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8,211 public-domain books, summarised. Page 153 of 172.
Legends of Gods and Ghosts (Hawaiian Mythology): Collected and Translated from the Hawaiian
W. D. (William Drake) Westervelt
High upon mountain ridges, beneath ocean surf, and across the dark paths of the spirit world, human lovers, treacherous chiefs, and shape-shifting dragon-gods wage battles of devotion and revenge.
Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun
George W. (George Wilbur) Peck
A sharp-eyed observation of Gilded Age life transforms small-town nuisances, political posturing, and domestic mishaps into enduring, slice-of-life comedy.
Plain Tales from the Hills
Rudyard Kipling
These vignettes capture the volatile, insular world of British colonial India, where reputations are fragile, passions are dangerous, and the line between farce and tragedy is perilously thin.
Poems of Nature
Henry David Thoreau
To dwell closely with nature is to trade the noisy slavery of modern ambition for a quiet, boundless realm of light and air.
Ten Boys from Dickens
Kate Dickinson Sweetser
These ten vignettes capture the formative years of Dickensian youth, tracing the paths of boys navigating poverty, ambition, and the stark realities of Victorian society.
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
Arthur Conan Doyle
A terrifying midnight madness strikes a quiet Cornish village, leaving one sister dead at a card table and her two brothers hopelessly insane.
The Aeneid of Virgil
Virgil
Driven by divine decree and shadowed by tragedy, a displaced prince leads his surviving people across violent seas to build a legendary new home.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
A tapestry of love, deceit, magic, and sudden fortune unfolds across the Islamic world, woven together by the relentless compulsion to tell stories.
The Yellow Fairy Book
Unknown
Magic, peril, and strange transformations await inside a world of ancient enchantments, cunning tricksters, and steadfast hearts.
Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader: Being Selections from the Chief American Writers
Benj. N. (Benjamin Nicholas) Martin
A sprawling, ambitious monument to early American thought, this expansive collection captures a young nation wrestling with its moral duties, judicial structures, historic battles, and emerging literary identity.
Dream Tales and Prose Poems
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Spectral lovers, mysterious obsessions, and fleeting visions of mortal pain haunt a world where the boundary between life and death dissolves into shadow.
History of the Union Jack and Flags of the Empire
Barlow Cumberland
Flags are living history, carrying in their stitches the choices, conflicts, and compromises that built an empire.
Iamblichus on the mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians
Iamblichus
A defense of sacred ritual rooted in Neoplatonic metaphysics, this text argues that divine communion is not an illusion of mortal emotion, but a real elevation of the soul.
Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A restless mind escapes the quiet constraints of northern Europe, discovering in the mountain passes and light-drenched ruins of the South a transformative encounter with nature, classical art, and the raw vitality of human life.
Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville
Mary Somerville
A childhood spent roaming free on the Scottish coast gives way to a lifetime of intellectual conquest, turning a quiet, self-taught girl into one of the nineteenth century’s towering scientific figures.
Sevastopol
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Cannon thunder shakes the morning frost over a blood-drenched bay as soldiers, officers, and civilians navigate the relentless, deadly routine of a besieged city.
Swiss Fairy Tales
William Elliot Griffis
A mountain peak glowing red at dusk; a tailor tricking a giant into an eating contest; a clockmaker learning time from an owl: these tales gather the legends of the Alps into one fireside hearth.
The 2002 CIA World Factbook
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
A sweeping compendium of global data, this reference catalog offers an exhaustive, standardized blueprint of the world’s sovereign nations, territories, and oceanic regions as they stood in 2002.
The Woman's Bible
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A rigorous feminist critique dismantles centuries of patriarchal theology, reclaiming ancient scriptures to show that woman’s true moral duty is self-development rather than submissive self-sacrifice.
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 12 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Miscellany
Robert Green Ingersoll
The human mind finds its highest dignity not in submission to ancient dogmas, but in the unyielding pursuit of intellectual freedom, natural morality, and compassionate reason.
Cowper
Goldwin Smith
An fragile, exquisitely tender mind struggles against the shadows of dark melancholy to pioneer a revolutionary simplicity in English poetry, finding solace in quiet countryside routines, domestic love, and private correspondence.
Excursions, and Poems: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume 05 (of 20)
Henry David Thoreau
An observant traveler wanders from New England fields to Canadian fortresses, reading the landscape like an ancient text to find the wild heart hidden beneath human order.
Guernsey Folk Lore: a collection of popular superstitions, legendary tales, peculiar customs, proverbs, weather sayings, etc., of the people of that island
MacCulloch, Edgar, Sir
An isolated island shapes its own reality, where midnight streams turn to wine, ancient standing stones defy the curious, and every dark lane holds a spectral secret.
Modern Design in Jewellery and Fans
Unknown
A revolution in metal and stone abandons pure commercial glitter to turn personal adornment into living, expressive art.
"My Novel"
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
A broad, sprawling panorama of nineteenth-century English society, this narrative explores how ambition, honour, and hidden secrets shape the intertwined destinies of the high-born and the humble.
Mystic Isles of the South Seas
Frederick O'Brien
Life in the South Sea islands offers a sweet, temporary refuge from the crushing pace of modern industrial civilization.
Roister Doister: Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College
Nicholas Udall
A foolishly vain knight pursues a wealthy widow who thoroughly despises him, completely unaware that his parasite helper is orchestrating his humiliation for sport.
The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of natural history and rural life (Illustrated)
Richard Jefferies
A gamekeeper moves through wet woods and quiet hedgerows, defending his master's preserves while observing the secret, constant machinery of nature.
The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852
Various
A vibrant cross-section of mid-nineteenth-century intellectual life, this collection captures a culture rapidly expanding its borders in literature, global politics, science, and social commentary.
The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III
Alexander Wheelock Thayer
An aging titan, deaf and isolated, wages a fierce legal war for his nephew while summoning his final, transcendent masterpieces from the void.
The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella
Passion and torment echo through every line, revealing two fierce Italian minds bound by verse, faith, and the long shadow of mortality.
The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4
Charles Lamb
A tapestry of human frailty, theatrical ambition, and urban devotion reveals how quiet virtues and eccentric passions endure through life's unexpected turns.
Alone with the Hairy Ainu
Arnold Henry Savage Landor
A lone traveller mounts a rough pack-saddle to ride four thousand miles through the uncharted wilderness of late-nineteenth-century Hokkaido, recording the customs of a vanishing people before modern civilization remakes their world forever.
Bacon and Shakspere
William Henry Burr
A handwriting study of five clumsy signatures becomes a devastating challenge to the conventional author of the Western world’s greatest plays.
Dangerous Connections, v. 1, 2, 3, 4: A Series of Letters, selected from the Correspondence of a Private Circle
Choderlos de Laclos
A chilling game of emotional conquest turns deadly when two aristocratic schemers weaponize desire against the innocent and the virtuous alike.
Framley Parsonage
Anthony Trollope
A young vicar's brush with political ambition and borrowed money threatens his quiet parish home, while his plain, fierce sister refuses to marry the local lord until his proud mother begs her to do so.
Heart of the West
O. Henry
On the dusty plains of Texas and across the snowbound cabins of the American frontier, human pride, sudden affection, and absurd misunderstandings collide in nineteen sharp vignettes.
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
A vast civilization does not perish in a single dramatic instant, but erodes through centuries of misplaced pride, religious splintering, and the relentless pressure of external forces.
One Irish Summer
William Eleroy Curtis
A leisurely journey through early twentieth-century Ireland reveals an island caught between a tumultuous, bloody heritage and a hopeful era of economic and social reform.
Philosophical Works, v. 2 (of 4): Including All the Essays, and Exhibiting the More Important Alterations and Corrections in the Successive Editions Published by the Author
David Hume
An anatomy of human emotion and moral life reveals that reason does not govern our choices; instead, feeling and natural sympathy construct our social world.
Stories of Symphonic Music: A Guide to the Meaning of Important Symphonies, Overtures, and Tone-poems from Beethoven to the Present Day
Lawrence Gilman
A guide to orchestral narrative unfolds the literary, mythical, and emotional tales hidden within classical scores.
Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)
Augustus Hopkins Strong
Eternal security and human responsibility belong together, acting as anchor and engine to the soul; to hold the promise of election without the daily pursuit of holiness is to miss the very means by which salvation is realized.
The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A fiery, restless spirit seeks absolute ideal beauty, political freedom, and profound emotional truth, confronting mortal decay and worldly tyranny through transcendent verse before vanishing into the quiet deep.
The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2): or a History of the Life of Mademoiselle de Beleau Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana
Daniel Defoe
A woman abandoned in poverty transforms herself into a wealthy, high-class courtisan, only to find that no amount of fortune can shield her from the haunting consequences of her past.
The life of John Eliot
Nehemiah Adams
An early American minister braves the New England wilderness to translate the Bible into an indigenous tongue, bridging two distant worlds through patient devotion.
The Nobel Prize winners in literature
Annie Russell Marble
A rare glimpse into global literary history reveals how a newly forged international prize sought to crown humanity’s greatest creative minds.
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D
Jonathan Swift
A sharp collection of political essays and satirical broadsides dissects the fierce party faction, personal avarice, and rhetorical deception dominating eighteenth-century British public life.
The Variable Man
Philip K. Dick
A 1913 handyman, pulled two centuries into the future by a time-travel accident, alters the fate of an interstellar war simply by fixing a broken bomb.