Phantastes was published in 1858. It tells the story of Anodos, who, on coming of age, is examining the effects of his deceased father. To his astonishment, in doing so he sees an apparition of a fairy woman, who tells him that he has some fairy blood and conveys him to Fairy Land.
George MacDonald · Fantasy · 28 ch
The Worm Ouroboros is considered to be one of the foundational texts of the high fantasy genre, influencing later authors like J. R. R.
E. R. Eddison · Fantasy · 38 ch
Caroline Meeber, known as Sister Carrie to her family, moves to Chicago at the tender age of eighteen to try to make something of herself. Living with her sister and brother-in-law, she quickly finds that life, and work, are hard in the big city. She soon takes up with a traveling salesman she met on the train into town.
Theodore Dreiser · Drama · 47 ch
Published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1917, the stories that make up Gullible’s Travels follow the comical misadventures of a long-suffering husband and his aspiring socialite wife. The unnamed protagonists and their hapless attempts to climb the social ladder serve as a canvas for Ring Lardner to satirize marriage, social dynamics, and the newly emerging middle class of the late 1910s. In 1917, the first five stories about the unnamed narrator and his “Missus” were compiled in book form as Gullible’s Travels, Etc.
Ring Lardner · Comedy · 7 ch
The Warlord of Mars begins after the previous installment in the Martian series abruptly ends: John Carter’s beloved princess Dejah Thoris has been imprisoned in the Temple of the Sun, whose rooms only revolve back to the entrance once every Barsoomian year. Now, Carter must mount a rescue to save the princess from certain doom. The novel, a fast-paced and straightforward tale of swashbuckling adventure, is another solid entry in Burroughs’ “swords-and-planets” corpus.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 16 ch
While investigating the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, a team led by Dr. Maracot is cut off from their ship and hurled to the bottom of the ocean. There, they find themselves in the remnants of the ancient civilization of Atlantis. Like some other later works by Arthur Conan Doyle, this novel shows elements of spiritualism and the supernatural, themes and ideas that interested him later in life.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Sci Fi · 7 ch
The Iron Heel is some of the earliest dystopian fiction of the 20th century. The novel is framed as a presentation of the long-lost “Everhard Manuscript,” a document written by the socialist revolutionary Avis Everhard around 1932. The manuscript is discovered in the year 2600, and is introduced and annotated by a far-future commentator.
Jack London · Sci Fi · 26 ch
Cranford was first serialized in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that Gaskell was busy writing her novel Ruth at the time the Cranford shorts were being published, suggests that she didn’t initially plan for Cranford to be a cohesive novel. The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fictional small English country town of Cranford.
Elizabeth Gaskell · Drama · 16 ch
A prestigious award gives the middle-aged professor Godfrey St. Peter the funds to buy a new house, but he’s reluctant to let go of his old one. His wife and two daughters welcome the change, seeing it as a well-deserved step up in the world. St. Peter instead focuses his attention on editing the journals of Tom Outland, his former student and would-be son-in-law—before his life was taken in the Great War.
Willa Cather · Drama · 29 ch
It is the Middle Ages, and the Hundred Years War rages on in England and France. Alleyne Edricson, the son of an English landowner, is training as a novice at an abbey. As his training draws to a close, he’s called upon to spend a year in the outside world to decide if he really wants to devote his life to prayer and contemplation.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Historical · 38 ch
Four years after writing his immensely popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum returned to the Land of Oz in this second book of fourteen he wrote about the magical country. Like its predecessor, The Marvelous Land of Oz has delighted children through the years, and has been adapted into stage plays, films, and comics.
L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 25 ch
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope is an adventure novel first published in 1894 that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Ruritania. It tells the story of Rudolph Rassendyll, who is, because of past indiscretions in the family and unbeknownst to him, the near twin of King Rudolph V of Ruritania. Labeled a ne’er-do-well by his sister-in-law, young Rudolph determines to escape his family and secretly travel to Ruritania for the coronation of his distant relative.
Anthony Hope · Adventure · 22 ch
Two idlers in London are sauntering in the streets when they pick up a coin dropped by a fleeing man. They keep meeting three persons, each time in a different disguise, who recount lurid tales. They seem to be looking for a spectacled man who regrets working with them, and has run away with a valuable coin … This novel is a Gothic horror classic, and takes the form of an episodic novel, with each chapter containing a story recounted by one of the three impostors.
Arthur Machen · Horror · 11 ch
At the Earth’s Core, published in 1914, is the first of a series of science fiction novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs set inside a hollow earth with a central “sun,” a land called Pellucidar. However unlikely this scenario, it allowed Burroughs free play to create heroic adventures in yet another alien environment in addition to his fantastic version of Mars in his Martian series. The story’s hero, David Innes, is recruited by an old man, Perry, to help fund his invention, a “mechanical subterranean prospector,” and then to test it out.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 16 ch
William Guest wakes up to find himself transported to a future utopian society. This bucolic society functions despite the absence of private property, marriage, prisons, courts, schools, and central government. The people are happy, healthy, and hard working.
William Morris · Sci Fi · 32 ch
The Night Land is science fiction ahead of its time. Published in 1912, the book introduces a 17th-century gentleman who loses his wife. He soon discovers himself somehow reanimated in Earth’s far future, millions of years from now, when the sun has died and the Earth has become a hellish waste.
William Hope Hodgson · Sci Fi · 30 ch
The gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin returns in this set of ten short stories to confess—or perhaps boast about—his crimes to the unnamed narrator. Mostly set around Lupin’s attempts to frustrate Chief-Inspector Ganimard and pocket some cash in the process, they also show off his knack for escaping from seemingly impossible situations, and even playing the role of the master detective. In the chronology of Arsène Lupin, these tales were published after, but set before, the darker stories of The Hollow Needle and 813.
Maurice Leblanc · Mystery · 10 ch
The Land That Time Forgot opens with the discovery near Greenland of a floating thermos flask containing a manuscript by castaway Tyler Bowen, Jr. The document recounts a series of adventures that starts with a sea battle against a German U-boat and ends on a mysterious island populated by hostile prehistoric animals and people. The second part of the book, “The People That Time Forgot,” continues the story with the tale of Tom Billings, who has been sent on a mission to rescue Bowen after his manuscript was discovered.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 23 ch
When Arsène Lupin disappeared at the end of The Hollow Needle the public and police assumed he was dead; but it turns out he was just biding his time and waiting for the right opponent to face off against. Luckily, a secret involving a stash of hidden papers and Europe’s aristocratic families is more than enough to pique the interests of Lupin and his unknown competitor. This novel is told more from Lupin’s point of view than the previous stories, and that reduces some of the omnipotence bestowed upon him by Leblanc while highlighting his more emotional qualities.
Maurice Leblanc · Drama · 18 ch
An Antarctic Mystery follows Mr. Jeorling, a wealthy American naturalist whose research has led him to the remote Kerguelen Islands, located in the southern Indian Ocean. Jeorling begins his adventure on the Halbrane after being admitted aboard by the reluctant captain Len Guy, who believes the events in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to be true. In that novel, Pym persuades Len Guy’s brother, William Guy, to lead a voyage to the Antarctic.
Jules Verne · Adventure · 26 ch