Though little is known about Marie de France, her work changed romantic writing forever. “The Lais of Marie de France” challenged social norms and the views of the church during the twelfth century concerning both love and the role of women. She wrote within a court unknown to scholars, in a form of Anglo-Norman French. Inspired by the Greeks and Romans long before her, Marie de France sought to write something not only morally instructive, but ...
First published in 1893, “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” is a collection of eleven detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had intended that this collection be the final stories of Holmes and Watson and killed off the beloved detective in the last story in this collection, “The Final Problem”, which contains the infamous confrontation between Holmes and his arch-nemesis, the crimi ...
After a brief military career, the illustrious Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky quickly turned to writing as a profession with the publication of his first novel, “Poor Folk” in 1846. This novel sparked a literary career that would eventually cement Dostoyevsky’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century. Early participation in a literary political group landed the writer in exile in Siberia for nearly a decade, an e ...
Collected together here in “Candide and Other Stories” we have a collection of philosophical fiction by 18th century French author Voltaire. In the author’s best known work, “Candide”, we find the story of a man who has lived a sheltered comfortable life, but when he begins to travel the world he witnesses the pervasive hardships of the world, an experience that leads to his ultimate disillusionment with his previously held philosophy. In “Micro ...
Popular American writer Ambrose Bierce comes alive in the magnificent collection of short stories. Having been no stranger to the battlefield, Bierce draws upon his experience as a soldier and the stories he heard during the American Civil War in this collection. However, his tales do not happily reminisce about the good times; instead, Bierce’s dry wit and love of the macabre guide his stories to much darker places. “Civil War Stories”, include ...
“The Secret Sharer and Other Stories” is a collection of seafaring tales by famed author Joseph Conrad. In “The Secret Sharer”, a nameless captain discovers a stow-away clinging to the side of his ship and secretly brings him aboard and harbors him in his cabin. In “Typhoon”, the main character, Captain MacWhirr, decides to sail his vessel through a typhoon in the South Pacific. His bold action, at first to the protest of his crew, later earns h ...
First published together in 1923, “The Inimitable Jeeves” is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse featuring his famous characters Bertie Wooster and his wise valet, Jeeves. The stories were previously published in magazines before being collected together and most share the common theme of Bertie’s friend, Bingo Little, and his dramatic love life. The Inimitable Jeeves is the second collection of Jeeves stories, following “My Man Jee ...
American author Stephen Crane, best known for his classic novel of the American Civil War, “The Red Badge of Courage”, was a prolific writer of short stories. His tales are some of the earliest American examples of Naturalism, Impressionism, and the Realist literary movement. Collected together here in this volume, “The Open Boat and Other Stories” are some of his most popular and famous shorter works. In the titular story, “The Open Boat” we fi ...
First published serially between 1893 and 1894, “The Jungle Book” is Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of jungle tales in which we first meet Mowgli, a child lost in the jungles of India and raised by a pack of wolves. To survive in the jungle Mowgli most learn from the animals to abide by the laws of the jungle. A cast of interesting creatures surround Mowgli, including Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, who help the young man to ...
