Classic Books

Utopia is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More’s description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

No one, I think, can be more sensible than I am that my story is nothing if not true. Hume has wisely said, “A man cannot speak long of himself without vanity.” I should like to be allowed to add that I have never known or conceived of a person—except probably the reader and writer of these pages—who could talk five minutes about himself without—lying. That is, to be sure, reducing the thing to mathematical exactness. An overestimating smile, or an underestimating shrug of the shoulders, or a tone of the voice even, will always—though sometimes inadvertently—

First published in the year 1847, famous Victorian writer Thomas Preskett Prest’s longish gothic story ‘Varney the Vampire; Or, the Feast of Blood’ was serialized as weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as “penny dreadfuls”.

Saturday had been a strenuous day for the baseball team of Winona University, and Victor Ollnee, its redoubtable catcher, slept late. Breakfast at the Beta Kappa Fraternity House on Sunday started without him, and Gilbert Frenson, who never played ball or tennis, and Arnold Macey, who was too effeminate to swing a bat, divided the Sunday morning Star between them.

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many things—including actual assault with the clenched fist—that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear—as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore—with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not what she has been, and—worst of all—the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon, when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so go to the other extreme to express their feelings. A similar impulse makes a man say, ‘Hutt, you old beast!’ when a favourite horse nuzzles his coat-front. Unluckily, when the reaction of marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say. But Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her ‘Teddy’ as she called him. Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps—this is only a theory to account for his infamous behaviour later on—he gave way to the queer, savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years married, when he sees, across the table, the same, same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until the day of its death or his own. Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three breaths as a rule, must be a ‘throw-back’ to times when men and women were rather worse than they are now, and is too unpleasant to be discussed.

Mr and Mrs Openshaw came from Manchester to settle in London. He had been, what is called in Lancashire, a salesman for a large manufacturing firm, who were extending their business, and opening a warehouse in the city; where Mr Openshaw was now to superintend their affairs. He rather enjoyed the change; having a kind of curiosity about London, which he had never yet been able to gratify in his brief visits to the metropolis. At the same time, he had an odd, shrewd contempt for the inhabitants, whom he always pictured to himself as fine, lazy people, caring nothing but for fashion and aristocracy, and lounging away their days in Bond Street, and such places; ruining good English, and ready in their turn to despise him as a provincial. The hours that the men of business kept in the city scandalized him too, accustomed as he was to the early dinners of Manchester folk and the consequently far longer evenings. Still, he was pleased to go to London, though he would not for the world have confessed it, even to himself, and always spoke of the step to his friends as one demanded of him by the interests of his employers, and sweetened to him by a considerable increase of salary.
—from this book

The Baital-Pachisi, or Twenty-five Tales of a Baital is the history of a huge Bat, Vampire, or Evil Spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies. It is an old, and thoroughly Hindu, Legend composed in Sanskrit, and is the germ which culminated in the Arabian Nights, and which inspired the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius, Boccacio’s “Decamerone,” the “Pentamerone,” and all that class of facetious fictitious literature.

The all-time loved collection of Hindu tales of Adventure, Magic, and Romance. Top popular series of Vikrarm-Betal tales now in English

“The idea behind the village industries scheme is that we should look to the villages for the supply of our daily needs and that, when we find that some needs are not so supplied, we should see whether with a little trouble and organization, they cannot be profitably supplied by the villagers. In estimating the profit, we should think of the villager, not of ourselves. It may be that, in the initial stages, we might have to pay a little more than the ordinary price and get an inferior article in the bargain. Things will improve, if we will interest ourselves in the supplier of our needs and insist on his doing better and take the trouble of helping to do better.” —from the Book

In the second century Lyons was the Rome of Gaul as it is now the second Paris of France. It was crowded with temples and public monuments. It was moreover the Athens of the West, a resort of scholars. Seated at the confluence of two great rivers, the Rhône and the Sâone, it was a centre of trade. It is a stately city now. It was more so in the second century when it did not bristle with the chimneys of factories pouring forth their volumes of black smoke, which the atmosphere, moist from the mountains, carries down so as to envelop everything in soot.

TURGENEV was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament. It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make his acquaintance about a generation ago, and the effect of it was, like Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini’s Duties of Man, and other congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they had been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to read Tolstoi, and Turgenev’s powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country’s predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what M. Haumand terms his “Hamletisme.” But in Virgin Soil he is easy and almost negligent master of his instrument, and though he is an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers experience round his theme as only the artist can who has enriched leis art by having outlived his youth without forgetting its pangs, joys, mortifications, and love-songs.

Amélie Louise Rives was born in 1863 in Richmond, Virginia to noted engineer Alfred L. Rives and the former Sadie MacMurdo. The younger son of a titled Englishman emigrates to America to establish a stud-farm in post-Civil War Virginia. He meets and falls in love with the daughter of the farm’s caretaker. She was named after her aunt Amélie, a goddaughter of French Queen Marie-Amélie. She was a goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and a granddaughter of the engineer and Senator William Cabell Rives, who had also been American ambassador to France.

Years ago, with special fondness, I hunted near the village of Glinnoje, which is about twenty versts from my estate. It is probably the best hunting area in the whole counties. After searching all the fields and bushes for game, I went regularly to evening evening to the moorland – it was the only moorland in the whole area – and only went from there to my hospitable innkeeper, the village school of Glinnoje, where I in the hunting season always took place. From the moor I had scarcely two versts to go to the village; the path led through a lowland, and only half way up I had to climb over a not very high hill. On this hill is a small country estate, which consists of an uninhabited mansion and a garden. I almost always passed by at sunset, and the house, with the boarded-up shutters, bathed in the rays of the evening sun, always reminded me of a blind old man who had crawled out of his closet to warm himself in the sun.

Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects. It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all sides and described as ‘a deplorable monument of the extent to which inteligence and erudition can be abused’.

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience”, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

We believe this work is culturally important, and have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as one of the central works of world literature. The novel charts the history of the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.

The Warlord of Mars’ is a science fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, third in his ‘Barsoom series’. Just like his famous tarzan series, this too got first published in All-Story Magazine. This novel continues where the previous one in the series, ‘The Gods of Mars’ abruptly ended. At the end of the previous book, John Carter’s wife, princess Dejah Thoris, is imprisoned in the Temple of the Sun by the vile pretender goddess Issus. It is said that one has to wait an entire Barsoomian year before the room the prisoner is in revolves back to the entrance.

The kind reception given to “The Japanese Fairy Book” has encouraged me to venture on a second volume of stories from Japan. I have invented none of these stories. They are taken from many different sources, and in clothing them with an English dress my work has been that of adapter rather than translator. In picturesqueness of conception Japanese stories yield the palm to none. And they are rich in quaint expressions and dainty conceits. But they are apt to be written in a style almost too bald. This defect the professional story-teller remedies by colouring his story as he tells it.

A historical drama novel by famous writer Sir Walter Scott, ‘Waverley; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since’ was first published in the year 1814.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. We believe this work is culturally important, and have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Wessex Tales’ is a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy, who is known as one of Victorian era’s best English novelists. Most of these stories are set in the years before the author’s birth; hence, are written with use of many dialectic words to give it the feel of the time. These stories explores social issues around marriage and kinship in that time.

The lions, if they left not the forest, would capture no prey; and the arrow, if it quitted not the bow, would not strike the mark.
—Arabian Nights.
The precise date of my story does not matter: the world strikes a much more even average than we are apt to think; and still, as of old, “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done.”
Once upon a time, then, there was a boy whose name was Charlemagne Kindred.
“Magnus” was the home version. I think his two young sisters were perhaps rather proud of the royal-republican title, and would by no means let it come down to “Charley,” and so lose itself in the crowd. Once in a while, when a longer lecture than usual was called for, Mrs. Kindred would say Charlemagne: but I doubt if it had much effect, unless to give Magnus some slighting thoughts of the ancestor who had first borne his name.

“There are two reasons the author has for putting forth this little volume: he feels that the time is, as it always has been, ripe for it; and second, his soul has ever longed to express itself upon this endless theme. It therefore comes from the heart—the basis of his belief that it will reach the heart.” -Preface by Ralph Waldo Trine