Our Library

A Christmas Carol follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter miser whose heart has frozen as cold as the London winter surroundi...

In the sunlit piazzas of Florence and the manicured drawing rooms of Edwardian England, Lucy Honeychurch stands at a cro...

In a crumbling 16th-century Sicilian castle, two sisters discover that the most terrifying monsters aren't supernatural;...

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's most carefully constructed novel, a story of revolution, resurrection, and the...

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn picks up where Tom Sawyer left off, but the tone could not be more different. Huck Finn, ...

Alice Adams is the story of a young woman trapped between the life she has and the life she desperately wants.

Anna Karenina tells the story of a Russian aristocrat who sacrifices everything for a forbidden passion—and pays a price...

Beowulf is the oldest surviving long poem in the English language, a thousand-year-old story that feels as urgent as tod...

Beyond Good and Evil is Friedrich Nietzsche's most direct attack on the moral and philosophical assumptions Western cult...

Candide begins in paradise and ends in a garden. The distance between those two places is the entire education Voltaire ...

Rodion Raskolnikov is a brilliant former law student living in crushing poverty in St. Petersburg. Brooding alone in his...

Dark Night of the Soul charts the most challenging passage in any person's inner life: that bewildering period when ever...

Das Kapital is Karl Marx's sweeping scientific dissection of capitalist production, exposing the hidden mechanics by whi...

Dead Souls opens with a fine spring chaise rolling into the provincial town of N. Inside sits Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov,...

At thirty-five, the midpoint of a human life, Dante wakes up lost in a dark forest. He cannot explain how he got there. ...

Alonso Quixano is a quiet gentleman in La Mancha until chivalry books take over his life. He sells land for more volumes...

Jonathan Harker thinks he is on a business trip. A young English solicitor travels to Transylvania to help a wealthy cli...

Qoheleth, the Teacher, opens with the most unsettling claim in ancient literature: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." ...

Have you ever been absolutely certain you were right—only to discover you were the problem all along?

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published a collection of essays that would permanently alter the American mind. He had a s...

Evelina Anville has lived her entire life in quiet obscurity, raised by her guardian in the English countryside. But whe...

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is the novel that established Thomas Hardy's reputation, and it remains one of the fin...

Have you ever come home changed and found that everyone you love is exactly the same?

Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist consumed by ambition who discovers the ...

Philip Pirrip (Pip) is an orphan living with his sister and her husband Joe, the village blacksmith. On a foggy evening ...

Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon who keeps finding himself the outsider in his own story. Swift publishes the Travels...

Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore for his father's funeral and walks into a court that has already moved on without him....

Thomas Gradgrind runs a school and a household on one rule: facts only. No imagination, no wonder, no play. He raises Lo...

On the Thames at dusk, Marlow tells his story to men waiting for the tide. London was once a dark place too, he says, an...

Jane Eyre is the story of a woman who refuses to be diminished. Born into nothing, abused by relatives, and nearly broke...

Thomas Hardy's final novel stands as one of the most uncompromising examinations of thwarted aspiration and social const...

King Lear opens with an act of catastrophic vanity dressed up as a retirement plan. An aging king, tired of power but st...

Les Misérables tells the epic story of Jean Valjean, a man who spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to ...

Between approximately 63 and 65 AD, as Rome's political tensions reached a breaking point, Seneca wrote a series of lett...

Little Women follows the four March sisters as they grow from girls into women in a New England household during and aft...

In the provincial town of Yonville, Emma Bovary arranges flowers that will wilt by evening, walks the same muddy streets...

Marcus Aurelius never meant you to read this. From 161 to 180 AD he ruled Rome while commanding armies on the Danube fro...

From the moment divine power separates earth from sky and brings order from primordial Chaos, Ovid's Metamorphoses unfol...

José Rizal wrote his last poem the night before the Spanish colonial government shot him at dawn. He was 35 years old, a...

George Eliot opens Middlemarch with a prelude about Saint Theresa of Ávila, a woman whose life of radical inner explorat...

Moby-Dick begins with one of the most famous lines in English literature: "Call me Ishmael." Our narrator is restless, b...

Written around 350 BCE and named after Aristotle's son Nicomachus, the Nicomachean Ethics is the most influential work o...

When Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the Philippines after seven years studying in Europe, he carries dreams of reform and ...

Elizabeth Gaskell's remarkable social novel unfolds as a journey of moral awakening, tracing the profound transformation...

Catherine Morland is not your typical heroine. She is ordinary in the best sense: a girl who preferred cricket to dolls,...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is narrated by a retired clerk living on the margins of nineteenth-century St...

In 1859, Victorian England was experiencing unprecedented social transformation. Democratic reforms expanded voting righ...

Around 49 AD, Seneca wrote De Brevitate Vitae, On the Shortness of Life, as a moral letter to his friend Pompeius Paulin...

John Milton's Paradise Lost opens in Hell: Satan and the fallen angels, defeated after their war against Heaven, lie stu...

Anne Elliot is twenty-seven, unmarried, and quietly certain she made the worst decision of her life eight years ago. At ...

Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr. Darcy at a country ball and writes him off as insufferably proud. He decides she is not hands...

Proverbs is the oldest practical self-improvement manual in the Western canon. Traditionally attributed to King Solomon ...

Richard III steps to the front of the stage and tells you exactly who he is. Deformed, overlooked, denied the pleasures ...

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe chronicles the extraordinary survival story of a young Englishman who defies his parents'...

When the Dashwood family loses everything: their home, their income, their security. The three sisters must navigate a w...

Siddhartha has everything a young man in ancient India could want: a brilliant mind, a respected family, and the admirat...

Around 400 BC, a Chinese archivist named Laozi supposedly handed a gatekeeper 81 short poems before disappearing into th...

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles opens with a revelation that transforms a poor rural family's understanding of ...

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is set in St. Petersburg, a small town on the Mississippi that stands in for Mark Twain's o...

The Aeneid is Rome's national epic and one of the most influential poems ever written. Virgil follows Aeneas, a Trojan p...

New York, 1870s. Newland Archer has everything a man of his class is supposed to want: a prestigious law career, a sterl...

Compiled by the disciples of Confucius after his death in 479 BCE, The Analects is not a systematic treatise but a colle...

The Apology begins with Benjamin Jowett's scholarly introduction, not Socrates' voice: an honest warning that Plato's ac...

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War around 500 BC for Chinese warlords fighting over territory. He never imagined it would stil...

Edna Pontellier has everything society says a woman should want: a wealthy husband, healthy children, a beautiful home, ...

Arjuna is one of the greatest warriors alive. He has trained his entire life for this battle. Then, as two armies face e...

On the morning of her twenty-ninth birthday, Valancy Stirling faces a devastating truth: she has wasted her entire life....

Miyamoto Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings in 1645, two years before his death, as a distillation of decades spent pe...

The Book of Job is the ancient world's most profound and unflinching exploration of human suffering. This timeless maste...

Dostoevsky's final masterpiece plunges into the darkest questions of human existence: Can faith survive in a world of su...

In 524 CE, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius waits in a prison cell at Pavia for execution. He was until recently one o...

Edmond Dantès has everything: a beautiful fiancée, a promotion to ship's captain, the respect of his crew, and a future ...

The Day's Work is Rudyard Kipling's 1898 story collection about the people who built and maintained the machinery of the...

The Dhammapada opens with a claim that sounds almost modern: you become what you think about. Every action starts in the...

In the grand halls of Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allies gathered to reshape Europe after the Great War. Among th...

Epictetus was a slave. He had no rights, no property, no freedom of movement, and yet he became one of the most psycholo...

The Essays of Montaigne invented the personal essay as we know it. In 16th-century France, Michel de Montaigne retired t...

The Gambler is a short yet devastatingly powerful novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1867 under extraordinary ci...

Nick Carraway leaves the Midwest for New York in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business. He rents a small house i...

Lily Bart has everything except the one thing that actually matters: money of her own. At twenty-nine, she is still the ...

Prince Lev Myshkin returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium, treated for epilepsy and sheltered from the worl...

The Iliad is one of the oldest stories ever written, and it still hits harder than almost anything created since. Set du...

The Interior Castle is Saint Teresa of Ávila's masterwork on the architecture of human consciousness: a practical guide ...

Jack London wrote The Iron Heel in 1908, and then the twentieth century happened exactly as he predicted. This is a dyst...

When Upton Sinclair set out to expose the brutal realities of American capitalism in 1906, he created more than a novel....

George Eliot opens The Mill on the Floss not with drama but with a dream: a slow, hypnotic drift down the River Floss to...

Gabriel Betteredge, the loyal house steward of the Yorkshire Verinder estate, never expected to become the chronicler of...

The Odyssey is the second great poem of the Western tradition, and the one that has never stopped being read. Homer's ep...

Oscar Wilde's only novel opens in a sunlit London studio where artist Basil Hallward has painted a portrait of extraordi...

In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince from exile on his farm outside Florence, hoping to win back a career with ...

The Republic follows Socrates through a night-long conversation that begins with a simple question: what is justice? It ...

Pierre de la Motte flees Paris at midnight with his wife and servants, ruined by debt and bad judgment. Lost on a stormy...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter stands as America's definitive exploration of public shame, hidden guilt, and t...

Paris, 1792. The guillotine falls every day. French aristocrats are dragged from their homes by revolutionary mobs, sent...

What happens when a respected doctor discovers how to separate his public self from his hidden desires? Robert Louis Ste...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens with Gilbert Markham, a restless young farmer in 1827, watching his rural neighborhood...

The Theory of Moral Sentiments explores how humans develop moral judgments through sympathy: our ability to imagine what...

The Wealth of Nations is the book that invented modern economics. Published in 1776, the same year as the American Decla...

After ten years of solitary contemplation in the mountains, the prophet Zarathustra descends to humanity with a radical ...

Young Jim Hawkins begins his tale by introducing the mysterious sea captain who changed everything at his family's inn, ...

Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, through a single day in Dublin on June 16, 1904, mapping ...

Lucy Snowe has nothing. No family, no money, no prospects. At twenty-three, she boards a ship alone and crosses the Chan...

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe, walked into second-growth woods on the shores of Walden Pond near Concord,...

In the glittering ballrooms of St. Petersburg and the blood-soaked fields of Borodino, Leo Tolstoy weaves together the g...

Washington Square is Henry James's sharpest, most accessible novel: a chamber drama about a plain heiress, a controlling...

Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange and stumbles into Wuthering Heights, a house where the dogs attack, the servants curse...