86 books

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (1911)

Drama Fantasy
The adventures of the three Darling children in Never-Never Land with Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up. ---------- ###German-language description: Peter Pan, das ist der Junge, der nie erwachsen wird und auf einer Insel lebt, auf der alles möglich st. Wendy und ihre Brüder können noch nicht ahnen, was sie erwartet, als sie auf der Insel landen: Zusammen mit anderen Kindern geraten sie in die Hände gefährlicher Piraten! Doch Rettung naht, denn auf Peter Pan können sich seine Freunde verlassen.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1893)

Marriage English Humor Drama Comedy
Set in England during the late Victorian era, the play's humour derives in part from characters maintaining fictitious identities to escape unwelcome social obligations. It is replete with witty dialogue and satirises some of the foibles and hypocrisy of late Victorian society. It has proved Wilde's most enduringly popular play. - [*Wikipedia*][1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest

As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1734)

English War Drama Comedy
This play has two principal settings: the court that Frederick has usurped from his brother, the rightful Duke, and the Forest of Arden, where the Duke and his followers (including the disgruntled Lord Jaques and the jester Touchstone) are living.

Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1853)

English Romance Friendship Victorian/Regency Drama
<p><i>Cranford</i> was first serialized in <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens">Charles Dickens’</a> magazine <i>Household Words</i> between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/elizabeth-gaskell">Gaskell</a> was busy writing her novel <i>Ruth</i> at the time the <i>Cranford</i> shorts were being published, suggests that she didn’t initially plan for <i>Cranford</i> to be a cohesive novel.</p> <p>The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fictional small English country town of Cranford. Gaskell drew from her own childhood in Knutsford to imbue her settings and characters with a nostalgic quality in a time when the societies and styles portrayed were already going out of fashion.</p> <p>Though not especially popular at the time of publication, <i>Cranford</i> has since gained an immense following, including at least three television adaptations.</p>

Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare (1600)

English Drama
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Summer festival, June 27th to September 10th, 1932. "The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, containing his death, and the coronation of King Henry the Fifth," by William Shakespeare. The prologue will be spoken by Eugene Wellesley and the epilogue by Hilda Coxhead.

Pericles by William Shakespeare (1609)

English Drama
This book includes a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a seperate introduction to Pericles, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary.

Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare (1735)

Drama
"Neither comedy nor tragedy, The Winter's tale contains elements of each genre, and defies easy classification. It experiments, like many of Shakespeare's late plays, with different styles and tones, and draws on a wide range of sources and inspirations. Full of mysteries and miracles, grief and dark humour, this strange play has fascinated critics and theatregoers for centuries. Theatrical and cinematic productions have tried to capture the range of interpretations and staging possibilities presented by The Winter's Tale, and the introduction to this edition explores the play's long history in performance and in criticism. Illustrations and extended notes interleaved throughout the text discuss the echoes of religious, scientific, and mythological texts found in the play."--Publisher description.

The deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper (1841)

Historical Fiction English War Friendship Drama Thriller
The Deerslayer is the last book in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy, but acts as a prequel to the other novels. It begins with the rapid civilizing of New York, in which surrounds the following books take place. It introduces the hero of the Tales, Natty Bumppo, and his philosophy that every living thing should follow its own nature. He is contrasted to other, less conscientious, frontiersmen.

Villette, a novel by Charlotte Brontë (1853)

Survival English Romance American Drama
**In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement.** With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

English Science Fiction Drama Dystopian Fantasy
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often referred to as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English novelist George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair). It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. ---------- Also contained in: [Novels (Animal Farm / Burmese Days / Clergyman's Daughter / Coming Up for Air / Keep the Aspidistra Flying / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168045W) [Novels (Animal Farm / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1167981W) [Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168095W)

Adam Bede by George Eliot (1800)

English Victorian/Regency Drama
Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and retribution.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Romance Mystery Drama Short Stories
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity.

Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884)

Historical Fiction English Science Fiction Victorian/Regency Drama Fantasy
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, though written in 1884, is still considered useful in thinking about multiple dimensions. It is also seen as a satirical depiction of Victorian society and its hierarchies. A square, who is a resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland. He attempts to convince the monarch of Lineland of the possibility of another dimension, but the monarch cannot see outside the line. The square is then visited himself by a Sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland, who must show the square Spaceland before he can conceive it. As more dimensions enter the scene, the story's discussion of fixed thought and the kind of inhuman action which accompanies it intensifies.

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1800)

Tragedy English Poetry Drama Redemption
A complete annotated translation of Goethe's "Faust," plus extensive interpretive notes, "Faust" illustrations and other visual sources used by Goethe, several pieces of Goethe's correspondence and commentary, eleven contemporary reviews by well-known writers, and ten modern pieces of criticism; also includes a Goethe chronology and selected bibliography.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (1791)

English Drama Revenge Death & Loss
Few men could compare to Benjamin Franklin. Virtually self-taught, he excelled as an athlete, a man of letters, a printer, a scientist, a wit, an inventor, an editor, and a writer, and he was probably the most successful diplomat in American history. David Hume hailed him as the first great philosopher and great man of letters in the New World. Written initially to guide his son, Franklin's autobiography is a lively, spellbinding account of his unique and eventful life. Stylistically his best work, it has become a classic in world literature, one to inspire and delight readers everywhere.

Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

Friendship Drama Fantasy French Adventure
*Le Petit Prince* est une œuvre de langue française, la plus connue d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Publié en 1943 à New York simultanément à sa traduction anglaise, c'est une œuvre poétique et philosophique sous l'apparence d'un conte pour enfants. Traduit en quatre cent cinquante-sept langues et dialectes, *Le Petit Prince* est le deuxième ouvrage le plus traduit au monde après la Bible. Le langage, simple et dépouillé, parce qu'il est destiné à être compris par des enfants, est en réalité pour le narrateur le véhicule privilégié d'une conception symbolique de la vie. Chaque chapitre relate une rencontre du petit prince qui laisse celui-ci perplexe, par rapport aux comportements absurdes des « grandes personnes ». Ces différentes rencontres peuvent être lues comme une allégorie. Les aquarelles font partie du texte et participent à cette pureté du langage : dépouillement et profondeur sont les qualités maîtresses de l'œuvre. On peut y lire une invitation de l'auteur à retrouver l'enfant en soi, car « toutes les grandes personnes ont d'abord été des enfants. (Mais peu d'entre elles s'en souviennent.) ». L'ouvrage est dédié à Léon Werth, mais « quand il était petit garçon ». [PDF](https://chesserresources.com/doc/the-little-prince-by-antoine-de-saint-exupery/) (Wikipedia)