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All Classics (581)

A Tale of Two Cities
By Charles Dickens
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Civil unrest and dramatic upheavals in the French Revolutionary era set the stage for Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. Two men, one French, one English, are at the heart of the novel. Their chara ...
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The Best American Humorous Short Stories
By Various
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Looking for a cure for everyday blahs? Try The Best American Humorous Short Stories, a 1920 treasury of favorite American writers at their funniest. Characters who range from the conniving to the ecc ...
Les Miserables
By Victor Hugo
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Les Miserables, Victor Hugo's 1862 masterpiece, tells a story of personal turmoil in the midst of the traumatic political and social upheaval of nineteenth century France. At its heart is Jean Valjean ...
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Dracula
By Bram Stoker
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Bram Stoker's Dracula is full of the kind of chills and thrills that mark the very best horror stories and films. Jonathan Harker, a freshly-minted English lawyer, travels to Transylvania to take on a ...
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1
By Edward Gibbon
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Over the course of one pivotal year in history, the colossal Roman Empire crumbled into ruin. Or so the story goes. But the fall of Rome in 480 A.D. may not have occurred in the single dramatic moment ...
Grimm's Fairy Tales
By Jacob and Wilhem Grimm
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"Once upon a time..." So begin many well-known and light-hearted fairy tales. In Grimm's Fairy Tales, however, the fables we read are full of a more potent combination of the dark and light, ...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
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Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are back for another rip-roaring adventure on the mighty Mississippi River. Feeling the call of life outside of his comfortable but ordinary home, Huck boldly fak ...
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
By Oscar Wilde
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Dorian Gray is the most beautiful young man Lord Henry Wotton has ever seen. What is his secret? Introduced to him through a friend who has just painted Dorian's portrait, Lord Henry finds much to dis ...
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Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
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A young orphan named Pip is the main character in Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations. Beginning from humble origins in the home of his guardians, Pip's eye is drawn to a more lavish and aristo ...
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Walden
By Henry David Thoreau
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A man throws off the burdens of modern society to live for a year in the woods. Walden is Henry David Thoreau's account of a radical experiment in living. Outside of the complications of civilization, ...
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Sense and Sensibility
By Jane Austen
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The death of Henry Dashwood forces his daughters and their mother to give up their comfortable home and fashionable lifestyle. Stuck in a modest rural cottage, the eldest Dashwood sisters, Elinor and ...
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On the Origin of Species
By Charles Darwin
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On the Origin of Species is Charles Darwin's groundbreaking 1859 work that first introduced the theory of natural selection and evolution. The book was the result of years of research, travel, and col ...
My Life and Work
By Henry Ford
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Born into a modest Detroit family, Henry Ford became a pioneer of American ingenuity and industry. In 1922, at the peak of his success in putting countless automobiles on the road, Ford put his own st ...
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The Woman in White
By Wilkie Collins
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Love, mystery, and danger combine in Wilkie Collins's haunting tale of The Woman in White. A young art teacher falls in love with one of his students, a girl who is promised to another man. Although ...
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The Three Musketeers
By Alexandre Dumas
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Growing up in genteel poverty in seventeenth-century France, young d'Artagnan dreams of becoming a hero. With hopes for glory and adventure in his heart, he sets out to join the elite company of the K ...
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The Federalist Papers
By Alexander Hamilton
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One of the most important set of documents at the heart of our nation's birth, The Federalist Papers were first published in early American newspapers between 1787 and 1788. Here the thoughts and hope ...
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
By Mark Twain
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain's classic depiction of a happy-go-lucky boy on a voyage of growth and discovery. Set in pre-Civil war Missouri, this novel is the story of Tom and his best f ...
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The Idiot
By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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In Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is a mentally unstable young man, and one of the last of his royal bloodline. Suffering from epilepsy and unexplained spells of insanity, he is an outsider, l ...