia Pascal grew up in a small Italian town not dissimilar to that of the author's upbringing. Pascal leads a somewhat feckless boyhood, allowing opportunities to slip away from him and living on the accumulated but dwindling resources of his...

Mr. Clark and Donald spend a year out west to the Crescent Ranch in Idaho learning about raising sheep. (summary by David O)...

Charles Haddon (C.H.) Spurgeon (19 June 1834 – 31 January 1892) was a British Particular Baptist preacher and is still known today as the "Prince of Preachers". He was a strong figure in the Reformed Baptist tradition, defending the Church in...

Austin Ford, the London correspondent of the New York Republic, is spending some idle time in the American Embassy chatting with the Second Secretary, when suddenly a note is brought in. This note is an appeal for help, found in the gutter in a dark...

Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. The...

The Commentaries on the Laws of England are an influential 18th century treatise on the common law of England by Sir William Blackstone, originally published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, 1765-1769. The Commentaries were long regarded as the...

This second letter from the Apostle Paul to the congregation of believers in the bustling port city of Corinth gives us a much more personal understanding of Paul's apostleship. He defends it rigorously, convincing his followers of his authority...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 different recordings of Robinson Crusoe's Story by Charles Edward Carryl, published in "Modern American Poetry" in 1919....

Samuel Butler's biographer dedicates his urbane account of the culture and entertainments of rural Sicily to the unborn son of his guide to them. (Summary by R. S. Steinberg)...

Four Science Fiction stories published in Science Fiction Adventures Magazine and Galaxy Science Fiction, written by Alan Edward Nourse (August 11, 1928 – July 19, 1992). He was an American science fiction writer and physician. He wrote both...

Aline Murray Kilmer (August 1, 1888 – October 1, 1941), was an American poet, children's book author, and essayist, and the wife and widow of poet and journalist Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918).Aline attended the Rutgers College Preparatory School with her...

The Riddle of the Universe is the philosophical work of Ernst Haeckel, eminent biologist, in which he explores the meaning of life, the nature of reality, and the connection between physiology and thought. (Summary by A. Gramour)...

Looking for a replacement to Sherlock Holmes after the author had killed him off in 1894, Doyle wrote this murder mystery in the dying years of the 19th century. Set in Napoleon's era, it involves a Frenchman returning to his native land to join the...

Published in 1859, On Liberty details Mill's view that individuals should be left wholly free to engage in any activity, thought or belief that does not harm others. Simple though it sounds, it is a position that challenges our ideas on the very...

The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853. Intending to prove how the architecture in Venice exemplified the principles he discussed in...

Browning, when at his best in vigor, clearness, and beauty, is peculiarly a poet for young people. His freedom from sentimentality, his liveliness of conception and narration, his high optimism, and his interest in the things that make for the life...

In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, confined in her madness; mute, or eerily chanting in her moated grange. The first Mrs Rochester lurks in the...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948) was the pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, a philosophy firmly...

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James that comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on "Natural Theology" delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland...

The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pound’s English translations/interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly...