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32,123 public-domain books, summarised. Page 84 of 670.
Hanover
Jack Thorne
A Black editor defies white supremacists in 1898 Wilmington, igniting a deadly coup that shatters a community and forces its survivors to seek redemption amid the ashes.
The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story
Frank Harris
This inquiry seeks to reconstruct the inner life of the world's most famous playwright by reading his dramas as a series of involuntary, autobiographical confessions.
Black spirits & white
Ralph Adams Cram
An atmospheric collection of ghost stories journeys through haunted European landscapes, where old transgressions, dark magic, and terrible secrets waiting in the shadow of ancient ruins shatter the composure of rational modern men.
The $30,000 Bequest, and Other Stories
Mark Twain
These stories capture the peculiar American collision of grand ambition and mundane reality. They offer a sharp, witty look at how dreams of wealth and status distort the lives of ordinary people.
The Marching Morons
C. M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth
A cunning twentieth-century swindler wakes from a centuries-long slumber into a future where average intelligence has plunged, finding himself uniquely suited to solve the high-IQ ruling minority's most desperate crisis.
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë
Refusing the comforts of easy romance, an ambitious young Englishman sets out for Belgium to carve out his own modest, unvarnished destiny.
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern
Unknown
An ambitious nineteenth-century editorial board sets out to map the entire terrain of human expression, gathering the world's mythologies, ancient philosophy, court poetry, and modern literature into a single definitive monument.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Robert Chambers
A grand sweeping view of physical creation reveals how natural laws govern everything from the assembly of distant stars to the origin and progressive development of human life.
The tale of Daddy Longlegs
Arthur Scott Bailey
A gentle, slow-moving harvestman with a secretive past settles near a farm, quietly outwitting his boastful woodland neighbors through silence and dumb luck.
Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes
Robert Louis Stevenson
A solitary wanderer ventures into the rugged mountains of southern France with an unlikely companion: a stubborn, mouse-colored donkey. This charming account captures the beauty of the wilderness and the profound lessons found in wandering.
English as She is Wrote: Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be made to Convey Ideas or obscure them
Anonymous
Language bends and breaks in the hands of the careless, yielding absurd misdirections, unintentional comedy, and surprisingly sharp truths about how we communicate.
![Cover of Rollo's Philosophy. [Air]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/rollo-s-philosophy-air-jacob-abbott.webp)
Rollo's Philosophy. [Air]
Jacob Abbott
The air is not merely empty space; it is a weight, a force, and a medium for sound, waiting to be understood through the curiosity of a growing boy.
The Negro
W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
This sweeping historical survey recovers the neglected legacy of African civilizations, challenging the pervasive racial prejudices of its time to reveal the foundational role of Black peoples in the story of humanity.
The Temptation of St. Antony
Gustave Flaubert
Desert winds howl across a scarped mountain where an aging hermit counts his years of deprivation. Spiritual pride and physical exhaustion crack his resolve, unleashing a cosmic parade of heresies, ancient gods, and primordial monsters to claim his soul.
The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 2, February 1810
Samuel James Arnold
Actors take the stage, bards mourn in secret, and a long-hidden identity turns a fortune upside down.
Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People
John Lockwood Kipling
An observant Englishman walks through the markets, fields, and shrines of nineteenth-century India, watching how everyday life turns upon the bodies of working animals and the ancient stories attached to them.
British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions
Wirt Sikes
A rich collection of regional myths, haunting omens, and vibrant local customs captures the imagination, mapping the magical topography of Wales through its lingering spectral lore.
Doctor Jones' Picnic
S. E. (Samuel E.) Chapman
An eccentric physician sails across the atmosphere in a colossal aluminum sphere, healing terminal illnesses and conquering the polar wilderness through the gentle power of science, faith, and high-potency homeopathy.
The "Characters" of Jean de La Bruyère
Jean de La Bruyère
A keen, cool observation of society reveals how vanity, money, and social ambition dictate human behavior, turning daily interactions into a performative game where genuine virtue is astonishingly rare.
Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex: with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs
William Gates
A rigorous attempt to reconstruct damaged Mesoamerican manuscripts reveals a grander vision: deciphering ancient ideographs might fundamentally reshape our understanding of human intellectual history.
The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1801)
Daniel Defoe
A man survives a catastrophic shipwreck only to face decades of total isolation on an uninhabited island, fighting for survival through sheer labor, practical ingenuity, and spiritual reckonings.
Sex variant women in literature
Jeannette H. (Jeannette Howard) Foster
Driven by a deeply personal quest to understand human intimacy outside societal norms, a pioneering scholar systematically unearths, catalogs, and analyzes centuries of female romantic relationships across world literature, history, and science.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Lamennais, Robert de" to "Latini, Brunetto": Volume 16, Slice 2
Various
A rigorous, systematic inventory of human knowledge across geography, history, law, literature, and science, mapped with precise early-twentieth-century scholarship.
Gods and Fighting Men: The story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory
Lady Gregory
A magical mist parts over ancient Ireland, revealing a world of gods who descend into mortals, giant warriors who race across windy bogs, and tragic lovers fleeing through enchanted forests.
Social Life
Maud C. Cooke
Navigating the delicate machinery of late nineteenth-century social life requires mastering everything from unspoken parlour rules to the exact etiquette of bicycle excursions and formal correspondence.
The tale of Rusty Wren
Arthur Scott Bailey
A tireless little songbird learns that even the most well-meaning neighbor can cause a commotion when he tries to run a household on his own terms.
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Richard F. Burton
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
A vast Victorian archive sits waiting, mapping decades of fearless exploration, brilliant translations, and raw curiosity about the world's most elusive corners.
Light Come, Light Go: Gambling—Gamesters—Wagers—The Turf
Ralph Nevill
A sweeping chronicle traces human fascination with chance from aristocratic West End clubrooms to continental casinos and English racecourses, where fortunes vanish on the turn of a card or the throw of a die.
Taras Bulba, and Other Tales
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
A vast land of wild steppes, provincial rivalries, and surreal night horrors comes alive in a collection where glorious heroism sits right alongside human pettiness.
The Poems of Sappho: An Interpretative Rendition into English
Sappho
A woman’s voice reaches across twenty-five centuries to praise Aphrodite, mourn lost companions, and burn with a passion so fierce it threatens to consume her very soul.
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A stolen cholera germ, a bloodthirsty orchid, and a creature haunting an astronomical observatory: these fifteen tales blend Victorian science with bizarre, speculative terror.
Arcadian Adelaide
Thistle Anderson
Self-satisfied provincialism meets its match in a fierce social critique that lays bare the pious hypocrisies and narrow horizons of an Edwardian Australian city.
Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
Annie Lash Jester
Settlers stepping ashore in seventeenth-century Virginia encountered a wilderness that demanded complete domestic reconstruction, transforming English traditions into a distinct, rugged plantation society.
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended: To which is Prefix'd, A Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great
Isaac Newton
A chronological re-examination of ancient history, from the earliest records to Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia.
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
An ardent young American woman inherits a sudden fortune and travels to Europe to seek an expansive life, only to find her fiercely guarded independence ensnared by a cold and calculating fortune hunter.
The history of witchcraft and demonology
Montague Summers
An uncompromising defense of orthodoxy against the supernatural underworld, this volume presents the history of demonic influence not as a collection of quaint folklore, but as a literal and dangerous reality.
Historic buildings of America
Unknown
A sweep across North America’s architectural landscape reveals how simple timber, carved stone, and towering brick tell the story of a continent’s shifting fortunes.
Parzival: A Knightly Epic (vol. 1 of 2)
von Eschenbach Wolfram
A young knight rides into the world in total ignorance, winning victories by instinct while remaining blind to the quiet, heartbreaking questions that true honor actually requires of him.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Dübner, Johann Friedrich" to "Dyeing": Volume 8, Slice 8
Various
An expansive survey of human knowledge spans the alphabet from mid-nineteenth-century French scholarship to the precise chemical mechanics of industrial textile dyeing. It captures a world caught between historical legacy and modern technique.
The World's Greatest Books
Unknown
A vast gallery of human lives reveals how thinkers, artists, and leaders confront passion, ambition, imprisonment, and mortal frailty. Through condensed personal records, history transforms into an intimate encounter with individual experience.
The Forerunner, His Parables and Poems
Kahlil Gibran
A collection of philosophical parables and prose poems explores the hidden depths of human nature, challenging conventional notions of pride, wisdom, and love. Through stark allegory, these reflective pieces contrast superficial earthly ambitions with the quiet realization of a larger, transcendent self waiting…
Cave Hunting: Researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe
William Boyd Dawkins
Deep beneath the surface of Europe lies an astonishing archive of early human history, where subterranean chambers preserve the bones, toolkits, and art of prehistoric peoples alongside the remains of extinct beasts.
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Songling Pu
Step across the threshold between the living world and the underworld, where vengeful spirits, miraculous beasts, corrupt officials, and eccentric immortals continuously test human morality.
The Biotic Associations of Cockroaches
Louis M. (Louis Marcus) Roth
Cockroaches maintain intricate ecological connections with countless organisms across global habitats, moving far beyond their reputation as mere household pests into complex scientific web dynamics.
The Sleeper Awakes: A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A man falls into a two-hundred-year trance, only to wake as the absolute, fabulously wealthy master of a hyper-capitalist future he never asked for.
Report of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations on the Petition of the Honourable Thomas Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, John Sargent, and Samuel Wharton, Esquires, and their Associates: 1772
Great Britain. Board of Trade
A clash of political will and economic ambition on the eve of the American Revolution, this 1772 imperial report captures the British government's desperate struggle to contain colonial expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains.
The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two
Sarath Kumar Ghosh
In the heart of the wild, survival depends on communal law, parental devotion, and sharp instinct rather than sheer brute force.
Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1
Ludwig van Beethoven
When a great artist leaves behind hundreds of letters, he unwittingly writes his own autobiography, stripping away romantic myth to expose the daily friction of living. This first volume of personal correspondence reveals a master torn between transcendent creative vision and the brutal, mundane realities of…