Classics

Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist is born an orphan and grows up handed from bad position to worse. Eventually he ends up in the London street gang run by Fagin, who attempts to blacken the boy's pure soul in his service. Through...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

by L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz chronicles the adventure of Dorothea in the land of Oz. A cyclone picks her up from her Kansas home, where she lives with her aunt and uncle, and deposits her in the fantastical land....

Othello

by William Shakespeare

Othello, The Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603. The work revolves around four central characters: Othello, his wife Desdemona, his lieutenant...

The Black Tulip

by Alexandre Dumas

Craving some first-rate historical fiction? Slip into this tale of intrigue and romance from Alexandre Dumas (pere), who is regarded by critics as one of the masters of the genre. In The Black Tulip, turmoil...

Castle Richmond

by Anthony Trollope

Castle Richmond is about the fortunes and relationships of two families of the Irish aristocracy, set against the harrowing background of the Great Famine. Sir Thomas Fitzgerald is being blackmailed by two disreputable...

Inferno

by Dante

"As poetry, Mr. Zappulla's English Dante is successful--. The power of Dante's descriptive poetry should be apparent, and that is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a translator."--Washington Times

In...

Siddhartha: An Indian Tale

by Hermann Hesse

Hesse's famous and influential novel, Siddartha, is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis...

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

First published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular and beloved British novels of all-time, maintaining its allure for contemporary readers everywhere and selling millions of copies worldwide!...

Leaves of Grass: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Walt Whitman

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has...

The Odyssey of Homer

by Homer

Homer's epic chronicle of the Greek hero Odysseus' journey home from the Trojan War has inspired  writers from Virgil to James Joyce. Odysseus  survives storm and shipwreck, the cave of the Cyclops  and...

The Canterbury Tales

by Geoffrey Chaucer

Lively, absorbing, often outrageously funny, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a work of genius, an undisputed classic that has held a special appeal for each generation of readers. The Tales gathers twenty-nine...

The Souls of Black Folk

by W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical,...

Sir Nigel and the White Company

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Perhaps the two best historical novels ever written about the Hundred Years War "[These two books] made an accurate picture of that great age, and that as a single piece of work they form the most complete,...

The Woman in White

by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is credited with being the first of the sensation novels, and one of the finest examples of the genre. A young woman's husband defrauds her of her fortune, her identity and eventually her...

The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham

The Moon and Sixpence is a fictional novel heavily influenced by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin. The novel is told first-person, dipping episodically into the mind of the artist. Charles Strickland...

Return of Tarzan

Tarzan #2

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Return of Tarzan is Edgar Rice Burroughs' second novel in the series starring the man raised by apes, and the story picks up where Tarzan of the Apes left off. Tarzan finds himself back in the coastal jungle...

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

An enchanting, romantic and thrilling story of one woman's struggle to overcome the suffocating social expectations of Victorian England to find happiness on her own terms.

The Time Machine

by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, from 1895, popularized the idea of a vehicle that allows its user to travel intentionally and selectively across time, and indeed Wells is credited with coining the very term "time...

Persuasion

by Jane Austen

When she was young and beautiful Anne Elliot fell in love with a dashing, but poor naval officer. Her family considered him beneath her and persuaded her to break off the match. Eight years later, when the novel...

Emile

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau wrote about the difficulty of being a good individual within an inherently corrupting collectivity: society. Emile deals specifically with education, and outlines a system which would allow for human...