Humanities and Arts Books

Two sisters, Grace and Marion, live happily in an English village with two servants Clemency Newcome and Ben Britain, and their good-natured widower father Dr Jeddler. Dr Jeddlar is a man whose philosophy is to treat life as a farce. Marion, the younger, is bethrothed to Albert Heathfield...

On 22 June 1816 Lord Byron and his contemporary and friend Percy Bysshe Shelley were sailing on Lake Geneva (referred to as "Lac Leman," the French name, throughout the poem) and stopped to visit the Château de Chillon. After touring the castle—and walking through the dungeon in which Bonivard...

The novel has four main themes. (1) The lifestyle of the provinces is juxtaposed with that of the metropolis, as Balzac contrasts the varying tempos of life at Angoulême and in Paris, the different standards obtaining in those cities, and their different perceptions. (2) Balzac explores the...

A collection of Russian short stories by the most famous and esteemed Russian writers

A young New-Yorker of twelve heard an appeal for the Fatherless Children of France and his heart was touched. He had no money, but he resolved to give his spare time and his utmost energy to support a "kid in France." The French child needed ten cents worth of extra food each day, in order to grow...

There were several interesting points about Hal Pritchard and Lorraine Vivian, but perhaps the most striking was their friendship for each other. From two wide-apart extremes they had somehow gravitated together, and commenced at boarding-school a friendship which only deepened and...

Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain, of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi many years after the War. The book begins with a brief history of the river from its...

A Simple Heart" ("Un Coeur Simple"), by French writer Gustave Flaubert, is one of the stories in his Three Tales (Trois Contes), published in 1877. It received admiring reviews at the time and has continued to be second only to his novel Madame Bovary (1857) in recognition and...

Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, and its 1893 second volume Sylvie and Bruno Concluded form the last novel by Lewis Carroll published during his lifetime. Both volumes were illustrated by Harry Furniss. The novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was...

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The themes and settings of Through the Looking-Glass make it a kind of mirror image of Wonderland: the...