"In a Grove" is an early modernist short story consisting of seven varying accounts of the murder of a samurai, Kanazawa no Takehiro, whose corpse has been found in a bamboo forest near Kyoto. Each section simultaneously...
The Symposium (Ancient Greek: Συμπόσιον) is a philosophical dialogue written by Plato sometime after 385 BC. It is a discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a group of speeches, both satirical...
The Discourse on the Method is a philosophical and mathematical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. Its full name is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth...
(The) Apology (of Socrates) is Plato's version of the speech given by Socrates as he defends himself against the charges of being a man "who corrupted the young, did not believe in the gods, and created new...
25 short, sometimes funny and sometimes mean stories ideal to rediscover the joy of reading a book as shiny and beautiful as a brand new cell phone. A look from a distance at the absurdity of our present day...
Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) is a French satire by the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, English translations of which have been titled Candide: Or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: Or, The Optimist (1762);...
The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime. According...
Nothing moved or stirred. Everything was silent, dead. Only the gun showed signs of life ... and the trespassers had wrecked that for all time. The return journey to pick up the treasure would be a cinch ......
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...
David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics,...
In the Year 2889 was first published in the Forum, February, 1889. It was published in France the next year. Although published under the name of Jules Verne, it is now believed to be chiefly if not entirely...
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra, sometimes translated Thus Spake Zarathustra), subtitled A Book for All and None (Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen), is a written work by German philosopher...
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (of York, Mariner Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River...
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a "monstrous...
Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in...
The Lost World is a novel released in 1912 by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning an expedition to a plateau in South America where prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and other extinct creatures) still survive. The character...
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...
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies...