Mr Polly is an ordinary middle-aged man who is tired of his wife’s nagging and his dreary job as the owner of a regional gentleman’s outfitters. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, he concludes that the...
Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south-west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. When the beautiful...
This is an 1881 compilation of Thomas Bulfinch's previous writings: The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855); The Age of Chivalry, or Legends of King Arthur (1858); and Legends of Charlemagne,...
The Practice of the Presence of God is a text compiled by Father Joseph de Beaufort of the wisdom and teachings of Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite monk. It is a collection of his letters, and records...
Margaret Earle, an Eastern girl, thinking she has reached her destination in Arizona, where she is going to teach school, steps off the train at a lonely, desert water tank, and the train moves on, leaving her...
Diane of the Green Van is a romance novel that was awarded the $10,000.00 prize in a novel contest in which over five hundred manuscripts were submitted.
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up...
In this short work (subtitled "A Little Book For Normal People") Evelyn Underhill, one of the 20th Century's leading scholars of Christian Mysticism, seeks "to put the view of the universe and man's place in...
Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable....
Hardy's masterpiece traces a poor stonemason's ill-fated romance with his free-spirited cousin. No Victorian institution is spared — marriage, religion, education — and the outrage following publication...
An enormous tidal wave on the west coast of North America has just killed thousands. Lenie Clarke, in a black wetsuit, walks out of the ocean onto a Pacific Northwest beach filled with the oppressed and drugged...
In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members...
To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920,...
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts...
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a novel by Lew Wallace published on November 12, 1880 by Harper & Brothers. Wallace's work is part of an important sub-genre of historical fiction set among the characters of...
The Age of Innocence centers on one society couple's impending marriage and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and mores...
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...