Classic KOMOEN

A Message from the Sea was a short story by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins written in 1860 for the Christmas issue of All the Year Round.

The Mysterious Island (French: L'Île mystérieuse) is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874. The original edition, published byHetzel, contains a number of illustrations by Jules Férat. The novel is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways, though thematically it is vastly different from those books. An early...

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergymanJonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length...

Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in thenovel are fully realized. Balzac conceived his ambitious project, The Human...

Once A Week is a collection of short stories and vignettes by A. A. Milne originally published in Punch. The collection was first published on 15 October 1914. The Heir Winter Sport A Baker's Dozen Getting Married  Home Affairs Other People's Houses Burlesques Merely Players The Men Who Succeed

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local...

Jacob's Room is the third novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 26 October 1922. The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or...

King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The titular character descends into madness after disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. Based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king, the play has been widely adapted for the stage and motion pictures, with the title role coveted by...

Fathers and Sons (Russian: Отцы и дети Ottsy i dety, IPA: [ɐˈtsɨ i ˈdʲetʲi]; archaic spelling Отцы и дѣти), also translated more literally as Fathers and Children, is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, one of his best-known works.  Arkady Kirsanov has just graduated from the University of Petersburg and returns with...

Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is an historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz inPolish. "Quo vadis Domine" is Latin for "Where are you going, Lord?" and alludes to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, in which Peter flees Rome but on his way meets Jesus and asks him why he is going to Rome. Jesus says, "I am going back to be crucified again", which makes...

American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June, 1842. Whilst there he acted as a critical observer of North American society, almost as if returning a status report on their progress. This can be compared to the style of his Pictures from Italy written four years later, where he wrote far more like a tourist. His...

Man and Superman is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juantheme. Man and Superman opened at The Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but omitted the 3rd Act. A part of the act, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal...

Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious...

Les Misérables (pronounced /leɪ ˌmɪzəˈrɑːb/ or /leɪ ˈmɪzəˌrɑːb/; French pronunciation: ​[le mizeʁabl(ə)]) is a French historical novel byVictor Hugo, first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by...

The Head of the House of Coombe is a 1922 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Head of the House of Coombe follows the relationships between a group of pre–World War One English nobles and commoners. It also offers both some interesting editorial commentary on the political system in prewar Europe that Burnett feels bears some responsibility for the war and some surprisingly pointed social...

Anna Karenina (Russian: «Анна Каренина»; Russian pronunciation: [ˈanːə kɐˈrʲenʲɪnə]) is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with editor Mikhail Katkovover political issues that arose in the final installment (Tolstoy's unpopular views of volunteers...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an 1891 philosophical novel by Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde. It was first published as aserial story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. As submitted by Wilde to the magazine, the editors feared the story was indecent, and deleted five hundred words before publication - without Wilde’s knowledge. Despite that censorship, The...

The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung, also sometimes translated as The Transformation) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It has been cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed...

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris) is a French Romantic/Gothic novel by Victor Hugo published in1831. The title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centered.  The novel's original French title, Notre-Dame de Paris (the formal title of the Cathedral) indicates that the...

The Home and the World (in the original Bengali, ঘরে বাইরে Ghôre Baire, lit. "At home [and] outside") is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore. The book illustrates the battle Tagore had with himself, between the ideas of Western culture and revolution against the Western culture. These two ideas are portrayed in two of the main characters, Nikhil, who is rational and opposes...