“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.” Lucy Honeychurch is a young English girl abroad in Italy for the first time and is ready to experience all the beauty, art, and romance it has to offer. She is hampered by the oppressive attentio...
She's broken. He's lost. Olivia Crawford has been through the ringer. All she wants is to start over without any complications or anyone figuring out her secrets. When her twin brother Finn convinces her to move back home and finish her degree at his school, it's just the push she needs to start ove...
Immediately following the success of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott sat down to write An-Old Fashioned Girl, expanding on the subject of rich versus poor that she explored in her first novel. It’s a story of a country mouse and a city mouse: 14-year-old Polly Milton travels to Boston for a stay wit...
Peter Rabbit has no appetite, which is very unusual for him. After thinking about it, Peter decides it is loneliness affecting him. He decides to leave the Old Briar Patch and see the Great World, starting at the Old Pasture. After a close encounter with an old nemesis, Hooty the Owl, Peter discover...
In the 19th century, when books were comparatively rare and expensive, encyclopedic compendiums about managing households became very popular. The most notable example in this genre is Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. Three years later, Edward Abbott, who desc...
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde and The First Stone by T. W. H. Crosland In 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years gaol with hard labour for offences “of gross indecency.” After spells in Newgate, Pentonville, and Wandsworth prisons, Wilde was transferred to Reading Gaol, where he completed the rem...
Norman Lindsay’s classic tale about an anthropomorphic pudding and its band of protectors was written in 1917, in response to an argument between Lindsay and the critic and anthologist Bertram Stevens about the types of stories that would appeal most to children. In retrospect it appears that Lindsa...
The so-called "Bigfoot Bible". Ivan T. Sanderson, cryptozoologist (he coined the term) and paranormal and nature writer, methodically examines the wealth of reported sightings and evidence pertaining to the infamous hairy creatures that have been called names like Sasquatch, Yeti and Oh-Mah. This pr...
Only two people were in a position to experience all the events leading up to the first flight of a viable airplane, and here in three short essays they report how it came about.The idea of powered flight was so new that there were not even accepted methods of measuring the forces at play on a machi...
Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-e Shīrāzī (1315-1390), more commonly known just as Háfiz, was a lyric poet, who ranks with Omar Khayyam and Rumi as a major figure in classical Persian literature. The compendious anthology of his poetry simply titled the Divan contains several hundred odes, from w...
It was a big, coffin-shaped plywood box that looked like it weighed a ton. This brawny type just dumped it through the door of the police station and started away. I looked up from the blotter and shouted at the trucker's vanishing back. "What the hell is that?" "How should I know?" he said as he sw...
