Classic Conrad short story. "What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour. He did not belong to the place. He had come to settle there under circumstances not at all myste- rious--he used to be very communicative about them at the time--but extremely morbid and un- reasonable. He was possessed of some little money evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up very cheaply. He occupied one of them himself and let the other to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil, the retired boat-builder--a man of evil repute as a domestic tyrant." According to Wikipedia: "Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language—a fact that is remarkable, as he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a strong Polish accent). He became a naturalized British subject in 1886. Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino and J. M. Coetzee."

Four Christmas stories by Bret Harte. The Christmas Gift that Came to Rupert, Dick Sppindler's Family Christmas, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar, and an Episode of Fiddletown. According to Wikipedia: "Bret Harte (August 25, 1836[2] – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. He was born in Albany, New York. ... He moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coast town now known as Arcata, then just a mining camp on Humboldt Bay. His first literary efforts, including poetry and prose, appeared in The Californian, an early literary journal edited by Charles Henry Webb. In 1868 he became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, but this one more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. His story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," appeared in the magazine's second edition, propelling Harte to nationwide fame... Determined to pursue his literary career, in 1871 he and his family traveled back East, to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly for an annual salary of $10,000, "an unprecedented sum at the time." His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872 he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work (or republish old), delivering lectures about the gold rush, and even selling an advertising jingle to a soap company. In 1878 Harte was appointed to the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany and then to Glasgow in 1880. In 1885 he settled in London. During the thirty years he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing, and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work. He died in England in 1902 of throat cancer and is buried at Frimley."

The extended essay on the role of the individual in history which Tolstoy appended to War and Peace, the result of his ruminations on the phenomenon of the the French Revolution and the Napoleonnic Wars.

Four-act play, first published in 1902. According to Wikipedia: "Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously.[1] Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them."

The Thirty-Nine Steps, set during World War I, tells the story of Richard Hannay, who finds himself accused of murder and must battles both police and spies to prove his innocence. According to Wikipedia, it "is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, first published in 1915...It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations. John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada. Buchan's 100 works include nearly thirty novels, seven collections of short stories and biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus, and Oliver Cromwell. Buchan's most famous of his books were the spy thrillers (including) The 39 Steps (which was converted to a play as well as an Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, though with Buchan's story much altered.) The "last Buchan" (as Graham Greene entitled his appreciative review) was the 1941 novel Sick Heart River (American title: Mountain Meadow), in which a dying protagonist confronts in the Canadian wilderness the questions of the meaning of life. The insightful quotation "It's a great life, if you don't weaken" is famously attributed to Buchan, as is "No great cause is ever lost or won, The battle must always be renewed, And the creed must always be restated."

Diese Datei enth?lt sowohl Knulp (Drei Geschichten aus dem Leben Knulps) als auch Siddhartha (Eine Indische Diktatur) im Original Deutsch. Laut Wikipedia: "Hermann Hesse (2. Juli 1877 - 9. August 1962) war ein in Deutschland geborener Schweizer Dichter, Romancier und Maler. Im Jahr 1946 erhielt er den Nobelpreis für Literatur. Seine bekanntesten Werke sind Steppenwolf, Siddhartha und The Glass Bead Game (auch bekannt als Magister Ludi), von denen jeder die Suche nach Authentizit?t, Selbsterkenntnis und Spiritualit?t erforscht. "

According to Wikipedia: "The Possessed (Russian: Бесы, tr. Besy) is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demons. An extremely political book, Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century. As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different ideologies begin to collide. Dostoevsky casts a critical eye on both the left-wing idealists, portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic, and the conservative establishment's ineptitude in dealing with those ideas and their social consequences. This form of intellectual conservativism tied to the Slavophile movement of Dostoevsky's day is seen to have continued on into its modern manifestation in individuals like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Dostoevsky's novels focus on the idea that utopias and positivist ideas, in being utilitarian, were unrealistic and unobtainable. The book has five primary ideological characters: Verkhovensky, Shatov, Stavrogin, Stepan Trofimovich, and Kirilov. Through their philosophies, Dostoevsky describes the political chaos seen in 19th-Century Russia."

Classic short story collection, first published in 1921. According to Wikipedia: "Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Classic Roman plays. Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, Teh Pot of Gold, The Two Bacchises, and The Captives. According to Wikipedia, "Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are among the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. Plautus wrote around 52 plays, which were released between c. 205 and 184 BCE, of which 20 have survived, making him the most prolific ancient dramatist in terms of surviving work. He attained such a popularity that his name alone became a hallmark of theatrical success. Plautus' comedies are mostly adapted from Greek models for a Roman audience, and are often based directly on the works of the Greek playwrights. He reworked the Greek texts to give them a flavour that would appeal to the local Roman audiences...Shakespeare borrowed from Plautus as Plautus borrowed from his Greek models...The Plautine and Shakespearean plays that most parallel each other are, respectively, The Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors."

According to Wikipedia: "Romulus and Remus are Rome's twin founders in its traditional foundation myth, although the former is sometimes said to be the sole founder. Their maternal grandfather is Numitor, rightful king of Alba Longa, a descendant of the Trojan prince, Aeneas and father to Rhea Silvia (also known as Ilia). Before their conception, Numitor's brother Amulius deposes his brother, kills his sons and forces Rhea to become a Vestal Virgin, intending to deprive Numitor of lawful heirs and thus secure his own position; but Rhea conceives Romulus and Remus by the god Mars or the demi-god Hercules. When the twins are born, Amulius has them exposed to die but they are saved by a series of miraculous interventions. A she-wolf finds them and suckles them. Then a shepherd and his wife foster them and raise them to manhood as shepherds. The twins prove to be natural leaders, and acquire many followers. When told their true identities, they kill Amulius, restore Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa and decide to found a new city for themselves."

According to Wikipedia: "Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was King of England for two years, from 1483 until his death in 1485 during the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field was the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses and is sometimes regarded as the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the subject of an eponymous historical play by William Shakespeare. When his brother Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord protector of the realm for Edward's son and successor, the 12-year-old King Edward V... There were two major rebellions against Richard. The first, in October 1483, was led by staunch opponents of Edward IV and most notably by Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. The revolt collapsed and Buckingham was executed at Salisbury near the Bull's Head Inn. In August 1485 there was another rebellion against Richard, headed by Henry Tudor, 2nd Earl of Richmond (later King Henry VII) and his uncle Jasper. The rebels landed troops, composed mainly of mercenaries, and Richard fell in the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last English king to die in battle (and the only king to die in battle on English soil since Harold II, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066)."

According to Wikipedia: "Maurice Marie ?mile Leblanc (11 November 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.

According to Wikipedia: "Maurice Marie ?mile Leblanc (11 November 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.

According to Wikipedia: "Maurice Marie ?mile Leblanc (11 November 1864 – 6 November 1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.

Philosophical essays. According to Wikipedia: "Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright who reshaped Bengali literature and music. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he was the first non-European who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. His poetry in translation was viewed as spiritual, and this together with his mesmerizing persona gave him a prophet-like aura in the west. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" still remain largely unknown outside the confines of Bengal."

First published in 1918. The book begins: "We have often heard discussions of the reason we do not find women, as a sex, in the vanguard of world affairs; why the great educators, strong figures in progressive or revolutionary movements, are men rather than women; why these movements, themselves, are made up almost entirely of men rather than women. People have asked over and over again why, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, in the world of "practical affairs," men, rather than women, generally excel."

Historical novel, set in France in 1718. According to Wikipedia: "Alexandre Dumas, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870) was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world. Many of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne were originally serialized. He also wrote plays and magazine articles and was a prolific correspondent."

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Rudyard Kipling, ‘"Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks.’ ? A pampered millionaire's son tumbles overboard from a luxury liner and falls into good fortune, disguised in the form of a fishing boat. The gruff and hearty crew teach the young man to be worth his salt as they fish the waters off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Brimming with adventure and humor. ? Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. ? Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". ? Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.

According to Wikipedia: "Fathers and Sons is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, his best known work. The title of this work in Russian ... literally means "Fathers and Children"; the work is often translated to Fathers and Sons in English for reasons of euphony. The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order. Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Rudyard Kipling, ‘Traffics and Discoveries.’ ? From "The Captive": The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man, rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-colored rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the little Barracouta nodded to the big Gibraltar, and the old Penelope, that in ten years has been bachelors' club, natural history museum, kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea. Said the sentry, assured of the visitor's good faith, "Talk to 'em? You can, to any that speak English. You'll find a lot that do." Also includes the stories "The Bonds of Discipline," "A Sahibs' War," ""Their Lawful Occasions,"" "The Comprehension of Private Copper," "Steam Tactics," ""Wireless,"" "The Army of a Dream," ""They,"" "Mrs. Bathurst," and "Below the Mill Dam," and the poems "From the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed,"" Poseidon's Law," "The Runners," "The Wet Litany," "The King's Task," "The Necessitarian," "Kaspar's Song in Varda," "Song of the Old Guard," "The Return of the Children," "From Lyden's 'Irenius, '" and "'Our Fathers Also.'" ? Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". ? Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from H. Rider Haggard, ‘Allan Quatermain’ ? This sequel to?King Solomon's Mines?is based on Rider Haggard's own experiences in Africa. During their search for a white race reputed to live near Mount Kenya, Allan Quatermain and his companions undergo a series of dangerous and thrilling adventures. The dramatic and often poetic story reveals Victorian preoccupations with evolution, race, sexuality, and the "New Woman." ? Sir Henry Rider Haggard was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and the creator of the Lost World literary genre. His stories, situated at the lighter end of the scale of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential. He was also involved in agricultural reform and improvement in the British Empire.? His breakout novel was?King Solomon's Mines(1885), which was to be the first in a series telling of the multitudinous adventures of its protagonist, Allan Quatermain. Haggard was made a Knight Bachelor in 1912 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative candidate for the Eastern division of Norfolk in 1895. The locality of Rider, British Columbia, was named in his memory.