Genre Other. Page - 199
No registration or authorisation! And it is all for free!
Description The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published as a serial in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, and the publishers thought it would so offend readers that they removed nearly 500 words without Wilde’s approval. Wilde soon expanded it and republished it as a novel, including a short preface justifying his art. Even though his contemporaries considered it so offensive that some argued for his prosecution, Dorian Gray today survives as a classic philosophical novel that explores themes of
Description Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus was the model of what we call a philosopher-king. Though his rule was troubled by war and conflict, he remained a thoughtful and even-handed ruler. Meditations isn’t a complete book, but rather a collection of his personal diary entries written over a ten-year campaign in Greece. The entries were never meant to be published; instead, they were a reminder to himself of how to remain calm, tranquil, and kind, even in the worst of
Description In 1910 famous explorer Robert Falcon Scott led the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The expedition was part scientific and part adventure: Scott wanted to be the first to reach the pole. The expedition was beset by hardship from the beginning, and after realizing that they had been beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian Expedition, the party suffered a final tragedy: the loss of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic cold on their return journey to base camp.
Description The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text written around the 6th century BC by Laozi, a Zhou-dynasty courtier. While its authorship is debated, the text remains a fundamental building block of Taoism and one of the most influential works of its time. Today it’s one of the most-translated works in the world. The work itself is a series of 81 short poetic sections, each one written in a fluid, ambiguous style, leaving them open to wide interpretation. Subjects range from advice to
Description Candide is the picaresque tale of the titular character’s fantastical journey from an insular, idealized life in a picturesque castle through the difficulties and evils of the real world. Satirical, comical, witty, and cutting, Candide was widely banned in its day for containing blasphemous and seditious concepts. Despite that, it survived controversy to become an important book in the Western literary heritage. Today Candide remains a breezy and darkly funny read.
Description The Prince is a book that was controversial before it had even been sent to the printer. Written in vernacular Italian instead of Latin, dedicated to a member of one of the most powerful Italian families of the day, and only printed after Machiavelli’s death, this treatise on how to tyrannize effectively was considered shocking even by his contemporaries. The discussion of its morality that continues to this day gives us the modern-day word Machiavellian. The book is organized into
Description Dracula is one of the most famous public-domain horror novels in existence, responsible not just for introducing the eponymous Count Dracula, but for introducing many of the common tropes we see in modern horror fiction. Count Dracula isn’t the first vampire to have graced the pages of literature—that honor is thought to belong to Lord Ruthven in The Vampyr, by John William Polidori—but Dracula is the vampire on which modern vampires are based. Dracula wasn’t as famous in its day as
Description Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, was an actual baron living in 18th-century Hanover famous for entertaining his guests with outrageously-embellished tales of his wartime exploits—so much so that his nickname in German is Lügenbaron, or “Baron of Lies.” When Rudolph Eric Raspe, a writer and scientist living in England, heard of the Baron’s tales, he wrote his own versions centered around a fictional Baron Munchausen. While the real Baron wasn’t amused to
Description Originally published serially as a three-part story, Heart of Darkness is a short but thematically complex novel exploring colonialism, humanity, and what constitutes a savage society. Set in the Congo in Central Africa, the tale is told in the frame of the recollections of one Charles Marlow, a captain of an ivory steamer. Marlow’s search for the mysterious and powerful “first-class agent” Kurtz gives way to a nuanced and powerful commentary on the horrors of colonialism, called by
Description Walden is one of the more famous transcendentalist tracts in modern American literature. First published in 1854, Walden is an account of Thoreau’s famous experiment in solitude: spending over two years alone in a cabin near the wilderness. Walden is broken into sections that meditate on single themes: economy, reading, sounds, solitude, visitors, and so on. The style is complex, weaving back and forth between simple, home-spun prose and complex allegory, metaphor, and allusion.