Description Details
Giles Dudley is called upon by his cousin Henry Wilton to assist him in San Francisco, but the reason for the summons is not at all clear. Dudley answers the summons, only to find himself immediately wrapped in the middle of mystery and intrigue, the roots and ends of which he is utterly unaware. He has been given to care for a mysterious young boy whom he hasn't even seen. His cousin has mysteriously disappeared. Dudley's role in the mystery has him convinced that as he goes about trying to assist his cousin with whatever it was he wanted to accomplish, he does so completely blindfolded . (Summary by Roger Melin)...

Excerpt Details
Mystery

Description Details
Esopo é um lendário autor grego, que teria vivido na Antigüidade, ao qual se atribui a paternidade da fábula como gênero literário. As Fábulas de Esopo serviram como base para recriações de outros escritores ao longo dos séculos, como Fedro e La Fontaine. Fabulista grego do século VI a.C.. O local de seu nascimento é incerto — Trácia, Frígia, Etiópia, Samos, e Sardes todas clamam a honra. Eventualmente morreu em Delfos. Na verdade, todos os dados referentes a Esopo são discutíveis e trata-se mais de um personagem lendário do que histórico. A única certeza é que as fábulas a ele atribuídas foram reunidas pela primeira vez por Demétrio de Falero, em 325 a.C.. Esopo teria sido um escravo, que foi libertado pelo seu dono, que ficou encantado com suas fábulas. Ao que tudo indica, viajou pelo mundo antigo e conheceu o Egito, a Babilónia e o Oriente. Concretamente, não há indícios seguros de que tenha escrito qualquer coisa. Entretanto, foi-lhe atribuído um conjunto de pequenas histórias, de carácter moral e alegórico, cujos papéis principais eram desenvolvidos por animais. Na Atenas do século V a.C., essas fábulas eram conhecidas e apreci...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Advice, Short stories

Description Details
volunteers bring you nine different recordings of Work without Hope , by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in honor of Labor Day. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of September 3rd, 2006....

Excerpt Details
Poetry

Description Details
’s Short Story Collection 022: a collection of 10 short works of fiction in the public domain read by a group of members.

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction

Description Details
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short masterpiece about a ranting, slightly mad civil servant. The stylistic inventiveness, and the insights into the absurdities and weakness of humans seem so fresh and incisive today that if published now (a century and a half later) Notes would be considered an avant-garde post-modernist triumph. In some ways this is a heavy text, laden with conversational philosophizing; but the vividness of the narrator make it a wonderful read, and funny. (Review by Hugh McGuire)...

Excerpt Details
Literature

Description Details
The Epistle to the Galatians is a book of the New Testament. It is a letter from Paul of Tarsus to a number of early Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia in central Anatolia. It is principally concerned with the controversy surrounding Gentile Christians and the Mosaic Law within Early Christianity. Along with the Epistle to the Romans, it is the most theologically significant of the Pauline epistles, and has been particularly influential in Protestant thought. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Religion

Description Details
In this, the only extant tragedy from Aeschylus' trilogy about the House of Oedipus, Thebes is under siege from Polynices, a former prince of Thebes. After King Oedipus left his city and cursed the princes, Polynices and his brother, Eteocles, decided to rule alternately, switching at the end of every year. However, at the end of his year as king, Eteocles refused to turn power over to his brother and exiled him, fulfilling his father's curse that the two brothers could not rule peacefully. In the action of the play, Polynices and a group of Argive soldiers are attacking Thebes so that he can take his place as ruler. Eteocles must combat both the foreign forces outside the walls and the crazed, frightened women within. Note: The ending of this play is suspect. The lines Antigone and Ismene's entrance to the end may have been added later, either after Sophocles' Theban plays became popular or in the Middle Ages. (Summary by Libby Gohn)...

Excerpt Details
Ancient Texts, Play, Tragedy, Classics (antiquity)

Description Details
The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915 and one of his best known works. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a horrible verminous creature. Terrifying in its banal simplicity, it became one of the seminal works of the twentieth century. This Translation is by Ian Johnston. (Summary by David Richardson)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Literature

Description Details
La police est bien mal faite. Voilà l'opinion qu'Onésime Coche, reporter dans un quotidien du matin, à Paris, ne manque pas d'émettre à la fin de ses articles. Au sortir d'un dîner chez son ami Ledoux, il trouvera l'occasion d'en faire la preuve. Par quel moyen et d'où viendra l'épouvante ? À vous de le découvrir. Our police service is thoroughly inefficient. That is the opinion Onesimus Coche, mere journalist, frequently expresses in his articles. After dining at his friend's Monsieur Ledoux, he will have the opportunity to prove his point. Where will the grip of fear come from? You will have to find out for yourself. (by Ezwa)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Mystery

Description Details
The year is 1752. Devil, the Duke of Andover, and highwayman Jack, the Earl of Wyncham are at odds over a country squire's beautiful daughter. Cheating at cards, the marital problems of the younger sister of the Duke and the younger brother of the Earl, and debts beyond imagination form the backdrop for this romance, Heyer's first work and the only one in the public domain. (Summary by Sibella Denton)...

Excerpt Details
Romance, Historical Fiction

Description Details
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776 – 1822), better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's famous but fictional opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and the author of the novelette The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppelia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote. Also Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on one of Hoffmann's characters. Master Flea was published in 1822....

Excerpt Details
Fantasy

Description Details
Lytton Strachey’s first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. With a dry wit, he exposed the human failings of his subjects and what he saw as the hypocrisy at the centre of Victorian morality. This work was followed in the same style by Queen Victoria (1921). (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Biography, History

Description Details
“These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at all--like the biscuit.Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and, possibly fail again. (Summary by G. K. Chesterton)...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Literature

Description Details
This personal anthology is my choice of speeches from Shakespeare that I enjoy reading (that I would like to have had by heart years ago!) and that seem to me to illustrate his unsurpassed use of language. He was a man who seemed to know everything about human nature and as Orson Welles said ‘he speaks to everyone and we all claim him’. I know that it has been said that ‘it is impossible to be a great Shakespearian actor without an idiosyncratic and extraordinary voice’ and this may be so, but that does not preclude ordinary mortals from reading, hearing and enjoying Shakespeare. (Summary by Martin Clifton)...

Excerpt Details
Romance, Humour

Description Details
Meet Hamilton Cleek - man of mystery, and master of disguise and derring-do. Cleek's exploits are, to say the least, highly improbable, but the book is enormous fun. The goodies are good and the baddies are very bad indeed, but beware - things are not always what they seem. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy a rattling good yarn! Cleek is the central figure in dozens of short stories that began to appear in 1910 and were subsequently collected in a series of books. (Summary by Ruth Golding and Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Mystery

Description Details
’s Short Poetry Collection 035: a collection of 20 public-domain poems.

Excerpt Details
Poetry

Description Details
Perhaps the first memoir written by a film celebrity, Pearl White's Just Me gives a first-person account of the actress' rise to stardom. White guides us through her early childhood, her development as a performer, and finally to her breakout role in The Perils of Pauline--a role that made her the most popular serial queen of early cinema. Although romanticized and somewhat embellished, this book gives us a fascinating glimpse into the film industry's earliest years and the various myths of film stardom. (Summary by ChuckW)...

Excerpt Details
Biography, Memoirs, Art

Description Details
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to (or parodied) in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.)(Summary by Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Literature, Myths/Legends, Play, Romance, Tragedy

Description Details
A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which was first published in 1887. It is the first story to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes, who would later become one of the most famous literary detective characters, with long-lasting interest and appeal. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes to his companion Doctor Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his study in scarlet: There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Mystery, Fiction

Description Details
Emilie Flygare-Carlén var under 1800-talet en av Sveriges mest populära och lästa författare. En Nyckfull kvinna, som gavs ut i fyra delar, har den unga Edith Sternfelt som centralgestalt. Hon är på ytan en mycket självmedveten, självsäker och nyckfull kvinna, men bär samtidigt på en stor osäkerhet. I första delen, Den obundna flickan, presenteras läsaren/lyssnaren för en rad personer som har viktiga roller på olika sätt. Av dessa är ”farbror Janne”, Ediths döde fars bror, en framträdande person. Han kallar sig ”en man av ränseln” och trivs bäst när han får göra strövtåg genom landet i sällskap med sin lille kortväxte följeslagare Primus. Janne är en både ömsint och vis man, och har ett gott öga till sin brosrdotter, som står hans hjärta nära, även om han är oroad över hennes nyckfullhet. Modern, hovrättsrådinnan, änka och ägare till det stora bruket Dagby i Värmland, styr med fast, och ibland något despotisk, hand sina underlydande, och försöker även styra sin äldsta dotter. Hon är är både oroad och förtretad över hur Edith avvisat en lång rad friare, och planerar, utan Ediths vetskap, att presentera henne för en lämplig kandidat, ...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Literature