Edgar Allan Poe

Beyond Words Press

When the body of Marie Rogêt is found in the Seine River, detective C. Auguste Dupin uses his superior deductive skills to discover the identity of the murderer. "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" is based in part on the actual murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, and is believed to be the first example of real-life crime used as a foundation for fictional narrative.A pioneer of the short story genre, Poe's stories typically captured themes of the macabre and included elements of the mysterious. His better-known stories include "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Tell-Tale Heart".

Beyond World's Classics

The Mystery of Marie Roget

Susan Coolidge

What Katy Did Next is the third installment of Coolidge's series about a playful young girl called Katy Carr. The story begins with Katy getting an invitation to spend a year in Europe. She is overjoyed at the thought of exploring the interesting places she has read about. However, once she gets there she faces unpleasant surprises but eventually ends up finding the greatest happiness of all.

What Katy Did Next

Willa Cather

My Ántonia evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Ántonia, teach her English, and follow the remarkable story of her life.Working in the fields of waving grass and tall corn that dot the Great Plains, Ántonia forges the durable spirit that will carry her through the challenges she faces when she moves to the city. But only when she returns to the prairie does she recover her strength and regain a sense of purpose in life. In the quiet, probing depth of Willa Cather's art, Ántonia's story becomes a mobbing elegy to those whose persistence and strength helped build the American frontier.

My Antonia

Pocket Edition - Beyond World's Classics

William Hope Hodgson

The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions. American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft listed The House on the Borderland and other works by Hodgson among his greatest influences and Terry Pratchett has called the novel "the Big Bang in my private universe as a science fiction and fantasy reader and later, writer".

The House on the Borderland

Earl Derr Biggers

It was the hour at which she liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness. The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef. A few late swimmers, reluctant to depart, dotted those waters whose touch is like the caress of a lover. On the springboard of the nearest float a slim brown girl poised for one delectable instant. What a figure! Miss Minerva, well over fifty herself, felt a mild twinge of envy--youth, youth like an arrow, straight and sure and flying. Like an arrow the slender figure rose, then fell; the perfect dive, silent and clean.

The House Without a Key

Edgar Wallace

"The Keepers of the King's Peace" is another entry in Edgar Wallace's eminently popular "Sanders of the River" series based on British attempts to bring their administration to darkest Africa. An elite crew of officers is charged with getting to the bottom of a female shaman's seemingly miraculous powers, but bumbling new addition Bones keeps getting in the way. Will they be able to stave off a mass rebellion before it's too late? Always with tongue in cheek, Edgar Wallace nevertheless provides insights into the period of history at the same time. Wonderful characters, enthralling stories, never a dull moment. These stories are as good as any of the "Sanders of the River" stories.

The Keepers Of The King's Peace

Frederic Arnold Kummer

The dull October afternoon was rapidly drawing to a close as I passed through the village of Pinhoe, and set my steps rather wearily toward Exeter. I had conceived the idea, some time before, of walking from London to Torquay, partly because I felt the need of the exercise and fresh air, and partly because I wanted to do some sketching in the southwest counties. Perhaps had I realized, when I started out, what manner of adventure would befall me in the neighborhood of the town of Exeter, I should have given that place a wide berth.

The Green God

Lucy Maud Montgomery

At sixteen Anne is grown up...almost. Her gray eyes shine like evening stars, but her red hair is still as peppery as her temper. In the years since she arrived at Green Gables as a freckle-faced orphan, she has earned the love of the people of Avonlea and a reputation for getting into scrapes. But when Anne begins her job a the new schoolteacher, the real test of her character begins. Along with teaching the three Rs, she is learning how complicated life can be when she meddles in someone else's romance, finds two orphans at Green Gables, and wonders about the strange behaviour of the very handsome Gilbert Blythe. As Anne enters womanhood, her adventures touch the heart and the funny bone.

Anne Of Avonlea

Louisa May Alcott

Beginning ten years after Little Men, Jo's Boys revisits Plumfield, the New England school still presided over by Jo and her husband, Professor Bhaer. Jo remains at the center of the tale, surrounded by her boys-including rebellious Dan, sailor Emil, and promising musician Nat-as they experience shipwreck and storm, disappointment and even murder.

Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age.After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society.

The Rise Of Silas Lapham

The summer had been cool; but, as often happens after cool summers, the autumn proved unusually hot. It seemed as if the months had been playing a game, and had "changed places" all round; and as if September were determined to show that he knew how to make himself just as disagreeable as August, if only he chose to do so. All the last half of Cousin Helen's stay, the weather was excessively sultry. She felt it very much, though the children did all they could to make her comfortable, with shaded rooms, and iced water, and fans. Every evening the boys would wheel her sofa out on the porch, in hopes of coolness; but it was of no use: the evenings were as warm as the days, and the yellow dust hanging in the air made the sunshine look thick and hot. A few bright leaves appeared on the trees, but they were wrinkled, and of an ugly color.

What Katy Did at School

Mary Shelley

The day had been sunny and warm: as the evening closed in a west wind rose, bringing along troops of fleecy clouds, golden at sunset, and then dun and grey, veiling with pervious network the many stars. Three horsemen at this hour passed through the open country between Hinckley and Welford in Leicestershire. It was broad day when they descended from the elevation on which the former stands, and the villagers crowded to gaze upon the fugitives, and to guess, from the ensigns they bore, to which party they belonged, while the warders from the near castle hastened out to stop them, thus to curry favour with the conqueror; a design wholly baffled.

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck

Honore De Balzac

This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel.

Eugenie Grandet

Edwin Abbott Abbott

First published in 1884, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" is English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott's classic work of science fiction. With the use of a geometric theme, Abbott weaves the fascinating tale of "A Square", an inhabitant of "Flatland", a two-dimensional world where women are portrayed as simple line-segments and men are represented as polygons whose social status is determined by the number and regularity of their sides. Through this device Abbott satirizes the seemingly arbitrary hierarchy of the Victorian era. In addition to a brilliant work of satire "Flatland" is a thought-provoking examination of the bounds of physical space. On the eve of the third millennium "A Square" dreams of a one-dimensional world, "Lineland", that is inhabited by "lustrous points". Subsequently he is visited by "A Sphere", an inhabitant of a three-dimensional world called "Spaceland", which he fails to comprehend until he sees it for himself. Having his mind opened to the existence of other dimensions "A Square" posits the theoretical possibility of the existence of four, five, and six dimensional worlds, an idea which gets him thrown out of "Spaceland" in disgrace. One of the most original pieces of literature ever written, "Flatland" is a witty and satirical adventure that explores the very nature of physical reality itself.

A Romance Of Many Dimensions - Beyond World's Classics

Flatland

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. The traditional story of a poisonous maiden has been traced back to India, and Hawthorne's version has been adopted in contemporary works. The story is set in Padua, Italy, in a distant and unspecified past. From his quarters, Giovanni Guasconti, a young student of letters, at the University of Padua, looks at Beatrice, the beautiful daughter of Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, a scientist who works in isolation. Beatrice is confined to the lush and locked gardens, which are filled with poisonous plants grown by her father. Giovanni notices Beatrice's strangely intimate relationship with the plants as well as the withering of fresh flowers and the death of an insect when exposed to her skin or breath.

Rappaccini's Daughter

Robert E. Howard

If Joel Braxton hadn't drawed a knife whilst I was beating his head agen a spruce log, I reckon I wouldn't of had that quarrel with Glory McGraw, and things might of turned out different to what they did. Pap's always said the Braxtons was no-account folks, and I allow he's right. First thing I knowed Jim Garfield hollered: "Look out, Breck, the yaller hound's got a knife!" Then I felt a kind of sting and looked down and seen Joel had cut a big gash in my buckskin shirt and scratched my hide trying to get at my innards.

A Gent From Bear Creek

D H Lawrence

Called the most widely-read English novel of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence's largely autobiographical Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding attachment to his loving but overbearing mother, Paul struggles to define himself sexually and emotionally through his relationships with two women-the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers, and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes. Heralding Lawrence's mature period, Sons and Lovers vividly evokes the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction. Lushly descriptive and deeply emotional, it is rich in universal truths about human relationships.

Sons And Lovers

Emily Starr was born with the desire to write. As an orphan living on New Moon Farm, writing helped her face the difficult, lonely times. But now all her friends are going away to high school in nearby Shrewsbury, and her old-fashioned, tyrannical aunt Elizabeth will only let her go if she promises to stop writing! All the same, this is the first step in Emily's climb to success. Once in town, Emily's activities set the Shrewsbury gossips buzzing. But Emily and her friends are confident - Ilse's a born actress, Teddy's set to be a great artist, and roguish Perry has the makings of a brilliant lawyer. When Emily has her poems published and writes for the town newspaper, success seems to be on its way - and with it the first whispers of romance. Then Emily is offered a fabulous opportunity, and she must decide if she wants to change her life forever.

Emily Climbs

Anna Sewell

Black Beauty - His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time. While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, it also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect.

Beyond Words Press

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