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34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 60 of 711.
Mariucha
Benito Pérez Galdós
When a disgraced aristocratic family collapses into poverty, an unyielding daughter and a pragmatic coal merchant forge an alliance to rebuild their lives on work rather than hollow pride.
The Man Who Laughs: A Romance of English History
Victor Hugo
A child whose mouth was surgically carved into a permanent grin is tossed into the storm of late-seventeenth-century aristocracies, where his monstrous face becomes a mirror for the horrors of power.
The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands
Roger T. (Roger Thompson) Finlay
A shared journey turns survival into stewardship, proving that ingenuity and empathy can bridge the vast gap between untamed wilderness and civilization.
Mark Twain's Speeches
Mark Twain
Under an easy, conversational exterior lies a master class in rhetoric, where meticulous calculation hides behind spontaneous wit and biting social commentary.
The Moving Finger
Mary Gaunt
A girl risks her life in the Victorian bush to warn a camp of stockmen against a bushranger raid, only to fall by the hand of the man who loves her.
The Seven Plays in English Verse
Sophocles
A man may run from his fate across whole kingdoms and decades, but the trap is always laid by his own hand.
Stray Birds
Rabindranath Tagore
Transient moments of natural beauty and quiet internal reflection coalesce into short, poetic epigrams that uncover profound spiritual truths embedded within the everyday world.
Butterflies and Moths (British)
William S. Furneaux
A hands-on, nineteenth-century guide transforms the British countryside into a living laboratory for the amateur naturalist pursuing butterflies and moths.
Ion
Plato
A playful contest of wits between an inquisitive philosopher and a boastful performer explores whether artistic brilliant performance stems from learned skill or divine possession.
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
A descent into madness, terror, and the bizarre awaits across a sprawling collection of nautical peril, ghostly obsessed lovers, and saturnine comedy.
Among the Pines
James R. (James Roberts) Gilmore
In the opening months of the American Civil War, a Northern traveler journeys deep into the coastal pine forests of South Carolina, where he encounters a society fractured by slavery, class divisions, and impending ruin.
Sundry Accounts
Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
A man sits in the dark with every lamp ablaze to keep the ghosts of a fatal gunfight at bay; a disgraced showman schemes to smuggle a barrel of contraband past southern marshals; an ambitious girl uses her sharp wit to claw her way out of small-town poverty.
The Carpenter's Daughter
Susan Warner
Driven by an unyielding faith in the face of poverty and neglect, a young girl quietly reshapes her broken household before her failing health runs out.
Maurine and Other Poems
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In a world driven by ambition and noise, true mastery in art and life requires a total surrender of the self to love, sacrifice, and beauty.
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
John Dewey
Human action is governed not by abstract reason or isolated instincts, but by habits formed within a shared social environment. True moral transformation requires changing these objective conditions rather than offering empty praise or blame.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman
A Union general reflects on his life from early military expeditions and California gold rushes to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, offering a candid witness account of leadership, strategy, and national upheaval.
Stories by American Authors (Volume 4)
Constance Fenimore Woolson
A forgotten genius dies in obscurity while a lesser artist succeeds, setting the tone for a collection where hidden desires and strange turns of fate quiet literary ambitions.
The oldest story in the world
Murray Leinster
A white thief in the East trades his soul for a legendary fortune in rubies, only to find that greed and arrogance carry a terrifying, endless price.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845
Various
An intimate, sweeping panorama of nineteenth-century European culture, this volume captures a restless era wrestling with literature, art, history, and the turbulent depths of the human mind.
Bulfinch's Mythology
Thomas Bulfinch
In a world where gods, knights, and monsters constantly rewrite the fates of empires, human passion remains the most dangerous power of all.
Stories from Hans Andersen
H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen
Fragile innocence faces absolute ice, vain pride, and terrifying devotion across landscapes where nature speaks and bargains always extract a heart-wrenching toll.
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)
Arthur Schopenhauer
Beneath the restless surface of human intellect lies a primal, unyielding force that drives all existence. To understand reality, one must look inward at the untamed cause behind every thought, perception, and feeling.
Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting: Battle Creek, Michigan, September 10 and 11, 1934
Unknown
A dedicated network of American horticulturists, amateur growers, and scientists gathers in Battle Creek to confront agricultural depression, severe winter freezes, and crop diseases through the rigorous selection and propagation of hardy nut trees.
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.
Lays of Ancient Rome
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
A city’s lost folk songs are brought back to life, capturing the desperate bravery, civic pride, and brutal sacrifices that forged an empire.
The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893: An Illustrated Monthly
Various
A lively mosaic of late-Victorian fiction, memoirs, and cultural debate reveals a world torn between rowdy bohemian freedom and rigid middle-class respectability.
The Problem of China
Bertrand Russell
Can an ancient, peaceful civilization survive its contact with aggressive Western industrialism and Japanese militarism without losing its soul?
Twentieth century Negro literature
Unknown
At the turn of the twentieth century, one hundred Black thinkers assemble to document their race's achievements, dissect its systemic oppression, and lay out an unyielding blueprint for full American citizenship.
The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives
Elizabeth Strong Worthington
When four young women form a mock club to debate an advice column about training wives, they treat matrimony as a joke—until life calls their bluff and turns their theory into practice.
The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits
Lewis Carroll
A crew of ten absurdly mismatched eccentrics embarks on a maritime expedition to hunt an elusive, mysterious creature using absurdity, optimism, and a completely blank map.
Diggers in the Earth
Eva March Tappan
Earth's subterranean reserves supply humanity's most essential everyday materials, transforming simple sand, stone, and raw minerals into vital building blocks of civilization through ingenuity and laborious human craft.
Davy and the Goblin: What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'
Charles E. (Charles Edward) Carryl
A young boy falls asleep after reading about Alice's adventures and embarks on a surreal nighttime journey through transformed nursery rhymes and strange landscapes.
Side Show Studies
Francis Metcalfe
Step right into the chaotic backstages of early twentieth-century Coney Island, where cynical showmen and razor-clawed beasts constantly vie for control over an unsuspecting public.
Overbeck
J. Beavington Atkinson
A devout German painter rejects modern coldness, retreats into a secluded Roman monastic circle, and spends his entire life attempting to resurrect the lost, sacred purity of Renaissance Christian art through precise, prayerful draftsmanship.
The tale of Turkey Proudfoot
Arthur Scott Bailey
A strutting bird learns that his thunderous voice and grand tail feathers matter far less to the world than they do to his own ego.
Parables from flowers
Gertrude P. Dyer
Resting upon the quiet cycles of the natural world, this collection of moral tales finds spiritual truth in the lives of wild blossoms, birds, and simple country folk.
Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
When three male explorers stumble upon a hidden, all-female society that has quietly flourished for two millennia, their arrogant assumptions about gender, power, and human nature are systematically shattered by a peaceful nation of self-sufficient mothers.
The Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning: Cambridge Edition
Robert Browning
Human desire demands both the fiery expanse of absolute knowledge and the tender reality of immediate, mortal love.
Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery
N. D'Anvers
Centuries of ocean voyages, overland treks, and brutal encounters reshape a continent as European travelers push relentlessly across North American wilderness.
On Growth and Form
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Nature shapes living forms not by biological decree alone, but through the universal mechanics of physical law, surface tension, and mathematical geometry.
Famous Modern Ghost Stories
Unknown
Shadows press against the glass, and the dead insist on keeping their appointments. In a world grown too noisy for peace, the unseen world slips through the floorboards to claim its rightful share of the quiet.
The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
A dark, unyielding mirror is held up to human nature, stripping away societal pretenses to reveal the raw, instinctual urges that quietly drive our civilization.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 33, 1519-1522: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Antonio Pigafetta
A primary source record of the first circumnavigation of the globe reveals how European expansion collided with complex island societies in the sixteenth century.
Chess Strategy
Edward Lasker
A master of positional play demystifies the chessboard, proving that victory rests not on raw calculation, but on a deep, systematic understanding of force, space, and pawn structure.
Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853
John Ruskin
Every building and painting reveals the moral health of the society that made it, reflecting either a joyful love of natural truth or a mechanical submission to lifeless rules.
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
In the shimmering, status-obsessed world of the Heian court, a shining prince pursues perfection in art and love, only to discover that beauty cannot outrun impermanence or human vulnerability.
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880
Various
A vibrant mid-Victorian periodical offers an intoxicating blend of high-altitude adventure, regional serialized fiction, historical lore, and scientific inquiry, reflecting the broad intellectual appetite of nineteenth-century American readers.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bréquigny, Louis Georges Oudard Feudrix de" to "Bulgaria": Volume 4, Part 3
Various
An alphabetical slice of human knowledge exposes the architecture of civilization, where technical precision meets historical upheaval across every domain of human endeavor.