Jane Austen’s earliest known serious work, Lady Susan is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.Lady Susan, a clever and ruthless widow, determines that her daughter is going to marry a man whom both detest. She sets her own sights on her sister-in-law’s brother, all the while keeping an old affair simmering on the back burner.But people refuse to play the roles as...

David Wilson has earned the unfortunate nickname "Pudd'nhead" from his fellow townspeople, who fail to understand his combination of wisdom and eccentricity. However, he is eventually able to redeem himself by simultaneously solving a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities.Two children, a white boy and a mulatto, are born on the same day. Roxy, mother of the mulatto and a slave, is given charge of the children; in fear that her son will be sold, she switches the babies....

This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligac...

Dick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and reencounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of an incurable blindness, the result of a head injury during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him—his ...

Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. The only problem is that she is promised to a Cossack warrior.In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first is the dilem...

American poet, critic, and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe is universally recognized for his cultivation of the macabre in fiction. His stories are characterized by an original kind of supernatural horror, often using the awareness of death as a catalyzing force in its own right. His tales and poems brim with psychological depth and intense imagery, made vivid through his musical language and hypnotic rhythms, which are especially captivating when heard aloud.This special audio ...

This book is an extraordinary day-to-day documentary of the Civil War's most infamous Confederate prison, Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville. Here thirteen thousand wretched Union prisoners died within barely fourteen months, from starvation, scurvy, and other diseases that spread through the camp. There was little shelter but makeshift tents; little in the way of blankets, warm clothing, or even shoes; and a scarcity of food and fresh water. Often they were forced to sleep on the ...

Two delightful tales by one of America’s favorite storytellers.In “Elsie in New York,” Elsie is an innocent young woman who, upon the death of her father, must look for work to make a living. Her father expected her to trust to the goodheartedness of his previous employer, but Elsie prefers to make her own way in life. Although she visits an employment agency and applies for several positions, do-gooders interfere. Thinking they are saving her soul, in actuality they point her to h...

When a dragon is discovered up on the Downs, the Boy is not in the least surprised. He's always known that cave was a dragon cave—it seems only right for a dragon to be living in it.The Boy decides to pay a visit to the cave, and he thinks he knows just what to expect. But this particular dragon is not a bit like the ones in fairy tales.

“In every nook and cranny, high and low, they sought for him…he had vanished as a star vanishes when it drops from its place in the sky.”From the author of such children’s classics as The Secret Garden and A Little Princess comes this enchanting story of a young boy discovering his true destiny.Twelve-year-old Marco knows he is being trained for something, but he isn’t sure what. All his life he has traveled with his father in secrecy, learning many langua...

This two-part adult fairytale by the author of The Secret Garden combines a charming Cinderella tale with an ironic look at class structure and the Edwardian marriage market in turn-of-the-century London.Emily Fox-Seton is a simple but good-hearted woman struggling to make ends meet while maintaining the dignity of one distantly related to the aristocracy. The Marquis of Walderhurst is an awkward but eligible bachelor being comically pursued by a pageant of unmarried ladie...

The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses sight of Christian morality, a conviction which lends him genuine nobility and, in the end, also brings justice and the restoration of his family and fortune.Through this simple, almost fa...