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The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Initially published throughout 1819 and 1820, The Sketchbook is a collection of 34 essays and short stories, collected and ordered according to the Author’s Revised Edition published in 1848. The Sketchbook is the first publication to use Irving’s pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, which he would carry into later works. The stories vary in nature, from the comical “The Mutability of Literature” to the eerie and seemingly supernatural “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but the personality of their narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, connects the stories and attracts their readers.

Washington Irving · Fantasy · 35 ch

The Mysterious Island

The Mysterious Island tells the tale of five Americans who, in an attempt to escape the Civil War, pilot a hot-air balloon and find themselves crashed on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. Verne had been greatly influenced by works like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and that influence shines brightly in this novel of engineering ingenuity and adventure. Verne imparts the escapees with such over-the-top cleverness and so many luckily placed resources that modern readers might find the extent to which they tame the island comical.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 62 ch

Hard Times

Hard Times (originally Hard Times—For These Times ) was published in 1854, and is the shortest novel Charles Dickens ever published. It’s set in Coketown, a fictional mill-town set in the north of England. One of the major themes of the book is the miserable treatment of workers in the mills, and the resistance to their unionization by the mill owners, typified by the character Josiah Bounderby, who absurdly asserts that the workers live a near-idyllic life but they all “expect to be set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon.” The truth, of course, is far different.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 37 ch

From the Earth to the Moon

In search of an occupation after the end of the Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club undertakes the design and construction of a cannon capable of launching a projectile to the Moon. The three main protagonists—Impey Barbicane, president of the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl, Barbicane’s rival and then collaborator, and Michel Ardan, a French scientist—board the hollow cannonball en route to the Moon. The story concludes in Autour de la Lune, the sequel published four years later.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 28 ch

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.” Indeed, Jude was to be Hardy’s last novel.

Thomas Hardy · Tragedy · 60 ch

The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland is unique in several ways. The narrative itself is a double-frame narrative: the editor of the volume is presenting a manuscript he found under mysterious circumstances, describing the account of two fishermen who themselves discovered a hand-written account of the cosmic haunting of a recluse’s remote home. Additionally, the novel is one of the earliest examples of the departure of horror fiction from the Gothic style of supernatural, psychological hauntings, to more realist, science-fiction/cosmic horror themes.

William Hope Hodgson · Horror · 31 ch

The Secret Agent

The place is London, and the time is the late 1800s. Mr. Verloc appears to be an unassuming owner of a bric-a-brac store, but he’s actually a spy for an unnamed country. When he’s summoned by his superiors and ordered to plant a bomb to foment unrest in English politics and society, he finds himself stuck in a more-than-uncomfortable situation.

Joseph Conrad · Thriller · 14 ch

Poor Folk

In 1840s St. Petersburg the ageing copyist Makar Dievushkin is, with various degrees of subtlety, trying to woo Barbara Dobroselova, a young woman who has had a swift fall in fortunes. Told in alternating letters to each other, their past stories and current hopes play out in raw and personal detail, as the daily realities of an uncaring and expensive town take hold. Poor Folk was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel and was written to try and cover his escalating debts from his expensive lifestyle and gambling addiction.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Drama · 55 ch

The Sea-Wolf

After a ferry accident on San Francisco Bay, literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is swept out to sea only to be rescued by the seal-hunting schooner Ghost. Wolf Larsen, the captain of the Ghost, is brutal and cynical but also highly intelligent, and he has no intention of returning Van Weyden to shore. Van Weyden is forced to serve on the Ghost, leaving behind his comfortable world ashore and entering into a psychological battle with Larsen on the sea.

Jack London · Adventure · 39 ch

The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Mysteries of Udolpho is Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel, first published in four volumes in 1794. It’s a typical gothic novel: set in a large castle which experiences supposedly supernatural events, a cruel and cunning villain is opposed by a young, virtuous heroine, who experiences great terror in the hands of her adversary. Emily St. Aubert, the novel’s protagonist, loses her parents and is placed in the care of her aunt, who unwittingly puts her in great danger.

Ann Radcliffe · Horror · 57 ch

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s biting critique of New York’s upper classes around the end of the 19th century. The novel follows socialite Lily Bart as she struggles to maintain a precarious position among her wealthy friends in the face of her own diminished finances and fading youth. Lily has resolved to gain social and financial security by marrying into wealth, but callous rivals and her own second thoughts undermine Lily’s plans.

Edith Wharton · Drama · 29 ch

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend is the last of Charles Dickens’ novels, published serially between 1864 and 1865. Like many of Dickens’ works, it addresses social concerns like how the poor and destitute are treated, but tempers these more serious themes with humor and satire. The novel opens with the retrieval of the body of a drowned man from the Thames river—a body which is identified as that of John Harmon, heir to his father’s huge fortune.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 68 ch

Kim

Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, published in 1901, tells the story of Kimball O’Hara (“Kim”), the orphaned son of an Anglo-Irish soldier, who grows up as a street-urchin on the streets of Lahore in India during the time of the British Raj. Knowing little of his parentage, he is as much a native as his companions, speaking Hindi and Urdu rather than English, cunning and street-wise. At about the age of twelve, Kim encounters an old Tibetan lama on a pilgrimage in search of a holy river.

Rudyard Kipling · Adventure · 15 ch

Lord Jim

Lord Jim was first published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine between October 1899 and November 1900. The first edition of the complete book was published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1900. The story begins when the young British seaman Jim, one of the crew of the steamer Patna, abandons the ship while it’s in distress.

Joseph Conrad · Adventure · 46 ch

The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto is considered to be the first “Gothic” novel—that is, containing a combination of tropes, like hidden passages, haunted paintings, mysterious sounds, skeletal ghosts, ancestral curses, and unexplained deaths, that essentially invented the genre later made famous by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, or Henry James. Walpole made a point of creating a novel that blends supernatural elements with more realistic depictions of characters and events. The plot centers around Manfred, the lord of Otranto Castle, who has just witnessed the death of his son under mysterious circumstances, just as his son was about to be married.

Horace Walpole · Horror · 8 ch

Last and First Men

Last and First Men is an extended think piece about the possible future history of humankind, extending from the 1930s into the extreme far future, hundreds of millions of years from now. It’s supposedly narrated by one of the “Last Men,” and dictated to a modern-day “First Man” by a kind of time-travel telepathy. As time moves further and further into the future, Stapledon switches to overviews of vast stretches of time rather than detailing the events in the lives of individual people.

Olaf Stapledon · Sci Fi · 18 ch

The Princess and the Goblin

The Princess and the Goblin is a children’s fantasy novel in the vein of the best classic fairy tales. The simple narrative follows Princess Irene as she discovers a ghostly relative living in a castle tower only she can access. During a walk outside one day, she encounters the threat of the lair of goblins living near the castle—and meets a new friend, a young miner named Curdie.

George MacDonald · Fantasy · 32 ch

My Ántonia

Written in the style of a memoir, My Ántonia chronicles Jim Burden’s friendship with the daughter of a Czech immigrant family. Recently orphaned, he moves west to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. Riding the same train is the Shimerda family, who are also on their way to settle in the area.

Willa Cather · Drama · 46 ch

At the Villa Rose

When the wealthy widow Madame Dauvray is found murdered at the Villa Rose in Aix-les-Bains, suspicion falls on her young companion Celia Harland, who has gone missing—along with Dauvray’s valuable jewels. The famous French detective Inspector Hanaud is called in to solve the mystery, which involves a séance, a missing chauffeur, and a web of deceit. A.

A. E. W. Mason · Mystery · 21 ch

The Pickwick Papers

In The Pickwick Papers, the wealthy and amiable Mr. Pickwick and his friends—calling themselves the “Pickwick Club”—wander around England out of curiosity and an interest in human nature. On the way, they have many loosely related comic adventures. Mr. Pickwick eventually employs a cockney man-servant, Sam Weller, whose fractured language and forthright attitude adds a great deal of amusement.

Charles Dickens · Comedy · 58 ch