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The Home and the World

The wealthy Bengali zamindar Nikhil has spent his last nine years of marriage trying to modernize and westernize his wife Bimala. But when he invites his friend Sandip, a fiery pro-Swadeshi activist fighting for Indian independence, to his home, Bimala becomes enraptured by the nationalist cause—and by the fascinating figure himself. The Home and the World is a complex exploration of the contradictions of the anti-British Swadeshi movement in the early 1900s.

Rabindranath Tagore · Drama · 12 ch

The Hoosier Schoolmaster

Ralph Hartsook has taken a teaching job in Flat Creek. It’s a rough assignment—the last few teachers quit after getting beat up, or “licked,” by the stronger pupils. Ralph meets Bud Jones, one of the biggest and toughest pupils, who warns him how tough it’ll be to keep the school in order, and Ralph quickly decides he’ll have to win Bud over to his side.

Edward Eggleston · Drama · 36 ch

The Hound of the Baskervilles

It would be hard to nominate a more well-known character in English literature than that of the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1880s. Holmes, alongside his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson, appeared in two initial novels and dozens of short stories serialized in popular magazines, attracting a devoted, almost fanatical following which continues to this day. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–1902, was the third novel featuring Holmes and Watson.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

The House Without Windows

A young girl named Eepersip lives with her parents in a cottage, but she feels trapped within its confines, so she leaves home to live a freer life in the wild. After leaving her parents’ home, she establishes a life for herself outdoors, rejecting both the society of adults and the comforts of civilization. Initially, she is happy to live in a meadow near her family’s home, but over time she is tempted to seek out new natural environments to live in.

Barbara Newhall Follett · Drama · 5 ch

The House Without a Key

Published in 1925, The House Without a Key introduces the kindly detective Charlie Chan, conceived by Earl Derr Biggers as a counter to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes common in the era’s society. John Quincy Winterslip, having been sent by his family to convince his aunt to return to Boston, arrives in Honolulu to find that a rich family member with a shady past has been murdered. Detective Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department recruits John to aid in the investigation.

Earl Derr Biggers · Adventure · 23 ch

The House of Arden

Edith Nesbit was a popular children’s author of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras in Britain. Though she was writing more than a century ago, her books nevertheless remain popular and are generally still in print. The House of Arden was published in 1908.

E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 14 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

The House of the Arrow

After the apparently natural death of wealthy widow Madame Harlowe, a blackmailer accuses her niece of murder by poison—an accusation he knows to be false. The famous French detective Inspector Hanaud is called in, with Madame Harlowe’s death only an excuse to investigate a series of anonymous blackmailings the local police have been helpless to solve. The police exhume Madame Harlowe’s body and find no trace of poison, defeating the blackmailer—yet there’s a treatise on untraceable poison in the house library.

A. E. W. Mason · Mystery · 26 ch

The House of the Seven Gables

Hepzibah Pyncheon is a dignified but destitute woman residing in the House of the Seven Gables—a manor with a dark history, and her ancestral home. She lives with her brother Clifford, who has completed a thirty-year sentence for murder, and a lodger named Holgrave, who is writing a book about the history of her family. Long ago, Matthew Maule owned the land that the titular house was later built on; but the scheming Colonel Pyncheon, founder of the Pyncheon family, wrongfully seized the land from him, and Maule was accused of witchcraft and condemned to death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne · Drama · 22 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

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 Idiot

Acclaimed by the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for its “polyphony” (a literary concept introduced by Bakhtin to describe a plurality of voices within a narrative), The Idiot is regarded by modern critics as one of Dostoevsky’s most experimental and artistically uneven novels. The novel follows the entrance of the epileptic Prince Muishkin—a character Dostoevsky meant to represent a “positively good and beautiful man”—into a circle of Russian high society characterized by vanity, greed, and social ambition. Thanks to his epileptic condition and his simplicity, earnestness, and kindness of heart, Muishkin is frequently branded by his newfound social circle as the titular “idiot”; but in reality, he’s a man of extraordinary sensitivity and insight.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 50 ch

The Incredulity of Father Brown

Father Brown, full-time Catholic priest and part-time amateur detective, returns in this third collection of short stories. Unlike the first two collections, this time Father Brown is investigating alone; his sidekick, the former criminal Flambeau, is nowhere to be seen. Father Brown has to solve a murder (including his own!) in each story, and since several also appear to involve the supernatural, he has ample opportunity to elaborate on his thoughts concerning it.

G. K. Chesterton · Mystery · 9 ch

The Inferno

The narrator of The Inferno —ostensibly August Strindberg himself—has not had an easy recent past, and a move to Paris is not helping. As his mania overtakes his ability to function in the society of artists, writers, scientists and philosophers he’d like to be part of, he turns to more unconventional methods to help make sense of his world. Written in diary form, The Inferno is a semi-autobiographical work that blends self-deprecating humour with a whirl of neurosis and attempted rationalisation.

August Strindberg · Drama · 19 ch

The Innocence of Father Brown

Father Brown is a Catholic priest, but a slightly unusual one in that he’s also an amateur detective. Unlike his more famous literary cousin Sherlock, Father Brown takes a less analytical and more intuition-oriented approach to solving the many murders that he happens to come across. This collection of short murder mysteries is Brown’s first appearance on the literary stage.

G. K. Chesterton · Mystery · 12 ch

The Invisible Man

Griffin, a scientist, has devoted his life to the study of optics. As his work progresses, he invents a method of making a person invisible. After testing the experiment on himself, he comes to realize that while the experiment was a complete success, he has no way of reversing his invisibility.

H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 29 ch

The Iron Heel

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

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man who finds himself on a mysterious island full of humanoid animal creatures. He comes to find that these creatures are the work of Dr. Moreau, a man who experiments in vivisection, and his assistant Montgomery. The story of Dr. Moreau’s island began as an article in the January, 1895 issue of Saturday Review.

H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 23 ch

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India.

Rudyard Kipling · Fantasy · 7 ch

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow is a fascinating, almost two-faced work. The first half consists of five legendary weird tales, loosely tied together by a fictional play—the eponymous King in Yellow —that drives those who read it mad. Celebrated by authors like H.

Robert W. Chambers · Horror · 11 ch