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The Wood Beyond the World

William Morris is famous in no small part for his contributions to defining the genre of modern fantasy literature, and The Wood Beyond the World is a classic example of that influence. Written in a purposefully antiquated prose style reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory or other aged fairy tales, The Wood Beyond the World can be difficult for some readers; but those who follow through will enjoy a charming and influential series of picaresque adventures. The book follows Golden Walter, a man leaving home who finds himself swept away to an enchanted land.

William Morris · Fantasy · 36 ch

The Fire in the Flint

Set in the Jim Crow South following World War I, The Fire in the Flint follows Dr. Kenneth Harper, a young, sometimes naive Black physician and war veteran. After graduating from a Northern medical school, he returns to his hometown of Central City, Georgia to start a practice. He arrives believing he can avoid discrimination by simply not getting involved with the town’s racial affairs—but he quickly finds out otherwise, and must confront the reality of living in a place where systemic racism and the Ku Klux Klan run rampant.

Walter White · Drama · 23 ch

Main Street

Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which she’s exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicott’s home town.

Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 40 ch

Moving the Mountain

John, a man who has spent the last thirty years in Tibet recovering from a head injury and totally unaware of his surroundings, regains consciousness and returns home, only to find that society has rapidly and drastically changed. The world as he knew it has become a feminist utopia, where civil rights, efficiency, and quality are of the utmost importance. The residents do their best to explain all of the societal changes that have happened in the past thirty years to John—who they consider to be a sociological dinosaur—while also pointing out all the flaws in the system they left behind.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · Sci Fi · 13 ch

The Princess and Curdie

Following the events of The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie has returned to his provincial life of hard but satisfying work with his father in the king’s silver mines. When an act of youthful cruelty leads him to a meeting with Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother, he’s charged with a mysterious quest—one that will require strength, wit, and courage. Bestowed with a supernatural ability to aid him on his mission, Curdie and a ferocious new companion must journey to the capital where Princess Irene and her father, the king, face a grave threat to the entire kingdom.

George MacDonald · Fantasy · 35 ch

The Haunted Hotel

One of Wilkie Collins’ shorter novels, The Haunted Hotel was published in 1878 as a monthly serial in six parts in Belgravia magazine. Most of the dramatic and sensational parts of the novel are set in Venice, and feature more of an emphasis on the supernatural than is usual in Collins’ work. The story deals with the death of the wealthy Baron Montbarry in a hotel in Venice.

Wilkie Collins · Drama · 29 ch

O Pioneers!

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! was first published in June of 1913 by Houghton Mifflin to high praise. Cather was immensely proud of the work and considered it her first “true” novel, having discovered her own form and subject.

Willa Cather · Drama · 30 ch

The Beetle

The Beetle was published in 1897, the same year as Dracula —and outsold it six to one that year. Like Dracula, the novel is steeped in the evil mysteries of an ancient horror: in this case, a mysterious ancient Egyptian creature bent on revenge. The story is told through the sequential points of view of a group of middle-class Victorians who find themselves enmeshed in the creature’s plot.

Richard Marsh · Horror · 52 ch

The Story of the Treasure Seekers

This is the story of the six Bastable children: Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noël and little Horace Octavius, known as H. O. Due to their mother tragically passing away and their father’s business partner running away with the money, the ancient and most noble House of Bastable, as the children like to call it, has fallen.

E. Nesbit · Adventure · 17 ch

Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was George Eliot’s last novel. It deals with two major characters whose lives intersect: One is a spoiled young woman named Gwendolen Harleth who makes an unwise marriage to escape impending poverty; the other is the titular character, Daniel Deronda, a wealthy young man who feels a mission to help the suffering. During her childhood Gwendolen’s family was well-off.

George Eliot · Drama · 72 ch

The Warden

The Warden is concerned with the unassuming Rev. Septimus Harding, who has for many years been the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital in the fictional town of Barchester. This “hospital” is what we would today probably call an aged-care or retirement home.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 21 ch

She

A professor is entreated by a dying colleague to take custody of the colleague’s five-year old son, raise him to adulthood, and at that time pass on a chest to him. The professor does so, and when the child reaches adulthood and the chest is revealed, it leads them on an adventure to Africa. There they encounter a young queen of a lost race who says she’s over two thousand years old, with an equally startling claim about the young man.

H. Rider Haggard · Adventure · 29 ch

The Way of All Flesh

The Way of All Flesh is often considered to be Samuel Butler’s masterpiece, and is frequently included in many lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century. Despite this acclaim, Butler never published it in his lifetime—perhaps because the novel, a scathing, funny, and poignant satire of Victorian life, would have hit his contemporaries too close to home. The novel traces four generations of the Pontifex family, though the central character is Ernest Pontifex, the third-generation wayward son.

Samuel Butler · Drama · 87 ch

The Luck of Barry Lyndon

The Luck of Barry Lyndon was first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine, then later as a complete volume entitled The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. —a title Thackeray disliked, but that was selected by his publisher. Thackeray had great difficulty composing the novel, and found himself frequently frustrated in his attempts to get Barry out of yet another jam.

William Makepeace Thackeray · Comedy · 20 ch

The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective

Loveday Brooke, an “altogether nondescript” woman, is one of the detective agency Lynch Court’s most able investigators. Her shrewd brain and immense common sense make it easy to look past the obvious solution to get to the heart of the matter, whenever her skills are called for. In this collection of short stories, Miss Brooke solves cases that have stumped the local police, including burglaries, missing people, and even murders.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis · Mystery · 7 ch

The Master Mind of Mars

The Master Mind of Mars is the sixth installment in the Martian series. It was published as a novel by A. C.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 16 ch

Cogewea, the Half-Blood

Cogewea, a mischievous young rancher, lives with her older sister and brother-in-law on their homestead, the Horseshoe Bend Ranch, located in the Flathead Indian Reservation. A member of the Okanogan tribe, Cogewea is nevertheless stigmatized as a “breed”—a derogatory term historically applied to people of mixed Native American and European descent. Drama arrives at the Horseshoe Bend with the person of Alfred Densmore, a businessman who has set out from the Eastern states in search of adventure and money.

Mourning Dove · Drama · 33 ch

The Teeth of the Tiger

The fortunes of Don Luis Perenna seem set to only increase after the will of his friend, Cosmo Mornington, is read. Perenna stands to benefit by one million francs if he finds the true heir, and by one hundred million if they can’t be found. But after both a detective and a potential recipient of the fortune die in the in the same way as Mornington, Perenna (alias Arsène Lupin ) must fight to prove his innocence and discover the real murderer.

Maurice Leblanc · Mystery · 21 ch

The Man in the Queue

Standing in line in a long queue for a show at a theater, a young man collapses—and it quickly becomes apparent that he has been stabbed in the back. Inspector Alan Grant of the Metropolitan Police is soon on the case, though he finds it deeply puzzling—not least because the identity of the victim is itself a mystery. The Man in the Queue, published in 1929, was the first in a series of successful detective novels written by the Scottish author Elizabeth MacKintosh writing under the pen name Josephine Tey, though it was first published using the pseudonym “Gordon Daviot.”

Josephine Tey · Mystery · 18 ch

The Ambassadors

A middle-aged man named Lambert Strether is sent to Paris by his wealthy wife-to-be in order to convince her son Chad to return home to America and take over the lucrative family business. This turns out to be much easier said than done, as Strether finds Chad much better adapted to European life than anyone expected. James’ characteristically dense prose is matched by a cast of subtly realized characters who rarely say exactly what they mean.

Henry James · Drama · 37 ch