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Description: A chronicle of the tragedies in the lives of two seemingly ''perfect couples'' whose lives are far from perfect, this novel was loosely based on two real-life incidents of adultery and on Ford's own messy personal life.
Description: The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set in Long Island's North Shore and New York City during the summer of 1922. 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 roaring 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on t...
Description: This short story must have been the inspiration for the popular movie Ghost Busters (1984). The humorist-author here tells the tale of a scientist-philosopher who invents devices to capture ghosts and sets up a business of eradicating them from haunted houses. If you've seen the movie, you will recognize the resemblance in this excerpt: My assistants with the extinguishers stood firm, and although almost unnerved by the sight, they summoned their courage, an...
Description: Norris described The Pit as a fictitious narrative of a deal in the Chicago wheat pit, which is the nickname of the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, where commodities are traded like stocks and bonds. One man tries to corner the market on wheat to make a fortune. More than a business story, the novel deals with love and the lack of love in a relationship, selfishness, power, greed, the financial power of men and lack of their power to control eve...
Description: The Young Buglers, A Tale of the Peninsular War is a book by British author G.A. Henty. It was published by Blackie and Son Ltd, London. It tells of the Peninsula War through the eyes of two orphaned brothers, Tom and Peter Scudamore.
Description: A Girl of the Limberlost is considered a classic of Indiana literature. The story takes place in Indiana, in and around the Limberlost Swamp - at that time, a site of heavy logging and natural oil extraction. This Bildungsroman is structured as girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl-undertakes-an-adventure-to-win-boy-back. The novel's heroine, Elnora Comstock, is an impoverished young woman who lives with her widowed mother, Katharine Comstock, on the edge of ...
Description: The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless mind, on top of the gigantic skyscraper that formed part of his properties.
Description: Beverly is a bewitching American girl who has gone to that stirring little principality--Graustark--to visit her friend the princess, and there has a romantic affair of her own.
Description: A story of love behind a throne, telling how a young American met a lovely girl and followed her to a new and strange country.
Description: Fourth book of the Graustark series.
Description: A handsome, good natured young fellow ranges on the earth looking for romantic adventures and is finally enmeshed in most complicated intrigues in Graustark.
Description: The romantic story of the shipwreck of a great modern liner on an uninhabited island, where the passengers built homes, established a government, created laws and enforced them and kept the fires of courage burning through the years that followed.
Description: Trilby (1894) is a gothic horror novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time, perhaps the second best selling novel of the Fin de siècle period after Bram Stoker's Dracula. Trilby is set in the 1850s in an idyllic bohemian Paris. Though it features the hijinks of three lovable English artists — especially the delicate genius Little Billee — its most memorable character is Svengali, a Jewish rogue, a masterful musician, and an ir...
Description: The Lifted Veil is a novella by George Eliot, first published in 1859. Quite unlike the realistic fiction for which Eliot is best known, The Lifted Veil explores themes of extrasensory perception, the essence of physical life, possible life after death, and the power of fate. The novella is a significant part of the Victorian tradition of horror fiction, which includes such other examples as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson's The St...
Description: The novel continues (from The Angel of the Revolution) the tale of a worldwide brotherhood of anarchists fighting the world armed with fantastical airships, ending on an apocalyptic note as a comet smashes into the earth.
Description: The first known gay vampire novel and one of the first psychic vampire stories.
Description: When Jerry Lambert, the Duke, attempts to safeguard the cattle ranch of Vesta Philbrook from thieving neighbors, his work is appallingly handicapped because of Grace Kerr, one of the chief agitators, and a deadly enemy of Vesta's. A stirring tale of brave deeds, gun-play and a love that shines above all.
Description: John Mackenzie trod the trail from Jasper to the great sheep country where fortunes were being made by the flock-masters. Shepherding was not a peaceful pursuit in those bygone days. Adventure met him at every…
Description: Margaret Earle, an Eastern girl, thinking she has reached her destination in Arizona, where she is going to teach school, steps off the train at a lonely, desert water tank, and the train moves on, leaving her in the darkness and in a strange, forlorn land. But she steps off into a series of adventures and thrilling events which make entertaining reading indeed. After an unpleasant encounter with one man, she is rescued by another, young Lance Gardley, like ...