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  Notes from the Underground

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  Notes from the Underground is Dostoevsky’s early masterpiece and is one of the first examples of existentialist literature. 
    
  Dostoevsky’s narrator is the anonymous voice of the masterful novella. Retired and isolated from society, he is bitter, contemptuous, and contemplative as he presents his anecdotes and philosophical outlooks. Presented as an extract from the narrator’s memoirs, Notes from the Underground is divided into two parts. Opening with a monologue attacking Western philosophy, Dostoevsky follows this theoretical exploration with the anti-hero’s accounts of various destructive and restorative life experiences. 
    
  First published in 1864, Notes from the Underground is an analysis of human psychology and demonstrates Dostoevsky’s sharp wit and keen understanding of the psyche.

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  The Prodigal Parents

  Sinclair Lewis

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  “The Prodigal Parents” is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The story revolves around a typical middle-class family of four and is about the revolt of the parents against the revolt of youth. The daughter, inclined towards communism, and the hard-drinking brother want their mother and father to continue to support them.

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  Rip Van Winkle The Legend of...

  Washington Irving

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  Kindly Rip Van Winkle, loved by all, lives a quiet existence in a small village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. One day, travelling in the mountains, he somehow falls asleep; upon waking, he finds that twenty years have passed! For adults and children alike, Rip Van Winkle paints a charming picture of rural life before and after the American War of Independence. It is counted among the earliest examples of American fiction. The collection also contains The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving’s story about the headless horseman, which explores the nature of legend, and The Pride of the Village, a mythic tale of love and loss. This version includes a free download of The Spectre Bridegroom – see inside booklet for details. The story is also included with the Digital Download version.

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  Symzonia - A Voyage of Discovery...

  Nathaniel Ames

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  Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery is a piece of fictional travel literature published on November 2, 1820, by Jonathan Seymour. It was written under the pseudonym Captain Adam Seaborn and its true authorship is uncertain, although stylometric analysis performed by Paul Collins suggests that the author was Nathaniel Ames. The book is premised on the earth's being hollow and was influenced by the theories of John Symmes. The account by the fictional Captain Seaborn details a voyage from the United States in which Captain Seaborn leads a crew of sailors to the center of the Earth.

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  The Canterville Ghost

  Oscar Wilde

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  The Canterville Ghost is a humorous short story by Oscar Wilde. 
  The story is about an American family who move to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, who killed his wife and was then walled in and starved to death by his wife's brothers. It has been adapted for the stage and screen several times. 
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  Against Nature (Against the Grain)

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

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  Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual - deeply cultured and well-read - can no longer bear contemporary Parisian life in any of its forms! As a youth he had experienced the monastic environment and later academic life, but, remaining unfulfilled, he immersed himself in the multifarious sensual pleasures so readily available in Paris.Still deeply unsatisfied, he decides to move to a house in a village in the countryside. Here he can create his own controlled environment with a minutely designed interior supporting his particular artistic tastes. At last he can live alone with his books, his reflections, and his needs. Nothing will interfere with how he wants to live, what he wants to see, to read, to study, to smell, to eat. However, a life of such total personal indulgence, even on a lofty intellectual and artistically sensitive plane, proves anything but easy - or satisfying.The character of Des Esseintes, intense, testing, infuriating, but astonishing, was said to have been influenced by the famous aesthete of the time, the Comte de Montesquiou (also a model for Baron de Charlus in Proust's In Search of Lost Time), while Against Nature makes an unmistakeable appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Boulton here reads one of the best early translations (published anonymously and originally titled Against the Grain), which has been revised to reinstate sections originally cut to protect sensibilities of the time. It is the full novel as Huysmans intended.

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