Fiction

Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen, and was her first published work when it appeared in 1811 under the pseudonym "A Lady". A work of romantic fiction, better known as a comedy of manners, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England,London and Kent between 1792 and 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood...

Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816. She died, at age 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December of that year (but dated 1818).  Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume...

The Light That Failed is a novel by Rudyard Kipling that was first published in 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine dated January 1891. Most of the novel is set in London, but many important events throughout the story occur in Sudan or India. The Light that Failed follows the life of Dick Heldar, a painter who goes blind. A 1903 Broadway play starring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and his wife...

The Trespasser is the second novel written by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1912. Originally it was entitled the Saga of Siegmund and drew upon the experiences of a friend of Lawrence, Helen Corke, and her adulterous relationship with a married man that ended with his suicide. Lawrence worked from Corke's diary, with her permission, but also urged her to publish; which she did in 1933 as Neutral...

The House of the Dead (Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novelpublished in 1861 in the journal Vremyaby Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberianprison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The...

"The Canterville Ghost" is a popular short story by Oscar Wilde, widely adapted for the screen and stage. It was the first of Wilde's stories to be published, appearing in the magazine The Court and Society Review in February 1887. It was later included in a collection of short stories entitled Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories in 1891.  The...

Cashel Byron's Profession is George Bernard Shaw's fourth novel. The novel was written in 1882 and after rejection by several publishers it was published in serialized form in a socialist magazine. The novel was later published as a book in England and the United States. Shaw wrote five novels early in his career and then abandoned them to pursue politics, drama criticism...

The Gambler (Russian: Игрок, Igrok) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky about a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian general. The novella reflects Dostoyevsky's own addiction to roulette, which was in more ways than one the inspiration for the book: Dostoyevsky completed the novella under a strict deadline to pay off gambling...

Unsocial Socialist was published in 1887, having been written in 1883. The tale begins with a humorous description of student antics at a girl's school then changes focus to a seemingly uncouth laborer who, it soon develops, is really a wealthy gentleman in hiding from his overly affectionate wife. He needs the freedom gained by matrimonial truancy to promote the socialistic cause, to which...

This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of the life with which the book pretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels then. It was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first. That is to say, nobody would publish it, though I tried...

When being forced to political marriage, she – a lovely, dreamy princess who inherently not to be acquainted with competition over the wall – suddenly disobey The King’s order riskily, deploying troops entrenched in the castle because of wishing to protect her honor. As the heart telling, he – a passionate adventurer count, not being interested of authority – who...

The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Russian: Царство Божие внутри вас [Tsarstvo Bozhiye vnutri vas]) is a non-fiction book written by Leo Tolstoy. A philosophical treatise, the book was first published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in his home country of Russia. It is the culmination of thirty years of Tolstoy's Christian anarchist thinking, and lays out a new...

Just imagine a northern Vietnamese teen-age soldier and an American soldier imprisoned in a jungle cave by an ethnic tribe and forced to eat frogs and rats roasted by an open ire and you are immediately drawn into what can only be described as a very special if not unique story. This gripping and humane tale has been awarded a prize by the Vietnamese Association of Writers...