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  The White Cat

  W. W. Jacobs

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  William Wymark Jacobs (1863 - 1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. His most popular works in the early part of the last century were his humorous tales set around the docks of Wapping and in the tap-room of the infamous Cauliflower tavern.Many of his stories were written in a Cockney vernacular and were keenly observant of character.  "The White Cat" is a humorous tale of a disputed inheritance, a clever old rogue and a suspiciously mislaid white cat.

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  Northanger Abbey

  Jane Austen

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  Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death - well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings - and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style.An Author's Republic audio production.

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  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...

  Mark Twain

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  They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever. 
  In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, our fun-loving protagonist goes on multiple adventures, getting into all kinds of trouble as he navigates the messiness of boyhood. 
  Sawyer is now so emblematic of a particular time and place in American history that it boosted the tourist industry of Hannibal, St. Louis - where the novel is set, and where Mark Twain himself grew up. 
  The Legend Classics series:Around the World in Eighty DaysThe Adventures of Huckleberry FinnThe Importance of Being EarnestAlice's Adventures in WonderlandThe MetamorphosisThe Railway ChildrenThe Hound of the BaskervillesFrankensteinWuthering HeightsThree Men in a BoatThe Time MachineLittle WomenAnne of Green GablesThe Jungle BookThe Yellow Wallpaper and Other StoriesDraculaA Study in ScarletLeaves of GrassThe Secret GardenThe War of the WorldsA Christmas CarolStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeHeart of DarknessThe Scarlet LetterThis Side of ParadiseOliver TwistThe Picture of Dorian GrayTreasure IslandThe Turn of the ScrewThe Adventures of Tom SawyerEmmaThe TrialA Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan PoeGrimm Fairy TalesThe AwakeningMrs DallowayGulliver’s TravelsThe Castle of OtrantoSilas MarnerHard Times

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  The Mill on the Floss

  George Eliot, (Mary Ann Evans)

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  "The Mill on the Floss," published in 1860, is a novel by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). It is a poignant portrayal of Victorian England and captures the complexities of family dynamics, societal expectations, and personal aspirations. The story centers on Maggie Tulliver, a passionate and intelligent woman struggling to satisfy her emotional needs in the rigid provincial community of St. Ogg's. Her relationship with her brother, Tom, and their conflicts with family and society form the crux of the narrative. The novel explores themes of gender norms, education, and the tension between individual desires and social conventions.

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  Seven Sixes are Forty Three

  Kiran Nagarkar

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  Kushank Purandare is a young writer living off the goodwill of a host of friends, relatives, and lovers while he waits to gain recognition for his work. He is witness to their struggle as modern Indians to hold on to a semblance of truth and sanity in the face of alienation, squalor, violence, and loss of hope. Nagarkar's explosive style and irreverent approach caused an equally explosive reaction when Seven Sixes was first published in 1974. Critics have struggled to reconcile its apparent nihilism with its underlying sense of optimism.

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  The Poison Belt

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  'You will conceive a bunch of grapes,' said he, 'which are covered by some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus. The gardener passes it through a disinfecting medium. It may be that he desires his grapes to be cleaner. It may be that he needs space to breed some fresh bacillus less noxious than the last. He dips it into the poison, and they are gone. Our gardener is, in my opinion, about to dip the solar system, and the human bacillus, the little mortal vibrio which twisted and wriggled upon the outer rind of the earth, will in an instant be sterilised out of existence...' And so Professor Challenger makes plans to ensure that he and his wife and three close friends are immune from the effects of the 'disinfecting medium', the poison belt, for as long as possible.As in The Lost World, Conan Doyle had these ideas long before our modern filmmakers, and his elucidation of scientific concepts in these adventurous and thrilling tales had enormous appeal for an audience which gained its knowledge from books. Sadly, the novel's ultimate appeal that 'solemnity and humility' would 'be the foundations upon which a more earnest and reverent race may build a more worthy temple' fell on stony ground. Within a year of its publication, most of Europe was embroiled in the most horrifying conflict the planet had ever witnessed, in which poisonous gas was to play an horrendous part.Public Domain (P)2012 Assembled Stories

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