Description Details
This is a story of an adventure involving a young man, his dog, and two friends. Together they wander through the Western prairies on a mission to make peace between the pale-faces and the Red men. They face many perils and become heroes many times over. This wonderful story takes the characters (and the reader) on an action-packed journey through the Western prairies during the times when relations between the white man and the Natives were not always peaceful. (Summary by Allyson Hester)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
The American Senator is a novel written in 1875 by Anthony Trollope. Although not one of Trollope's better-known works, it is notable for its depictions of rural English life and for its many detailed fox hunting scenes. In its anti-heroine, Arabella Trefoil, it presents a scathing but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a woman who has abandoned virtually all scruples in her quest for a husband. Through the eponymous Senator, Trollope offers comments on the irrational aspects of English life. (Description by Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Sixth in the Chautauqua Girls series. It picks up the characters of Dr. Stuart Everett and Joy Saunders introduced in Ester Ried Yet Speaking and follows them and other Christians in their work for the Master. Half-hearted and fully committed workers: all have an impact on those around them, for good or for ill. (Summary by Tricia G)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Die schöne Natalie Graybrooke liebt ihre Vetter Launcelot Linzie, doch ihr Vater, Sir Joseph Graybrooke, will sie mit seinem Geschäftsfreund Richard Turlington verheiraten. Weder ahnt er etwas von dessen dunkler Vergangenheit, noch weiß er, dass für Turlington die Hochzeit mit Natalie die einzige Möglichkeit ist, den Ruin seiner Firma abzuwenden. Da Natalie noch keine sechzehn Jahre alt ist, gibt es für die beiden Liebenden nur einen Ausweg, sie heiraten heimlich und müssen die Ehe bis zu Natalies sechzehntem Geburtstag geheim halten. Inzwischen macht Sir Joseph sein Testament und bestimmt den Mann, den er für seinen zukünftigen Schwiegersohn hält, zu seinem alleinigen Testamentsvollstrecker und Vermögensverwalter. Doch dann erfährt Turlington von der heimlichen Heirat. Alle seine Pläne sind gescheitert und er sieht seine letzte Rettung in Sir Josephs Testament. (Summary by Hokuspokus)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
With international book sales in the millions, Ralph Connor was the best-known Canadian novelist of the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. Glengarry School Days (1902), hugely popular in its time, is based on his memories of growing up in rural Ontario around the time of Canadian confederation. Although Connor saw himself as writing moral fiction for adults, generations of younger readers have also enjoyed these affectionate and gently amusing sketches, and excerpts from Glengarry School Days have appeared in school anthologies. (Summary by Bruce Pirie)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her story is universal but not, I think, banal - despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise. First Love is given its originality and poignancy by Turgenev's mastery of the piercing turning-point (akin to Joyce's epiphanies) that transforms the character's whole being, making a tragic outcome inevitable. Even the nature symbolism is rescued from triteness by lovely poetic similes - e.g. but at that point my attention was arrested by the appearance of a speckled woodpecker who busily climbed up the slender stem of a birch-tree and peeped out uneasily from behind it, first to the right, then to the left, like a musician behind the bass-viol. (Summary by Martin Geeson)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
One of the first books to be published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, Prelude is among Katherine Mansfield's most accomplished stories, inspired by her childhood in New Zealand. (Introduction by iremonger)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Bartley Alexander is a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges going through what's known today (but not in 1912) as a mid-life crisis. Although married to his wife Winifred, Bartley resumes his acquaintance with a former lover, Hilda Burgoyne, in London. The affair proves to gnaw at Bartley's sense of propriety and honor....

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Written in the years 1840 to 1841, when Dickens was twenty-eight years old, this is a ‘Road’ tale in the very best tradition. Little Nell Trent and her Grandfather are the main characters, who secretly set off from their home under cover of night, to escape the wicked dwarf Quilp. Pursued across England, their adventures lead them through poverty stricken city areas where several destitute people offer them aid on their way, into the countryside where they meet the strange, colorful, and sometimes menacing characters for which Dickens is so well known. Grandfather’s mind begins to wander, and he leans even more for help on Nell, who herself is feeling ill and weak. Eventually they reach a safe pasture with a kind gentleman and think their troubles may be over, but heart-breaking tragedy strikes. (Summary by Mil Nicholson)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
The Metamorphosis (in German, Die Verwandlung, The Transformation) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915, and arguably the most famous of his works along with the longer works The Trial and The Castle. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a giant monstrous vermin. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Nella Larsen, a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote two brilliant novels that interrogated issues of gender and race. In Passing, her second novel published in 1929, she examines the troubled friendship between two mixed-race women who can pass as white. One, Irene Redfield, marries a black man and lives in Harlem, while the other, Clare Kendry, marries a bigoted white man. Clare re-enters Irene's life after an absence of many years, and stirs up painful questions about identity. (Introduction by Elizabeth Klett)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding establishment called Beacon House, offered abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship. (Summary by Gilbert Keith Chesterton)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
I am very glad that The Story of the Seven Who Were Hanged will be read in English. The misfortune of us all is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another—neither about the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations, the aspirations of one another. Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances. -- Leonid Andreyev, in a letter to Herman Bernstein...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Joop en Sam wonen samen bij Juffrouw Meks in de Amsterdamse volksbuurt de Pijp. De vroeg-20ste-eeuwse, impressionistische roman Pijpelijntjes is een belangrijk literair document, dat helder de sociale situatie en het leven in een Amsterdamse volkswijk weergeeft. Het boek baarde in 1904 opzien, omdat het homosexualiteit tot thema heeft. Het boek is uitgegeven in twee versies. Hier wordt voorgelezen uit de eerste van die twee. Noot: De lezer die met de plattegrond van Amsterdam in de hand zou willen nagaan waar het verhaal van deze roman zich afspeelt, zal geen moeite hebben om de straten die genoemd worden te vinden. Met één uitzondering. Tegen het einde van zijn boek noemt De Haan de Hoedemakersstraat. De naam van deze straat werd later veranderd in Kuipersstraat....

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Sugilanon nga gisuwat ni Senador Vicente Rama bahin kang Amboy nga palahubog, ug ang iyang pamahala nga kinabuhi tungod sa iyang pagkapalahubog. Kini ay una nga istorya sa daghan nga nahabutang na istorya sa librong 'Larawan'. (Summary by April Gonzales)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Anthony Trollope sets the scene for his wonderful Chronicles of Barsetshire with this short novel about Septimus Harding's challenged ecclesiastical seat as the warden of Hiram's Hospital. To make things more interesting, the man doing the challenging - John Bold - also happens to be courting Mr. Harding's daughter, Eleanor. (Summary by JessicaLouise)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
The Blithedale Romance is the story of four principal characters who work with -- and sometimes against -- each other on Blithedale, a communal farm antecedent to those that sprang up later in the 1960s, and similar to one on which Hawthorne himself lived in 1841. These communes arose out of the pressures on society and the individual brought by the Industrial Revolution. Some were organized around religious philosophies, some were secular. Among the secularists, the Transcendental movement mentioned in the novel espoused the idea that the individual's intuition, rather than religious dogma, was the true path to spiritual enlightenment. Our four characters, like so many who fled to these communes, struggle to free mankind from bondage as they struggle with the unaccustomed day-to-day tasks of farm life. But they are plagued by a mystery that follows them from the world, and ultimately leads to tragedy. (Summary by Christine Dufour)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
A young red-head plots to kidnap her irritating cousin with the help of a former boxer, her uncle, and a rogue who has his eye on her. Things don't work out exactly as planned, as criminals, detectives and cases of mistaken identity all get in the way. (Summary by Carrie Bradfield)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Rain charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert a Pacific island prostitute named Sadie Thompson. (Introduction by an excerpt from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction

Description Details
Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English to express sympathy for African slaves. Perhaps based partly on Behn's own experiences living in Surinam, the novel tells the tragic story of a noble slave, Oroonoko, and his love Imoinda. The work was an instant success and was adapted for the stage in 1695 (and more recently by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999). Behn's work paved the way for women writers who came after her, as Virginia Woolf noted in a Room of One's Own (1928): All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, ... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction