Diary of a Madman (1835; Russian: Записки сумасшедшего, Zapiski sumasshedshevo) is a farcical short story by Nikolai Gogol. Along with The Overcoat and The Nose, Diary of a Madman is considered...
12 Fairy Tales from the author of the Wizard of Oz series of books. Inspired by Lang and the Brothers Grimm, Baum sought to create an American type of fairy tales, avoiding the usual violence and roman often...
Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before and after the American Civil War. The book begins with a brief history of the river....
Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Antichrist" might be more aptly named "The Antichristian," for it is an unmitigated attack on Christianity that Nietzsche makes within the text instead of an exposition on evil or...
Chesterton was an orthodox religious person, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism. In 1923, he wrote this short biography of St. Francis of Assisi, after whom Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose his papal...
A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered...
One of the earliest science fantasy stories ever written, From the Earth to the Moon follows three wealthy members of a post-Civil War gun club who design and build an enormous columbiad -- and ride a spaceship...
Hanney, an expatriated Scot, returns from a long stay in South Africa to his flat in London. One night he is buttonholed by an American who appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, and claims...
Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure...
“The Way of the Bow” relates the story of Tetsuya, the best archer of the country, who conveys his teachings to a boy in his village. Using the metaphor of archery the author leads us through several essential...
The Book of Tea was written by Okakura Kakuzo in the early 20th century. It was first published in 1906, and has since been republished many times. In the book, Kakuzo introduces the term Teaism and how Tea...
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of...
Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition,...
"The Most Dangerous Game" features as its main character a big-game hunter from New York, who becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island in the Caribbean, and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is an...
Miyamoto Musashi's Go Rin no Sho or the book of five rings, is considered a classic treatise on military strategy, much like Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Chanakya's Arthashastra. The five "books" refer to the...
Edward Prendick is shipwrecked in the Pacific. Rescued by Doctor Moreau's assistant he is taken to the doctor's island home where he discovers the doctor has been experimenting on the animal inhabitants of the...
"The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928. It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which...