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A Journal from Japan
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Marie Stopes
Marie Stopes was a highly controversial scientist and activist in her era, campaigning for radical new views of love-based marriage, birth c…
William, An Englishman
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Cicely Hamilton
William – an Englishman is a 1919 novel by Cicely Hamilton. The novel explores the effect of the First World War on a married couple during …
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
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Wassily Kandinsky
Published in 1911, Kandinsky's book compares the spiritual life of humanity to a pyramid -- the artist has a mission to lead others to the p…
Audrey Craven
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May Sinclair
In May Sinclair’s remarkable first novel, Audrey Craven is a beautiful young woman who has by her idiosyncrasies acquired a thoroughly undes…
Drum-Taps
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Walt Whitman
Drum Taps is the next collection of poems published by Walt Whitman after his famous Leaves of Grass. This collection is a direct response …
Under Western Eyes
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Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes (1911) is a novel by Joseph Conrad. The novel takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Geneva, Switzerland, and is vie…
The House of Dust: A Symphony
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Conrad Aiken
The House of Dust is a poem written in the four-movement format of a classical symphony. Hauntingly beautiful despite its bleak post-World …
I've Come to Stay: A Love Comedy of Bohemia
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Mary Heaton Vorse
An iconoclast in many fields herself, Mary Heaton Vorse was fascinated with Bohemia, the colorful unboundaried land of poets and artists and…
The House of the Dead
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The House of the Dead is a novel published in 1861 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian p…
The Three Sisters
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May Sinclair
Fascinated as she was by the lives of the Brontë siblings, May Sinclair loosely based her subtly sensual, quietly insurrectionary 1914 …
Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion
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George Santayana
Even before the Great War turned the world upside down, Western civilization was being revolutionized at all levels: intellectually, philos…
Nocturne of Remembered Spring, and Other Poems
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Conrad Aiken
Written at the height of the Great War, the poems of this volume are suffused with a sense of melancholy and tragedy. Some of the poems (su…
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
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Lafcadio Hearn
In an introductory paragraph, Lafcadio Hearn declares his intention: "The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than …
Life and Death of Harriett Frean
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May Sinclair
Harriett Frean is a well-to-do, unmarried woman living a life of meaningless dependency, boredom, and unproductivity as she patiently cares …
Ward No. 6
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Anton Chekhov
The line between sanity and insanity is blurred in this classic novella by Anton Chekhov. The disillusioned idealist Dr. Rabin is in charge…
Love Among the Artists
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George Bernard Shaw
Love Among the Artists was published in the United States in 1900 and in England in 1914, but it was written in 1881. In the ambience of chi…
The Steel Flea
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Nikolai Leskov
An 1881 comic story by Nikolai Leskov, presented in the form of a traditional skaz or folk-tale, but entirely of Leskov's invention. It tell…
A Journal of Impressions in Belgium
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May Sinclair
In 1914, at the age of 51, the novelist and poet May Sinclair volunteered to leave the comforts of England to go to the Western Front, joini…
The Power-House
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John Buchan
The Power-House is a novel by John Buchan, a thriller set in London, England. It was written in 1913, when it was serialised in Blackwood's …
The Shadow-Line
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Joseph Conrad
Dedicated to the author's son who was wounded in World War 1, The Shadow-Line is a short novel based at sea by Joseph Conrad; it is one of h…
The Romantic
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May Sinclair
As a simple story told, "The Romantic" is one of Sinclair’s tightest and most compelling. Charlotte Redhead, a young British secre…
Kalevala, The Land of the Heroes (Kirby translation)
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Elias Lönnrot
The Kalevala is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology. It…
The Death of Society: A Novel of Tomorrow
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Florence Roma Muir Wilson
A weary survivor of the Great War, Major Rane Smith wanders in a great ennui amidst the mystical beauties of the fjords of Norway after the …
The Tysons
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May Sinclair
Another frank May Sinclair exploration of fin de siècle English love and sex, marriage and adultery, "The Tysons" is the st…
The Possessed
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Although titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoyevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils o…
If All These Young Men
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Florence Roma Muir Wilson
Another remarkable World War I novel by Romer Wilson, "If All These Young Men" is a character study of a group of young 20-somethi…
Martin Schüler
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Florence Roma Muir Wilson
Romer Wilson's first novel is a study in the life of Genius, a theme that would preoccupy her throughout her life. The eponymous Martin Sch…
Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage Vol. 1 (version 2)
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Dorothy Richardson
"Pointed Roofs" is the first volume of "Pilgrimage," a series of thirteen autobiographical novels by Dorothy Richardson …
The Maine Woods
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Henry David Thoreau
On August 31, 1846, twenty-nine-year-old Henry David Thoreau left his cabin on Walden Pond to undertake a railroad and steamboat journey to …
Swann's Way (Version 2)
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Marcel Proust
"Swann's Way" is the first of the seven parts of Marcel Proust's great autobiographical novel "In Search of Lost Time." …
The Coast of Bohemia
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William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells is at his iconoclastic best in this exploration of bourgeois values, particularly in the clash between respectable soci…
A Vital Question, or, What is to be Done?
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Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Despised by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, What Is To Be Done? is a fascinating, sympathetic story of idealistic revolutionaries in mid-nineteenth…
A Defence of Idealism
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May Sinclair
The philosophy of Idealism, revived in eighteenth-century Europe by George Berkeley, argued against philosophical materialism by maintaining…
The Steppe
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Anton Chekhov
Little Yegorushka goes off to school for the first time, setting out on the journey in the company of his Uncle Ivan, the local priest Fathe…
The Duel (version 2)
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Anton Chekhov
Known for his plays and short stories, Anton Chekhov also wrote a series of novellas, astonishing for their psychological complexity and com…
An Anonymous Story
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Anton Chekhov
In "An Anonymous Story," Chekhov continues to explore his favorite themes of superfluous men, ironic rakes, exploited women, and t…
Three Years
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Anton Chekhov
Laptev, the rich but unattractive scion of a merchant, renounces his independent-minded, intelligent, devoted, but equally unattractive mist…
My Life: The Story of a Provincial
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Anton Chekhov
A provincial youth of wealth and noble status refuses to employ himself in the typical occupations of the higher classes, thus acquiring a r…
Weird Tales
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E. T. A. Hoffmann
This recording includes both volumes of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Weird Tales, a collection of gothic novellas set in Germany, Italy, and some of …
A Family of Noblemen
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Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Meet the Golovliovs, the ultimate dysfunctional family. In the difficult transition years before and after the liberation of Russia’s serfs,…
Two Sides of a Question
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May Sinclair
Here are two gemlike novellas in one volume, written in May Sinclair’s clearest and cleverest prose and exploring the many ways in which a w…
The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter
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Henry Murger and Henri Murger
As much as any other work of literature, Henri Murger’s 1851 collection of witty sketches Scènes de la vie de bohème shaped th…
Anne Severn and the Fieldings
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May Sinclair
Written in an era of cheap, formulaic romantic fiction, the nuanced, seditious, quietly erotic novels of May Sinclair stand out like literat…
A Woman's Experiences in the Great War
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Louise Mack
An eye-witness account of the fall of Antwerp to the Germans in the opening months of World War I, Mack’s story has passages of extraordinar…
A Hero of Our Time (Version 2)
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Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov
One of the iconic characters of all Russian literature, Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is the ultimate “superfluous man.” An aristocratic r…
The Outcast
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For many nineteenth-century Christians, the new biological and geological discoveries of that era brought on severe crises of faith. Winwood…
A Common Story
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Ivan Goncharov
Alexander Fedoritch Adouev is the naïve, pampered son of Anna Pavlovna, a provincial landowner. He decides to go off to Saint Petersbur…
Russian Fairy Tales
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Peter Nikolaevich Polevoi
The existence of the Russian Skazki or Märchen was first made generally known to the British public by Mr W. R. S. Ralston in his “Russ…
All Things Are Possible
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Lev Shestov
A passionate exponent of Russian Existentialism, Lev Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world but had an extensive influence on…
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
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William Henry Davies
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is an autobiography published in 1908 by the Welsh poet and writer W. H. Davies (1871–1940). A large part…
From Sunrise Land
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Amy Wilson Carmichael
One of the most renowned of all Protestant Christian missionaries, Amy Carmichael is remembered most for the fifty-five years she spent doin…
Childhood (version 2)
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Leo Tolstoy
Childhood is the first published novel by Leo Tolstoy, released under the initials L. N. in the November 1852 issue of the popular Russian l…
Anarchism and Other Essays (Version 2)
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Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman, the most famous anarchist in American history, shows the whole range of her iconoclastic thought in this collection of essays.…
The World As Will and Idea, Vol. 1 of 3
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Arthur Schopenhauer
In this work, Schopenhauer explains his fundamental idea that at the root of the reality we see around us is a Will that eternally, insatiab…
Crome Yellow, Version 2
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Aldous Huxley
Fascinating and brilliant at many levels, Huxley's spoof of Lady Ottoline Morrell's famous bohemian gatherings is difficult to categorize. T…
Mr. Waddington of Wyck
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May Sinclair
May Sinclair’s 1921 novel tells the story of the ridiculous Mr. Horatio Bysshe Waddington, a pompous, self-deluded poser making his way thro…
A Dissertation Concerning the Nature of True Virtue
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Jonathan Edwards
Disproportionately remembered as a hellfire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher on the basis of the excessively-anthologized "Sinners in the…
The Life-Story of a Russian Exile
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Marie Sukloff
Hero or assassin? Victim or criminal? Marie Sukloff fits no easy category. A young peasant woman who became a political radical and activ…
My Confession
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Leo Tolstoy
"My Confession" is a brief autobiographical story of Leo Tolstoy's struggle with a mid-life existential crisis of melancholia. It …
The Combined Maze
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May Sinclair
Ranny Ransome is an idealistic young man, devoted to exuberant gymnastic exercises and to fighting “flabbiness” in his own life, body and so…
The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 2 of 3
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Arthur Schopenhauer
In this work, Schopenhauer explains his fundamental idea that at the root of the reality we see around us is a Will that eternally, insatiab…
The Cellar-House of Pervyse
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Mairi Chisholm
Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker were two British nurses and ambulance drivers whose staggeringly heroic efforts during World War I saved co…
The Clouds
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Aristophanes
Strepsiades is an Athenian burdened with debt from a bad marriage and a spendthrift son. He resolves to go to the Thinking Shop, where he c…
Prometheus Bound (Browning Translation)
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Aeschylus
Whether or not it was actually written by Aeschylus, as is much disputed, "Prometheus Bound" is a powerful statement on behalf of …
Iphigenia in Aulis (Way translation)
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Euripides
Iphigenia in Aulis (Ancient Greek: Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι) is the last extant work of the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after the …
Electra (Storr Translation)
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Sophocles
Electra or Elektra is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes (409 BC) …
The Acharnians (Billson Translation)
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Aristophanes
Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premi…
Iphigenia in Tauris (Murray Translation)
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Euripides
The apparent sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis by her own father Agamemnon was forestalled by the godness Artemis, who by an adroit sleight of…
Electra (Murray Translation)
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Euripides
Electra (the Unmated One) is eaten up with hatred of her mother Clytemnestra and stepfather Aegisthus for their murder of her father Agamemn…
Little Eyolf (Mencken Translation)
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Henrik Ibsen
One of the four profound plays of Ibsen’s late period (along with “The Master Builder,” “John Gabriel Borkman,” and “When We Dead Awaken”), …
Backwater (Pilgrimage, Vol. 2)
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Dorothy Richardson
"Backwater" is the second volume of "Pilgrimage," a series of thirteen autobiographical novels by Dorothy Richardson con…
The Persians (version 2)
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Aeschylus
The earliest of Aeschylus' plays to survive is "The Persians" (Persai), performed in 472 BC and based on experiences in Aeschylus'…
Prometheus Bound (Thoreau Translation)
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Aeschylus
Whether or not it was actually written by Aeschylus, as is much disputed, "Prometheus Bound" is a powerful statement on behalf of …
The Trojan Women (Coleridge Translation)
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Euripides
Described by modern playwright Ellen McLaughlin as "perhaps the greatest antiwar play ever written," "The Trojan Women,"…
Antigone (Plumptre Translation)
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Sophocles
A powerful artistic protest against tyranny, "Antigone" has been translated and adapted dozens of times, applied over and over thr…
Crime and Punishment (version 2)
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Crime and Punishment" is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal "T…
Oedipus Rex (Murray Translation)
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Sophocles
"Oedipus Rex" (Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους Τύραννος, Oidipous Tyrannos), also known as "Oedipus the King" or "Oedipus t…
Oedipus at Colonus (Jebb Translation)
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Sophocles
"Oedipus at Colonus" (also Oedipus Coloneus, Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ, Oidipous epi Kolōnō) is one of the three Theban p…
The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3 of 3
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Arthur Schopenhauer
In this work, Schopenhauer explains his fundamental idea that at the root of the reality we see around us is a Will that eternally, insatiab…
Agamemnon (Browning Translation)
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Aeschylus
The play Agamemnon details the homecoming of Agamemnon, King of Argos, from the Trojan War. Waiting at home for him is his wife, Clytemnestr…
The Libation-Bearers (Morshead Translation)
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Aeschylus
The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus concerning the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. The name derives f…
The Furies (Morshead Translation)
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Aeschylus
The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus concerning the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. The name derives f…
Agamemnon (Morshead Translation)
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Aeschylus
The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus concerning the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. The name derives f…
Russia in 1919
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Arthur Ransome
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in a memorandum book: "Met Arthur Ransome at_____'s; discussed a boo…
Seven Against Thebes (Way Translation)
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Aeschylus
Seven against Thebes is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. The trilogy is sometimes referred to …
The Suppliant Maidens (Morshead Translation)
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Aeschylus
The Suppliants, also called The Suppliant Maidens, or The Suppliant Women, is a play by Aeschylus. It was probably first performed sometime …
Ajax (Campbell Translation)
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Sophocles
Ajax is a Greek tragedy written in the 5th century BC. The date of Ajax's first performance is unknown and may never be found, but most scho…
The Last Ditch
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Violet Hunt
An amusing but deeply poignant story, “The Last Ditch” describes the wartime experiences of a British aristocratic family who gradually real…
Trachiniai (Campbell Translation)
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Sophocles
Women of Trachis (Ancient Greek: Τραχίνιαι, Trachiniai; also translated as The Trachiniae or The Trachinian Maidens) is an Athenian tragedy …
Philoctetes (Campbell Translation)
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Sophocles
Philoctetes is a play by Sophocles (Aeschylus and Euripides also each wrote a Philoctetes but theirs have not survived). The play was writte…
The Priest and His Disciples (Shaw Translation)
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Hyakuzō Kurata
At the age of twenty-six (at the height of the Great War in Europe), the religious pilgrim and maverick Kurata Hyakuzō wrote a profoundly ph…
Alcestis (Way Translation)
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Euripides
Alcestis, queen of Pherae, is one of the noblest heroines in all of Greek drama. Her husband Admetus is the supposedly virtuous king of Pher…
Medea (Way Translation)
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Euripides
Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BCE. The plot cente…
Tasker Jevons: The Real Story
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May Sinclair
In this May Sinclair wartime masterpiece, dashing newsman Walter Furnival is an absurdly good catch: handsome, successful, athletic, intelli…
A Man's World
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Rachel Crothers
The mysterious Frank Ware is a woman writer forced to write under a masculine pseudonym in order to win literary respect. Adding to her enig…
Brand
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Henrik Ibsen
Inflamed by what he saw as his Norwegian homeland's shocking betrayal of Denmark after the Prussian invasion of Danish territory, Ibsen wrot…
The Nō Plays of Japan
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Varioustranslated Byarthur Waley
Noh (Nō), or Nogaku—derived from the Sino-Japanese word for "skill" or "talent"—is a major form of classical Japanese mu…
The Elder Edda (Bray Translation)
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Sæmund Sigfusson
The Elder or Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems dating from the thirteenth century CE. Though no two translators or editors seem…
The Prose Edda (Brodeur Translation)
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Snorri Sturleson
Also known as the Younger Edda or Snorri's Edda, the Prose Edda is a three-part work composed or at least compiled by thirteenth-century Ice…
Hedda Gabler (version 2)
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Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler has just returned from her honeymoon. She has married out of ennui, and is already heartily sick of her husband, who is a plodd…
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Original 1848 Edition)
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Anne Brontë
When Helen Graham moves into old Wildfell Hall with her little son Arthur, the rustic neighborhood comes alive with gossip and speculation, …
Out of Bohemia: A Story of Paris Student-Life
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Gertrude Christian Fosdick
Beryl Carrington is a naïve young American artist following her ideals to Paris, where she meets three young men, all also artists and …
The Saga of Erik the Red (Reeves Translation)
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Unknowntranslated Byarthur Middleton Reeves and Translated Byarthur Middleton Reeves
The Saga of Erik the Red is one of the two important thirteenth-century accounts of the Norse explorations of Greenland and North America, a…
The Saga of the Greenlanders (Reeves Translation)
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Unknowntranslated Byarthur Middleton Reeves and Translated Byarthur Middleton Reeves
The Saga of the Greenlanders is one of the two important thirteenth-century accounts of the Norse explorations of Greenland and North Americ…
The Creators: A Comedy
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May Sinclair
Jane Holland is a genius, the greatest of a group of extraordinary literary friends. She has an intense artistic and intellectual kinship wi…
The Flaw in the Crystal
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May Sinclair
One of May Sinclair’s “uncanny” stories, this novella explores many of Sinclair’s most treasured themes: the bounds of marriage, the conflic…
The New Idealism
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May Sinclair
The genius of May Sinclair lies in her brilliant bridging of the Victorian and the modern eras, in her determination never to become ossifie…
Don Quixote, Vol. 1 (Ormsby Translation)
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the mo…
The Master Builder (Gosse & Archer Translation)
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Henrik Ibsen
Halvard Solness is a master architect who has ruthlessly forged a preëminent career without regard for the feelings of those around him…
Jenny
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Sigrid Undset
Jenny Winge is a Norwegian expatriate studying art in Rome, part of a Bohemian group of friends who explore the ancient City in an intoxicat…
Don Quixote, Vol. 2 (Ormsby Translation)
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the mo…
Eskimo Folk-Tales
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Knud Rasmussen
Quote:"No man is better qualified to tell the story of Greenland, or the stories of its people. Knud Rasmussen is himself partly of Esk…
Aino Folk-Tales
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Basil Hall Chamberlain
Not for the squeamish or for children, these folk-tales are from the Ainu, the somewhat mysterious indigenous people of Japan, thousands of …
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (Markham translation)
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Unknowntranslated Byclements Markham, Anonymoustranslated Byclements Markham and William James Mcglothlin
A whimsical collection of stories about a wandering street urchin, Lazarillo de Tormes is a classic of the Spanish Golden Age, even paid hom…
The Tree of Heaven
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May Sinclair
One of the most heart-breaking of all World War I novels, this family epic was written in the midst of the War itself, and shows the intense…