Description Denis, a young writer and poet, travels to an English countryside manor to spend the summer alongside a cast of outlandish leisure class intellectuals. The younger guests of the manor grapple with navigating love and sex within a post-Victorian society. Older guests and inhabitants obsess over trivialities from their vast libraries, eager to give a show of their knowledge to each other. The novel uses these interactions to paint a scathing representation of their insecurities and
Description The Autobiography of Mark Twain is a collection of reminiscences and reflections. Twain began dictating them in 1870, and in 1906 he published Chapters from My Autobiography in twenty-five installments in the North American Review. He continued to write stories for his autobiography, most of which weren’t published in his lifetime due to a lack of access to his papers, or their private subject matters. After Twain’s death, numerous editors have tried to organize this collection of
Description While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina , the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks production compiles all of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication. The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to
Description The American Crisis is a collection of articles by Thomas Paine, originally published from December 1776 to December 1783, that focus on rallying Americans during the worst years of the Revolutionary War. Paine used his deistic beliefs to galvanize the revolutionaries, for example by claiming that the British are trying to assume the powers of God and that God would support the American colonists. These articles were so influential that others began to adopt some of their more
Description Thomas Paine wrote the first part of The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to the furious attack on the French Revolution by the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, published the previous year. Paine carefully dissects and counters Burke’s arguments and provides a more accurate description of the events surrounding the revolution of 1789. He then reproduces and comments on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
Description Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics , had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern philosophy with Christian theology, he realized that he was “the man who with the
Description Five Weeks in a Balloon tells the tale of three Englishmen who attempt to cross Africa, from east to west, in a balloon. Dr. Ferguson is the rational scientist leading the trio, accompanied by loyal sidekick Joe and the doctor’s sporting friend Kennedy. The three embark on many adventures: They encounter natives and dangerous animals, experience problems with their ballooning technology, and struggle with the winds and the weather. Throughout the novel, the author liberally
Description The popular history of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody remains more myth than anything else, yet it’s undeniable that he was a central figure in the American Old West. Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, soldier, bison hunter, scout, showman—his résumé reads like the quintessential record of all that makes up the Old West mythology, and it’s all documented in this, his original 1879 autobiography. While The Life of Buffalo Bill is rife with the dramatic stylings of
Description Thomas Paine was an American political commentator and activist in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His writing covered a wide range of subjects, but were centered on his core beliefs of republicanism and the inherent rights of people. An early pamphlet of his, “Common Sense,” was written soon after he arrived in America from Great Britain; with its focus on the ills of colonialism and the King’s veering between rational debate and righteous outrage, it has been cited as
Description In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution. When Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for
Description Denis, a young writer and poet, travels to an English countryside manor to spend the summer alongside a cast of outlandish leisure class intellectuals. The younger guests of the manor grapple with navigating love and sex within a post-Victorian society. Older guests and inhabitants obsess over trivialities from their vast libraries, eager to give a show of their knowledge to each other. The novel uses these interactions to paint a scathing representation of their insecurities and
Description The Autobiography of Mark Twain is a collection of reminiscences and reflections. Twain began dictating them in 1870, and in 1906 he published Chapters from My Autobiography in twenty-five installments in the North American Review. He continued to write stories for his autobiography, most of which weren’t published in his lifetime due to a lack of access to his papers, or their private subject matters. After Twain’s death, numerous editors have tried to organize this collection of
Description While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina , the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks production compiles all of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication. The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to
Description The American Crisis is a collection of articles by Thomas Paine, originally published from December 1776 to December 1783, that focus on rallying Americans during the worst years of the Revolutionary War. Paine used his deistic beliefs to galvanize the revolutionaries, for example by claiming that the British are trying to assume the powers of God and that God would support the American colonists. These articles were so influential that others began to adopt some of their more
Description Thomas Paine wrote the first part of The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to the furious attack on the French Revolution by the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, published the previous year. Paine carefully dissects and counters Burke’s arguments and provides a more accurate description of the events surrounding the revolution of 1789. He then reproduces and comments on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
Description Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics , had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern philosophy with Christian theology, he realized that he was “the man who with the
Description Five Weeks in a Balloon tells the tale of three Englishmen who attempt to cross Africa, from east to west, in a balloon. Dr. Ferguson is the rational scientist leading the trio, accompanied by loyal sidekick Joe and the doctor’s sporting friend Kennedy. The three embark on many adventures: They encounter natives and dangerous animals, experience problems with their ballooning technology, and struggle with the winds and the weather. Throughout the novel, the author liberally
Description The popular history of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody remains more myth than anything else, yet it’s undeniable that he was a central figure in the American Old West. Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, soldier, bison hunter, scout, showman—his résumé reads like the quintessential record of all that makes up the Old West mythology, and it’s all documented in this, his original 1879 autobiography. While The Life of Buffalo Bill is rife with the dramatic stylings of
Description Thomas Paine was an American political commentator and activist in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His writing covered a wide range of subjects, but were centered on his core beliefs of republicanism and the inherent rights of people. An early pamphlet of his, “Common Sense,” was written soon after he arrived in America from Great Britain; with its focus on the ills of colonialism and the King’s veering between rational debate and righteous outrage, it has been cited as
Description In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution. When Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for