This fascinating fourteenth-century text is as complex as it is misunderstood. The premise is simple enough: the author creates a fictional set-up where, over ten days, seven female and three male characters who are cooped up in a country e...

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342-1400) had a career in royal service as a member of the court and a diplomat. His literary work, notable for its range of genres, helped establish the English literary tradition. With their astonishing diversity...

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squi...

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote island, encountering savages,...

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is a novel by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. Swift's mas...

Somewhere between tales and polemics, these funny, ribald, and inventive pieces show Voltaire doing what he does best: brilliantly challenging received wisdom, religious intolerance, and naïve optimism. Traveling through strange environment...

Goethe's morbid tale of a man madly in love is purely emotional and beautifully unrestricted. some call it over-exaggeration but when reading the book one must understand when goethe wrote it he wasn't trying to be subtle. the book, written...

Ivanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to take place in the middle ages but it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is the first novel i...

A short story by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle tells the tale of a lazy old man who falls asleep for twenty years and returns to his village to find that the world has changed drastically during his absence and that nearly everyone he k...

A short story by Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells the tale of Ichabod Crane a superstitious school-teacher who finds himself terrorized either by a headless phantom or his prank-loving rival for the affections of a local...

Oliver Twist is a classic tale of a boy of unknown parentage born in a workhouse and brought up under the cruel conditions to which pauper children were exposed in the Victorian England. With this novel, Dickens did not merely write a topic...

The Three Musketeers is the most famous of Alexandre Dumas’s historical novels and one of the most popular adventure novels ever written. Dumas’s swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of d’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country...

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the greatest novels of all time and in fact stands at the fountainhead of the entire stream of popular adventure-fiction. Dumas himself was one of the founders of the genre. The cold, brooding, vampiric C...

Moby Dick belongs to the first rank of world literature. Melville read widely and deeply within the Western tradition, and brought it all together in his complex masterpiece. Within the framework of a simple tale of obsession, Melville offe...

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Uncle Tom's Cabin was t...