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The Book of Khalid

After being turned out by his parents for his disobedience, a Maronite teenager named Khalid scrapes up the funds to emigrate to the United States of America by working as a muleteer. Crossing the Atlantic with his friend Shakib, Khalid sets himself up in New York city as a peddler of counterfeit trinkets “made in the Holy Land.” He quickly loses interest in peddling and develops eccentric philosophical views as he immerses himself in various turn-of-the-century subcultures, including the freethought movement, Bohemianism, and Tammany Hall. Spurred on by his love for his cousin Najma, Khalid returns to his Lebanese hometown, Baalbek, where his iconoclastic philosophy earns him the enmity of the religious and secular authorities.

Ameen Rihani · Comedy · 33 ch

The Return of Tarzan

The Return of Tarzan was first published in the pulp New Story Magazine between June and December of 1913, and later published as a novel in 1915. The story picks up shortly after the events in the first book as Tarzan is traveling to France from the United States. While on the ship, he intervenes in the plots of a man named Nikolas Rokoff and his companion Alexis Paulvitch.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 26 ch

Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel, is a coming-of-age novel that follows the life of Oliver Gant and his family in the fictional town of Altamont, North Carolina. The story begins with Oliver’s early years, capturing the struggles of post-Civil War Southern life. Later, the focus shifts to Eugene, Oliver’s son, an aspiring writer torn between his artistic ambition and his small-town roots.

Thomas Wolfe · Drama · 42 ch

Allan Quatermain

Allan Quatermain, the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, was first serialized in Longman’s Magazine in the U.K. and subsequently published as a novel in 1887. In it we see the eponymous hero reunited with his companions to travel to Africa on a dangerous and adventuresome quest to try to find a legendary tribe of white-skinned people, the Zu-Vendi.

H. Rider Haggard · Adventure · 27 ch

Democracy

At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires. As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right?

Henry Adams · Comedy · 14 ch

Greenmantle

Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps. The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate’s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war. The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.

John Buchan · Adventure · 23 ch

The History of Mr. Polly

Trapped in a failing shop and a loveless marriage, Mr. Polly stages his own death and walks away to start life over. Wells turns one man’s comic rebellion into a warm story about courage and second chances.

H. G. Wells · Comedy · 10 ch

The Beasts of Tarzan

The Beasts of Tarzan, the third book in the Tarzan series, was first published in All-Story Cavalier magazine in 1914. It was later published as a novel in 1916. Tarzan’s old enemy, Nikolas Rokoff, escapes prison and plans his revenge by kidnapping the Tarzan’s son, the heir of Greystoke.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 21 ch

A Tangled Tale

In the late 19th century, Lewis Carroll —better known these days as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland —was also an established mathematician who had published many books and papers in the fields of algebra and logic. His mathematical interest extended to the setting of puzzles for popular consumption. The stories collected here cover varied subjects including the cataloguing of paintings, the number of times trains will pass each other on a circular track, the most efficient way to rent individual rooms on a square, and many more.

Lewis Carroll · Comedy · 14 ch

The Blue Lagoon

After being shipwrecked in the South Pacific, cousins Dick and Emmeline Lestrange are stranded upon an island, fortunately populated with plentiful resources and the beauty of nature. With the guidance of the ship’s cook, the only other survivor, they learn how to live off the land, foregoing their civilized upbringing and adopting a more primitive way of life. Of course, with this environment and its pleasures come a great number of dangers, from animal attacks to hazardous weather, and as Dick and Emmeline mature they experience one of the strongest forces of nature: love.

H. de Vere Stacpoole · Adventure · 49 ch

Typee

Tom and fellow sailor Toby escape from their duties onboard a whaling ship and fall in with savages on Nukuheva (Nuku Hiva) of the Marquesas Islands. The islanders welcome them to their tropical paradise, but the two runaways must remain on guard to find out if these savages are truly friends or foes. Typee was Melville’s first novel, written after his own voyages and experiences on a whaling ship to the Marquesas and beyond.

Herman Melville · Adventure · 38 ch

Night and Day

Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book’s deeper concerns are resolutely subversive.

Virginia Woolf · Drama · 34 ch

The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the most well-received of Henry James’s novels. First published in 1902, it follows Kate Croy and Merton Densher, an engaged couple in late-Victorian London, who meet Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress. Milly, though young and lively, is burdened with a fatal disease.

Henry James · Drama · 38 ch

Bel Ami

Georges Duroy returns to Paris from military service in Algeria penniless. After meeting up with an old friend, he finds journalism work at a renowned newspaper. He gradually climbs the ranks to chief-editor—but all this time, he hasn’t been using his wit as a writer, but rather the clever manipulation of the women around him, to get ahead.

Guy de Maupassant · Drama · 18 ch

The Blithedale Romance

Miles Coverdale is a young poet who goes to work on a communal farm in New England. He joins other idealists who seek to leave behind what they see as a corrupt society, and to live off the land by honest work. They will escape the world, and at the same time improve it by their example.

Nathaniel Hawthorne · Drama · 30 ch

The House of the Wolfings

The House of the Wolfings tells the tale of a band of German Goths living in a wood they call the Mark. Their lives are idyllic until the long shadow of the Roman Empire threatens the peace in their land. Thiodolf, the leader of the Wolfings and a descendant of the ancient gods, must rally the surrounding tribes to defend their home and way of life.

William Morris · Fantasy · 32 ch

Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Thuvia, Maid of Mars moves the focus of Burroughs’ Martian series to Carthoris, the son of the human John Carter and Martian Dejah Thoris and the prince of Helium. Princess Thuvia of Ptarth and Prince Carthoris of Helium are in love. Fate, however, is against them: the princess is promised to another, the Jeddak of Kaol, Kulan Tith.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 14 ch

My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career is a classic Australian work published in 1901 by Stella Miles Franklin, with an introduction by Henry Lawson. A thinly veiled autobiographical novel, it paints a vivid and sometimes grim picture of rural Australian life in the late 19th Century. Sybylla Melvyn is the daughter of a man who falls into grinding poverty through inadvised speculation before becoming a hopeless drunk unable to make a living from a small dairy farm.

Miles Franklin · Drama · 40 ch

Almayer’s Folly

Kaspar Almayer is a Dutch trader whose career has stalled. He finds himself in a riverside village in the jungles of East Borneo with his estranged Malay wife, their beautiful daughter Nina, and a lavish but unfinished house the village has dubbed “Almayer’s Folly.” Kaspar dreams of becoming rich enough to free himself from the backwater village and take Nina to Europe. Rumors of gold deposits in the depths of the jungle delude him into thinking he’s close to achieving that dream, and with the arrival of a rajah’s son who’s willing to join Kaspar in his get-rich-quick scheme, the plot is kicked into motion.

Joseph Conrad · Drama · 13 ch

Nordenholt’s Million

As a new bacteria strain emerges and causes the collapse of the world’s food supply, wealthy and powerful Stanley Nordenholt steps forward with a plan to try to save a small, select portion of the British population. Sequestered in Scotland, he leads the group in a race between their dwindling food supply and their effort to reverse the damage caused by the bacteria as the outside world descends into chaos and starvation. Blending ecological disaster and science fiction with psychological and sociological exploration, Nordenholt’s Million asks the reader how far might they be willing to go—and at what cost—to save humanity from total disaster.

J. J. Connington · Sci Fi · 20 ch