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1,474 public-domain books, summarised. Page 28 of 31.
Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific
Felix Speiser
A traveler crosses a chain of islands where beauty and violence sit side by side. The sea is luminous, the forest closes in, and every shore reveals a new order of power, labor, belief, and loss.
Heimskringla
Snorri Sturluson
Kings rise, swear, raid, convert, and fall while skalds turn bloodshed into memory. Norway’s early history here moves like a tide, carrying saints, traitors, lawmen, and boys into the same cold current.
The Book of Nature Myths
Florence Holbrook
Discover the ancient stories behind nature’s wonders—how animals, plants, and natural phenomena came to be, told through the eyes of early peoples’ imagination and reverence for the world around them.
Old Ebenezer
Opie Percival Read
In a town where reputation is a public spectacle, a writer-lawyer with a taste for irony keeps colliding with pride, courtship, and mob law until private feeling becomes a test of character.
The Naval History of the United States. Volume 2
Willis J. (Willis John) Abbot
Naval warfare shapes a young nation’s destiny through fierce battles, daring voyages, and the evolution of American maritime power from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War.
The Green Rust
Edgar Wallace
HOOK In this masterfully paced thriller, Edgar Wallace weaves a web of international intrigue where a devastating biological weapon threatens to topple the global economy and starve the world into submission.
The red terror in Russia
S. P. (Sergeĭ Petrovich) Melʹgunov
A revolution promises a new order, but these pages keep asking what happens when power decides that fear is a method and death a routine.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Bertrand Russell
Explore the tension between mystical intuition and rigorous logic, as reason and science confront the mysteries of existence and knowledge.
Wood-Carving: Design and Workmanship
George Jack
A craft manual can read like a quiet argument about seeing, choosing, and cutting with purpose. Here the lesson is not only how to carve wood, but how to make judgment and handwork answer to each other.
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern
Unknown
A vast treasury of human thought and imagination, this collection opens windows onto the world’s literary heritage, from ancient epics to modern reflections, revealing the enduring power of storytelling and ideas across cultures and centuries.
Manhood of Humanity
Alfred Korzybski
Humanity’s progress hinges on a unique capacity to bind time—an exponential power shaping ethics, economics, and civilization itself.
A Little Princess: Being the whole story of Sara Crewe now told for the first time
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A young girl’s life shifts from luxury to hardship and back again, revealing the strength of kindness, imagination, and resilience amid the stark contrasts of Victorian London.
Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures
Heinrich Hoffmann
Bright little rhymes, then sudden calamity: these stories turn childish misbehavior into spectacle, with each warning landing harder than the last.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete
Giacomo Casanova
A restless life runs from Venetian youth to a lonely death in Bohemia, with prisons, salons, convents, and courts in between. What holds it together is not scandal but a man forever trying to turn charm into fate.
My Studio Neighbors
W. Hamilton (William Hamilton) Gibson
HOOK Discover the hidden dramas and delicate intricacies of nature’s smallest neighbors, revealed through vivid observation and gentle storytelling.
The Cauliflower
A. A. (Arthur Alger) Crozier
HOOK A detailed, practical guide to the cultivation, varieties, and care of cauliflower, revealing the challenges and opportunities of growing this often-neglected vegetable in diverse climates and soils.
The Reckoning
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
HOOK: A spy moves through burning country and divided loyalties, but the hardest battle is not in the woods or forts. It is in the heart, where love and duty keep changing sides.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
A wedding feast opens into a city of traps, wages, and vanished hope, where every promise of work costs more than it gives. What begins as an immigrant dream hardens into an account of how a family is ground down.
Gabriel and the Hour Book
Evaleen Stein
A young peasant boy’s quiet courage and an artist monk’s passion intertwine in a medieval abbey, where illuminated manuscripts become a bridge between hardship and hope.
The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, commonly called Lord Cochrane, the Hon. Andrew Cochrane Johnstone, Richard Gathorne Butt, Ralph Sandom, Alexander M'Rae, John Peter Holloway, and Henry Lyte for A Conspiracy: In the Court of King's Bench, Guildhall, on Wednesday the 8th, and Thursday the 9th of June, 1814
Unknown
A high-stakes courtroom drama unfolds over a complex conspiracy involving false reports, stock manipulation, and questions of loyalty during wartime Britain.
That Affair Next Door
Anna Katharine Green
A death next door looks simple until everyone’s story begins to split apart. What starts as a neighbor’s late-night curiosity turns into a trap of mistaken identity, hidden marriage, and a detective’s cold certainty.
The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines
T. H. (Trinidad Hermenegildo) Pardo de Tavera
T. H. Pardo de Tavera’s seminal work serves as a foundational bridge between ancient indigenous wisdom and modern pharmacology, cataloging the lush, curative landscape of the Philippine Archipelago with rigorous botanical precision and deep cultural empathy.
Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A mad knight’s chivalric quests collide with harsh reality, weaving a tapestry of humor, wisdom, and human folly that questions the nature of honor, illusion, and identity.
The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Müller
George Müller
A life built on prayer becomes a record of daily dependence, tested in money, in illness, in work, and in the care of hundreds of children.
At Good Old Siwash
George Fitch
HOOK George Fitch’s classic collection captures the riotous, high-spirited absurdity of early twentieth-century Midwestern college life, where football is a religion, Greek life is a battlefield, and logic is the first casualty of youth.
North and South
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
A young woman from the English countryside confronts the harsh realities of industrial life in the North, navigating love, class conflict, and personal growth amid the smoke and steam of a changing world.
The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1: The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order
Marcus Tullius Cicero
A vivid window into the final decades of the Roman Republic, these letters reveal the personal struggles, political intrigues, and human complexities behind one of history’s most turbulent eras.
Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol. 3: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer
Hook A monumental bridge across the literary landscape, this encyclopedic volume decodes the DNA of Western storytelling, cataloging the heroes, villains, and myths that have shaped the collective imagination of the English-speaking world.
Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals: As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac
Henry Morford
A soldier who has seen the war from the ranks keeps running into the same enemy behind the enemy: delay, vanity, and men who confuse paperwork with command.
The Odyssey of Homer
Homer
A king is absent, a household rots from within, and a son must grow into the shape of a father he barely knows. What begins as a search for news becomes a long homecoming earned through deception, patience, and blood.
Natural Law in the Spiritual World
Henry Drummond
What if the laws that govern the natural world also shape the spiritual realm? This exploration challenges the divide between science and religion, revealing a profound unity beneath both.
Hard Times
Charles Dickens
HOOK In the grim, smoke-choked town of Coketown, a rigid devotion to facts and reason collides with the messy realities of human emotion, revealing the limits of cold logic in a world shaped by industry and social struggle.
Alonzo and Melissa
I. (Isaac) Mitchell
A lovers’ promise is tested by war, family cruelty, superstition, and a long disappearance that turns longing into obsession. What begins as pastoral hope becomes a tale of prisons, graveyards, and a mystery that keeps returning.
Tongues of Conscience
Robert Hichens
HOOK A haunting collection of short stories exploring the psychological weight of guilt, where the internal voices of the transgressor manifest as external phantoms, blurring the line between morality and madness in Victorian society.
Lincoln's Birthday
Unknown
HOOK A curated treasury of history and heart, this anthology captures the soul of the Great Emancipator through the collective voices of the poets, statespeople, and friends who knew him best.
The Girl in the Golden Atom
Ray Cummings
HOOK When a scientist discovers a subatomic world hidden within a wedding ring, he shrinks himself to enter it, finding a golden-skinned civilization and an epic struggle between love and tyranny.
Dhammapada, a Collection of Verses
F. Max (Friedrich Max) Müller
A short poem keeps returning to the same hard truth: the mind makes the world we live in. What begins as a few sharp verses grows into a map of suffering, self-command, and release.
A London Life, and Other Tales
Henry James
HOOK A delicate unraveling of English society’s polished surface reveals the restless tensions beneath—where family secrets, social facades, and personal despair collide in intimate, quietly devastating ways.
Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
George Chapman
Courtly favor turns to rivalry, and rivalry to blood. In these two tragedies, pride, desire, and revenge keep tightening the net until almost every private passion becomes a public ruin.
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son: Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to his intimates as "Piggy."
George Horace Lorimer
HOOK A titan of the Chicago meatpacking industry mentors his son through a series of sharp, unsentimental letters, revealing the ruthless pragmatism and homespun wisdom required to survive the Gilded Age business world.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are not mere nonsense but a gateway to the unconscious mind, revealing hidden desires and conflicts through symbolic imagery and complex mental processes.
Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen
A world where fragile innocence meets harsh realities, where magic and sorrow intertwine in stories that have shaped childhoods and linger in the heart.
Studies in Literature and History
Lyall, Alfred C., Sir
A profound exploration of literature and history reveals how ideas, societies, and beliefs intertwine, shaping culture and politics from ancient times to modernity.
The Grell Mystery
Frank Froest
A celebrated explorer’s murder on the eve of his wedding plunges London into a labyrinth of secrets, deception, and shifting loyalties where nothing is quite what it seems.
At Plattsburg
Allen French
HOOK A group of civilian men trades their everyday lives for military discipline and camaraderie at a summer training camp, discovering the challenges and unexpected bonds forged in preparation for war.
The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2
Henry Baerlein
A detailed chronicle of Yugoslavia’s turbulent birth reveals the complex interplay of national ambitions, foreign interventions, and internal struggles that shaped a new Balkan state after World War I.
Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California
Mary E. (Mary Evarts) Anderson
A journey that begins with steamers, reefs, and crowded decks opens into a portrait of islands, people, and faith in motion. The pleasures are small and vivid; the questions beneath them are larger than travel.
The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
A profound meditation on human suffering, the nature of existence, and the complexities of human character, revealing a world where pain is not an aberration but the very essence of life.