The Graphic Canon by Book
The classic canon of Western civilization meets the artists and illustrators who have remade reading in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Russ Kick's magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. - Amazon
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Pri...
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Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown
The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Ancient Iraq and is among the earliest known works of literary writings. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems abo...
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The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
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The Poems of Sappho by Sappho
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she d...
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Lysistrata by Aristophanes
This classic comedy — from the 5th century BC — concerns the vow of Greek women to withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to end the disastrous wars between Athens and Sparta. An exub...
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The Hebrew Bible by Jewish scripture
The Hebrew Bible is a term referring to the books of the Jewish Bible as originally written mostly in Biblical Hebrew with some Biblical Aramaic. The term closely corresponds to contents of the Jew...
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Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
The Tao Te Ching or Dao De Jing, originally known as Laozi, a record-keeper at the Zhou Dynasty court, by whose name the text is known in China. The text's true authorship and date of composition o...
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Mahabharata by Vyasa
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. The epic is part of the Hindu itihāsa (literally "history"), and forms an important part of Hi...
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De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
De rerum natura is a first century BC epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in dactylic hexam...
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The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji is a classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, around the peak of the Heian Period. It is sometimes...
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One Thousand and One Nights by India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Ni...
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
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The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a mo...
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Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
Le Morte d'Arthur (spelled Le Morte Darthur in the first printing and also in some modern editions, Middle French for la mort d'Arthur, "the death of Arthur") is Sir Thomas Malory's compilation of ...
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Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en
Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming Dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In En...
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The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its fo...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare between 1590 and 1596. It is one of his most played pieces. The events of the play take place in and around Athens in ancient Gr...
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King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1603 and 1606. It is considered one of his greatest works. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a...
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Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Macbeth, commonly just Macbeth, is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometim...
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The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's sonnets, or simply The Sonnets, is a collection of poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as time, love, beauty and mutability. They were proba...
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Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes th...
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The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne by John Donne
John Donne (/ˈdʌn/ dun) (between 24 January and 19 June 1572[1] – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the me...
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Paradise Lost by John Milton
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books. A second edition followed in 1674, redivided into twelve...
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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
From the preeminent prose satirist in the English language, a great classic recounting the four remarkable journeys of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver. For children it remains an enchanting fantasy;...
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of...
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Dangerous Liaison by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Its prime movers, the Vicomte...
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A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With 200 million copies sold, it is the most printed original English boo...
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shoc...
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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Am...
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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbors she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl, is the product ...
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The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Samuel Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊləˌrɪdʒ/; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic M...
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the ...
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Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul are two books of poetry by the English poet and painter, William Blake. Although Songs of Innocence was first...
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The book is narrated in free indirect speech following the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with matters of upbringing, marriage, moral rightness and education in her aristocratic socie...
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Selected Poems of Lord Byron by Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure...
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The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (/ˈpɜrsi ˈbɪʃ ˈʃɛli/;[2] 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the English l...
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The Poems of John Keats by John Keats
John Keats (/ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bys...
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
At this challenge, Mary Shelley began work on the 'ghost story' that was to evolve into the most celebrated horror novel in literary history. Frankenstein was published the next year and become the...
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Household Tales by Brothers Grimm
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection ...
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The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake by William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English painter, poet and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of t...
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Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson
a Danish author and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and the "The Ugl...
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The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
At the heart of Charles Dickens's second novel, first published in 1838, is a story as much about crime and poverty as it is about justice and charity. Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist grows up unde...
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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery...
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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan. The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead...
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The narrative is non-linear, involving several flashbacks, and two primary narrators: Mr. Lockwood and Ellen "Nelly" Dean. The novel opens in 1801, with Mr. Lockwood arriving at Thrushcross Grange,...
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Moby Dick by Herman Melville
First published in 1851, Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white wh...
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Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.
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Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Roc...
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On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on Thursday 24 November 1859, is a seminal work of scientific literature considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title...
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Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables is a novel by French author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters ov...
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Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted ...
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps th...
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Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is a novel by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Set some six months later...
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is a murder story, told from a murder;s point of view, that implicates even the most innocent reader in its enormities. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a tormented young killer and a cheerful...
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final i...
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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 endu...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl...
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Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four ...
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Spawned by a nightmare that Stevenson had, this classic tale of the dark, primordial night of the soul remains a masterpiece of the duality of good and evil within us all.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Celebrated novel traces the moral degeneration of a handsome young Londoner from an innocent fop into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure and, ultimately, a murderer. As Dorian Gray sinks into...
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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not specify the name of th...
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin
First published in 1899, this novel shocked readers with its open sensuality and uninhibited treatment of marital infidelity. Poignant and lyrical, it tells the story of a New Orleans wife who atte...
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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
This book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a...
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. Thanks in part to the 1939 MGM movie, it is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been wid...
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A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
British social comedy examines a young heroine's struggle against strait-laced Victorian attitudes as she rejects the man her family has encouraged her to marry and chooses, instead, a socially uns...
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Dubliners by James Joyce
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. The fifteen stories were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dub...
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The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely st...
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Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. This collection, The Short Stories, originally published in 1938, is definitiv...
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The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1945 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking wo...
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Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction — evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet mo...
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Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature.
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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence centers on an upperclass couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assump...
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The Poems of Wilfred Owen by Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors o...
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The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all Kafka's short stories. With the exception of Kafka's three novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika), this collection includes all of Ka...
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To the Lighthouse 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, skillfully manipulates temporality and psycholog...
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Collected Stories by William Somerset Maugham
Thirty-one short stories which provide a rich view of Maugham's prolific talent, wide-ranging vision, and engaging style.
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Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyss...
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Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his l...
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The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner
This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds readers of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets....
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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Classic novel that has inspired generations of seekers. Blending Eastern mysticism and psychoanalysis, Hesse presents a strikingly original view of man and culture and the arduous process of self-d...
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar...
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Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf (orig. German Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining ...
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Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped i...
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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their fa...
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, ...
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embod...
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Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre's greatest novel — and existentialism's key text — now introduced by James Wood. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressio...
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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
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Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges'...
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The Stranger by Albert Camus
Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story ...
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Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm is a dystopian novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democrat...
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The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor by Flannery O'Connor
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do n...
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Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literatur...
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The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
The Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren that recounts the life of "Frankie Machine", a card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run not far from the tenement in which he lives. Ma...
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Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (pronounced /ˈɡɒdoʊ/) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects...
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lord of the Flies discusses how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results....
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and se...
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On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the post...
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Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs himself stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie Willia...
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Narrated by the gigantic but docile half-Indian "Chief" Bromden, who has pretended to be a deaf-mute for several years, the story focuses on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, a ...
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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of...
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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Ма́стер и Маргари́та) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consi...
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning car...
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Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertake...
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Crash: A Novel by J. G. Ballard
In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto cr...
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Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Presents a collection of sixty short stories by twentieth-century American author Donald Barthelme.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is the name of both a 1981 collection of short stories and the title of a story within the collection by the American writer Raymond Carver. Plots from...
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Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Janey Smith keeps a journal of her dreams and experiences as she is rejected by her father, kidnapped by thieves, and sold into prostitution
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Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It was McCarthy's fifth book, and was published by Random House. The narrative foll...
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The Famished Road by Ben Okri
The Famished Road is the Booker Prize-winning novel written by Nigerian author Ben Okri. The novel, published in 1991, follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed most likely Nige...
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル, Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru?) is a novel by Haruki Murakami. The first published translation was by Alfred Birnbaum. The American translation and its British ad...
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Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America. The novel touches on the topics of tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child a...
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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. It was first published in English in 1925 as Death in Venice and Oth...
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Native American Folktales by Thomas A. Green
Presents thirty-one stories selected from North American native traditions, organized into such categories as origins, heroes, heroines, villains, society and conflict, and the supernatural.
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The Three Hundred Tang Poems by China
The Three Hundred Tang Poems (simplified Chinese: 唐诗三百首; traditional Chinese: 唐詩三百首; pinyin: Tángshī sānbǎi shǒu) is an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618 - 907) first compiled a...
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Awakening Upon Dying by Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Awakening Upon Dying, with introductory commentary by Dzogchen Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, is a new translation of the ancient text also known as The Great ...
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The Poems of Francois Villon by François Villon
François Villon (in modern French, pronounced [fʁɑ̃swa vijɔ̃]; in fifteenth-century French, [frɑnswɛ viˈlɔn]) born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared from view in 1463, is the best known French poet ...
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Apu Ollontay by Peru
Ollantay is a dramatic play, originally written in the Quechua language. It is considered by some to be of Incan origin---and as such the oldest and deepest expression of Quechua literature---while...
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Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe by Japan
Hagoromo (羽衣 The Feather Mantle?) is among the most-performed Japanese Noh plays. It is an example of the traditional swan maiden motif. - Wikipedia
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The Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Naian
The Water Margin, known in China as Shuihu Zhuan, is one of the "Four Great Classical Novels" of vernacular Chinese literature, despite being banned by Imperial Edict at the end of the Ming Dynasty...
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Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life by Dennis Tedlock
Popol Vuh, the Quiche Mayan book of creation is not only the most important text in the native language of the Americas, it is also an extraordinary document of the human imagination. It begins wit...
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The Works of George Peele by George Peele
George Peele (baptised 25 July 1556 – buried 9 November 1596) was an English translator, poet, and dramatist, who is most noted for his supposed but not universally accepted collaboration with Will...
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Selected Poems by Andrew Marvell
"The quality which [Andrew] Marvell had," T.S. Eliot remarked, "whether we call it wit or reason or even urbanity.is something precious and needed and apparently extinct." This selection does justi...
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Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn, the poet, playwright, novelist and political satirist was the first truly professional woman writer in English. This selection, edited and introduced by Professor Janet Todd, demonstrat...
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A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works by Jonathan Swift
Treasury of five shorter works by the author of Gulliver's Travels offers ample evidence of the great satirist's inspired lampoonery. Title piece plus The Battle of the Books, A Meditation Upon a B...
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The life and letters of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin FRS (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and in many ways was "the First American". A renowned polymath,...
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Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 by James Boswell
In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and t...
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The Confessions of Nat Turner by Nat Turner, Thomas R. Gray
Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted i...
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Foliage: Or, Poems Original and Translated by Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist, poet, and writer. - Wikipedia
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Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear
A collection of over 100 limericks with the author's original illustrations
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number o...
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Le Bateau Ivre by Arthur Rimbaud
"Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat") is a 100-line verse-poem written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud. The poem describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narr...
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The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, in Eight Fits by Lewis Carroll
The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) is typically categorized as a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Written from 1874 to 1876, the poem bor...
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Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
Dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs lead our narrator to a manuscript, Memoirs of a Suprasensual Man. This manuscript tells of a man, Severin, who is so infatuated with a wo...
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The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz Hugh Ludlow
The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract. ...
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Struwwelpeter, Or, Merry Rhymes and Funny Pictures... by Heinrich Hoffmann
Der Struwwelpeter (1845) (or Shockheaded Peter) is a German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann. It comprises ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly about children. Each has a clear moral that...
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Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Presents a complete collection of poems by the English author along with a chronology, further reading, and notes.
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
During the United States Civil War, a condemned man has many thoughts as he stands on a bridge, awaiting hanging.
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Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, ...
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The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
Using an ocean voyage as the setting, this novel shows people's lack of understanding of each other.
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The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes
Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes's poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through th...
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Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
The decadence and violence of the urban streets is graphically portrayed in a novel set in a New York slum
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Best Science Fiction Stories of H. G. Wells by H. G. Wells
Eighteen supernatural tales deal with such phenomena as an invisible man, a crystal egg from Mars, a blood-sucking orchid
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Collected Short Stories of Saki by Saki
The extraordinary stories of 'Saki' are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried.
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The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky by Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky continues to be regarded as the greatest literary representative of revolutionary Russia. Born of the people, and having experienced in his own person their sufferings and their misery,...
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If: A Father's Advice to His Son by Rudyard Kipling
An illustrated version of one of Kipling's famous poems about a father's advice to his son.
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The Complete Short Stories of Jack London by Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world ...
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Selected Stories by D. H. Lawrence
Because of his frank and honest portrayal of human sexuality in the controversial works for which he is best known, e.g. Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence was not widely res...
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Collected Poems 1912-1944 by Hilda Doolittle
Gathers poems from each period of Hilda Doolittle's career and includes background information on her major works
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The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran
A collection of the major works of the celebrated poet, artist, and mystic features an array of stories, parables, prose poems, and essays that include "The Prophet," "The Wanderer," "Jesus the Son...
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The Complete Stories by Zora Neale Hurston
This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction—most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime—reveals the evolution of one of the most important African Americ...
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Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt
"Black Elk Speaks is the story of the Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during the momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. Black Elk met the dist...
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Collected Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the di...
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Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral by Gabriela Mistral
The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, ...
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The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934 by Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin (Spanish: [anaˈis ˈnin]; born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell; February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was an author born to Cuban parents in France, where she was a...
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In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
n Watermelon Sugar is a novel written by Richard Brautigan and published in 1968. It is a tale of a commune organized around a central gathering house which is named "iDEATH". In this environment, ...
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Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indica...
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Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula by Barry Gifford
Despite her mother's disapproval, Lula Pace Fortune joins her boyfriend, Sailor Ripley, when he finishes serving his prison sentence for murder
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Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
An imaginary re-creation of Einstein's discovery of the nature of time, this novel takes us through the young patent clerk's many dreams depicting compelling conceptions of time.
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Poems of Rumi by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Maulana)
Rumi, or The Master as he is referred to in Greater Iran, recited his poetry in a state of ecstasy induced by music and dance. This work presents a translation of his poems from the original Persia...
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The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
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The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
“For many successive generations now, ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ and ‘Four Quartets’ have continued to excited readers and to inspire young poets. Teenagers still disc...
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