Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams...
A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of...
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no...
"I, Robot" is a science-fiction short story by Cory Doctorow published in 2005. The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type...
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man...
"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...
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...
Thoreau wrote his famous essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, as a protest against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of slave-owning.
Adam Smith's masterpiece, first published in 1776, is the foundation of modern economic thought and remains the single most important account of the rise of, and the principles behind, modern capitalism. Written...
War and Peace is a novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russkii Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's...
The Interpretation of Dreams is a book by Sigmund Freud. The first edition was first published in German in November 1899 as Die Traumdeutung (though post-dated as 1900 by the publisher). The publication inaugurated...
2 B R 0 2 B is a satiric short story that imagines life (and death) in a future world where aging has been “cured” and population control is mandated and administered by the government.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 science fiction novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. As a satire, Flatland offered pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian...
The Tao Te Ching is fundamental to the Taoist school of Chinese philosophy and strongly influenced other schools, such as Legalism and Neo-Confucianism. This ancient book is also central in Chinese religion,...
The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It is often considered, along with The Three Musketeers, as Dumas' most popular work. It is also...