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The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. This text was acclaimed by Ivan Bunin as one of the finest in the language....

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Literature

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Joseph Andrews ... was the first published full-length novel of the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding, and indeed among the first novels in the English language. Published in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a ‘comic romance,’ it is the story of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams....

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Fiction, Literature

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A lecture on the art of fiction, given by the English critic Walter Besant on April 25, 1884, and an answer to the lecture by American writer Henry James in the same year. (Summary by Julie VW)...

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Literature

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Far From The Madding Crowd is Hardys fourth novel.It centres on the lives of five characters,Gabriel Oak,Bathsheba Everdene,Mr Boldwood,Sgt.Troy and Fanny Robin.The plot involves love,loyalty,death and betrayal and all this is delivered to us in Hardys most eloquent prose.The images of character and nature are painted for our minds eye with sublime style.Finally,but not least, Hardys use of the Greek chorus is unsurpassed in injecting comedy and nudging the story along(Summary by Tadhg Hynes)...

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Literature

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If you like Jane Austen, you will probably like this book!Mrs. Gaskell, as she was often referred to, is considered one of the greatest British novelists of the Victorian era. She was one of the earliest novelists ever to use dialect in her works, finding often that no word but the vernacular would suffice to convey the meaning she wanted to achieve. She was the author of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a much-acclaimed and sometimes-reviled biography of her friend and peer.Wives and Daughters revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s. The novel was first published in the Cornhill Magazine as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866. When Mrs Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Literature

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Maria Chapdelaine is one of the most famous French Canadian novels. It is the love story of Maria Chapdelaine, daughter of a peasant family in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region of Quebec, in the 1900s. It is often seen as an allegory of the French Canadian people, describing simple joys and great tragedies, the bonds of family, the importance of faith, and the strength of body and spirit needed to endure the harshness of life in Canada's northern wilderness. (Summary by Kim S and Sarah Jennings)...

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Literature

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The book is about three families in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. The three families represent different gradations of the Edwardian middle class: the Wilcoxes, who are rich capitalists with a fortune made in the Colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Tibby, and Helen), who represent the intellectual bourgeoisie and have a lot in common with the real-life Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, a couple who are struggling members of the lower-middle class. The Schlegel sisters try to help the poor Basts and try to make the Wilcoxes less prejudiced. The motto of the book is Only connect......

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Literature

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The ‘Card’ in question is Edward Henry Machin - His mother called him ‘Denry’. This light-hearted story is of his rise from humble beginnings as the son of a washerwoman and sempstress in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the pottery towns (which Arnold Bennett christened ‘The Five Towns’) of the English Midlands; how, by his own wits, enterprise and ‘nerve’ he rose to wealth, married bliss and public recognition as the youngest-ever mayor of his home town. “’And yet,’ demanded Councillor Barlow, ‘what’s he done? What great cause is he identified with?’ ‘He’s identified,’ said the speaker, ‘with the great cause of cheering us all up’.” (summary by Andy Minter)...

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Literature

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Stendhal - a German pen-name for a French writer who hated the English. Contemporary to some of the great names of French literature like Balzac and Flaubert, Stendhal is quite often considered a writer that doesn't seem to fit a defined genre. Some say he's a Romantic, others that he's a Modernist and that Le Rouge et Le Noir is the first modern novel. On one point they are all agreed: the novel is a masterpiece that shows a young theology student - Julien Sorel - intelligent, handsome and who is determined to rise above his humble peasant origins. Stendhal presents the reader with a satirical plot that will involve you in passions, intrigues, last-minute reversals and, mostly, the hypocrisy by which society operates. (Summary by sailormoon)...

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Literature

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Ruin is a tale that is not a tale. It is a microscopic peering into the unpleasant fabric of human sustainability. It is a real person wrought by sabotaging the very nature of storytelling. It is a description of love, that is, the deliberate perversion of it in order to fulfill one's needs, which is to say it is the banal record of everyday life. It is a collection of details that follow the details that preceded it in A Book of Nightmares. It is not a happy book. It is full of elegiac contemplation on suffering, helplessness, holiness and unrelenting sexual isolation. It is blunt and graphic and painfully beautiful. It has little plot, and no punctuation, and might, just might, be the poetry for which America has been unconsciously waiting....

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there is only love in its various forms and manifestations and by it we either see or we do not see it has been eight years since my last report I am home again if this house can be said to have been a home to me or rather if it can still so be called many years have scampered in and eaten away at what I remember was a modest structure with a mild economical luster ......

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Epigraph Ruin About the Author About William Ralph Press

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Excerpt: If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the ?Attic salt? so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree....

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readers present the eighth collection of monologues from Shakespeare’s plays. Containing 20 parts. William Shakespeare (April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) remains widely to be considered the single greatest playwright of all time. He wrote in such a variety of genres - tragedy, comedy, romance, &c - that there is always at least one monologue in each of his plays. Some of these teach a lesson, some simply characterize Shakespeare at his best, some are funny, some sad, but all are very moving. Each monologue will touch everybody differently. Some people will be so moved by a particular monologue that they will want to record it. (summary by Shurtagal)...

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Literature, Play, Poetry

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Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is widely considered to be the greatest English-language biography ever written. It was revolutionary in its efforts to represent Johnson as he was, celebrating his flaws as well as his genius, and in Boswell's decision to represent Johnson primarily by quoting his writings and relating personal anecdotes rather than relying on matters of public record. From the time of its publication till now, The Life of Johnson has been one of the most popular and influential books ever written. (Summary by Kirsten Ferreri.)...

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Biography, Literature, Memoirs

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Excerpt: In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigour of the reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as this may seem, it is none the less true....

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This is volume 4 of 4. -- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (or, more briefly, Tristram Shandy ) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years. It was not always held in high esteem by other writers (Samuel Johnson responded that, Nothing odd can last), but its bawdy humour was popular with London society, and it has come to be seen as one of the greatest comic novels in English, as well as a forerunner for many modern narrative devices. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Fiction, Literature

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Excerpt: The First Part of Henry the Fourth with the Life and Death of Henry Sirnamed Hot-Spurred; Actus Primus -- Scoena Prima -- Enter the King, Lord John of Lancaster, Earle of Westmerland, with others. King. So shaken as we are, so wan with care, Finde we a time for frighted Peace to pant, And breath shortwinded accents of new broils To be commenc?d in Stronds afarre remote: No more the thirsty entrance of this Soile, Shall daube her lippes with her owne childrens blood: No more shall trenching Warre channell her fields, Nor bruise her Flowrets with the Armed hoofes Of hostile paces. Those opposed eyes, Which like the Meteors of a troubled Heaven, All of one Nature, of one Substance bred, Did lately meete in the intestine shocke, And furious cloze of civill Butchery, Shall now in mutuall well- beseeming rankes March all one way, and be no more oppos?d Against Acquaintance, Kindred, and Allies. The edge of Warre, like an ill- sheathed knife, No more shall cut his Master. Therefore Friends, As farre as to the Sepulcher of Christ, Whose Souldier now under whose blessed Crosse We are impressed and ingag?d to fight, Forthwith a power...

Table of Contents Details
Table of Contents: The First Part of Henry the Fourth, 1 -- Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., 1 -- Scaena Secunda., 3 -- Scoena Tertia., 8 -- Actus Secundus. Scena Prima., 15 -- Scaena Secunda., 17 -- Scoena Tertia., 20 -- Scena Quarta., 22 -- Actus Tertius. Scena Prima., 34 -- Scaena Secunda., 41 -- Scena Tertia., 45 -- Actus Quartus. Scoena Prima., 50 -- Scaena Secunda., 53 -- Scoena Tertia., 55 -- Scena Quarta., 58 -- Actus Quintus. Scena Prima., 59 -- Scena Secunda., 62 -- Scena Tertia., 66 -- Scaena Quarta., 70...

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (or, more briefly, Tristram Shandy ) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years. It was not always held in high esteem by other writers (Samuel Johnson responded that, Nothing odd can last), but its bawdy humour was popular with London society, and it has come to be seen as one of the greatest comic novels in English, as well as a forerunner for many modern narrative devices. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Fiction, Literature

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Excerpt: Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Book the First, translated by Charles Cotton, Ed. William Carew Hazilitt.

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Contents PREFACE..................................................................................................................................................................... 6 THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE ...................................................................................................................................... 9 THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE ............................................................................................................................. 24 CHAPTER I THAT MEN BY VARIOUS WAYS ARRIVE AT THE SAME END............................................... 57 CHAPTER II OF SORROW .................................................................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER III THAT OUR AFFECTIONS CARRY THEMSELVES BEYOND US ......................................... 66 CHAPTER IV THAT THE SOUL EXPENDS ITS PASSIONS UPON FALSE OBJECTS, WHERE THE TRUE ARE WANTING....................................................................................................................................... 74 CHAPTER V WHETHER THE GOVERNOR OF A PLACE BESIEGED OU...

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Excerpt: The Perils of Certain English Prisoners by Charles Dickens.

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Excerpt: St. Ives, The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England by Robert Louis Stevenson.