In these darkly imaginative stories, E. M. Forster explores worlds where technology, habit, and social convention have replaced direct human experience. The title story, The Machine Stops, follows Vashti, who lives sealed in an automated room and worships the all-encompassing Machine, while her son Kuno begs her to visit him and rediscover the earth, the stars, and the body's own authority. Her journey by airship through a civilization that has grown fearful of nature, touch, and independe...

Fifty essential works, one sweeping introduction to the world's greatest storytellers. This first volume gathers Jane Austen's social wit, Charles Dickens's unforgettable characters, Fyodor Dostoevsky's psychological depth, Victor Hugo's romantic grandeur, Herman Melville's seafaring epic, and Edgar Allan Poe's dark imagination alongside giants from Cervantes to Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters to Shakespeare. Spanning centuries and continents, from the Spanish Golden Age to Gothic romance, Vic...

A Room with a View is a luminous and witty exploration of love, freedom, and self-discovery set against the vibrant landscapes of Italy and the restrained society of Edwardian England. In this beloved classic, E.M. Forster crafts a story that delicately examines the tension between social convention and personal desire. The novel follows Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman touring Florence with her prim and proper cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. At the Pension Bertolini, Lucy encounters an ...

Alexandria rises here as both a city and a palimpsest: a place shaped by Alexander, the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Christianity, the Arab conquest, Napoleon, and modern municipal change. E. M. Forster frames it as a living guidebook in which monuments only become fully meaningful when read through the past, and he blends scholarly authority with a personal, often witty voice. He explains his method, transliteration choices, and the book's deliberate division into a sweeping historical pageant a...

E. M. Forster's Anonymity: An Enquiry begins with a deceptively simple question: does knowing who wrote a work alter the way we read it? Moving from anonymous ballads like Sir Patrick Spens to signed poems such as Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, he widens the inquiry to novels, plays, and journalism, asking what authorship really contributes to literature. At the heart of the essay is a vivid distinction between writing that merely informs and writing that creates atmosphere, mood, and im...

E. M. Forster's Cambridge lectures begin with a witty tribute to William George Clark, the scholar whose integrity, independence, and wide literary sympathies set the tone for the course. From there, Forster asks what a novel is, answering with playful caution while arguing that fiction is too fluid for tidy definitions or narrow critical rules. He insists that English novels must be seen beside the great achievements of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, and others, and that criticism should be...

This 1st volume of "100 Books You Must Read Before You Die" contains the following 50 works, arranged alphabetically by authors' last names: Little Women [Louisa May Alcott] Emma [Jane Austen] Father Goriot par [Honoré de Balzac] The Tenant of Wildfell Hall [Anne Brontë] Wuthering Heights [Emily Brontë] Tarzan of the Apes [Edgar Rice Burroughs] Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll] My Ántonia [Willa Cather] Don Quixote [Miguel Cervantes] The Awakening & Other Short Stories [Kate...

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors last names - Little Women [Louisa May Alcott] - Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen] - Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie] - Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower] - The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett] - A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett] - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll] - The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers] - The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton] - The Woman in Whi...

"99 Science Fiction Short Stories" brings together some of the finest sci fi short stories ever crafted. Featuring gems from masters of the genre, such as H.G Wells , Robert Barr , PKD, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Norton, and many, many more!

This award-winning novel about a conflict between a British woman and an Indian man amid the stirrings of rebellion against empire is "a revelation" ( The New York Times).One of Time magazine's 100 best English language novels published since 1923,one of the Modern Library's 100 great works of twentieth-century English literature, and thewinner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize"By th...

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985. The Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (1998).

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. ...