Description Poirot Investigates is a classic collection of Agatha Christie’s short stories first published in 1924. It follows the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his companion Arthur Hastings as they solve a series of mysteries. From threatening letters to Egyptian curses to missing wills, Poirot’s little grey cells never falter. While Hastings and the reader are lost in the minutiae of the case, Poirot sees it all—and with impeccable attention to detail, finds the culprit.
Description Melville’s pen ranges far and wide in this collection of his short stories and novellas, with subjects including a faraway mountain lodge, a magnificent rooster, a haunted table, and of course the inimitable scrivener Bartleby, whose tale is now viewed as one of the great English short stories. While his earlier novels had been well received, by this point in his career his star had waned, and it was only in the early twentieth century that his work, including these short stories,
Description Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker. Running away from this
Description The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a
Description After an unusual mission trading catnip to the catlike Salariki of planet Sargol, Dane Thorson and other low-ranking crew members of the Solar Queen watch in horror as the rest of their crew falls mysteriously ill. Only the four men left standing—and maybe the Captain’s bizarre pet Hoobat—can save their ship from drifting through space for all time, condemned as a plague ship. Originally published by Gnome Press in 1956 under the name Andrew North, Plague Ship is the second
Description A young man stumbles into a rural public house in western Ireland claiming to be on the run after having killed his father. He immediately becomes a source of awe and an object of adoration, and even love. But what happens when the inhabitants of this tiny village find out all is not as the stranger claims? J. M. Synge first presented The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the 26th of January, 1907. The performance immediately offended Irish nationalists
Description Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing towards the middle of his career, sometime between 1598 and 1599. It was first published in quarto in 1600 and later collected into Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of Much Ado About Nothing was performed for the newly-married Princess Elizabeth and Frederick the Fifth, Elector Palatine in 1613. Shakespeare’s sources of inspiration for this play can be found in Italian
Description School Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the trials, tribulations and adventures of the denizens of the turn-of-the-century English boarding school. First published in schoolboy magazines starting in 1901, the stories originally appeared in publications like The Captain and Public School Magazine. Some were also later collected into books. These stories, written more than a decade before he moved on to his more famous characters like
Description Just William, published in 1922, was the first of a long series of well-loved books about William Brown, an eleven-year old English schoolboy, written by Richmal Crompton. William is continually scruffy and disreputable, and has a talent for getting into trouble and becoming involved in various inventive plots and scrapes, to the exasperation of his long-suffering parents and older siblings. Crompton continued to write stories about the amusing adventures and mishaps of William
Description The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was the second novel written by Anne Brontë, the youngest of the Brontë sisters. First released in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell, it was considered shocking by the standards of the time due to its themes of domestic disharmony, drunkenness and adultery. Perhaps this was why it quickly became a publishing success. However, when Anne died from tuberculosis her sister Charlotte prevented its republication until 1854, perhaps fearing for her sister’s
Description Poirot Investigates is a classic collection of Agatha Christie’s short stories first published in 1924. It follows the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his companion Arthur Hastings as they solve a series of mysteries. From threatening letters to Egyptian curses to missing wills, Poirot’s little grey cells never falter. While Hastings and the reader are lost in the minutiae of the case, Poirot sees it all—and with impeccable attention to detail, finds the culprit.
Description Melville’s pen ranges far and wide in this collection of his short stories and novellas, with subjects including a faraway mountain lodge, a magnificent rooster, a haunted table, and of course the inimitable scrivener Bartleby, whose tale is now viewed as one of the great English short stories. While his earlier novels had been well received, by this point in his career his star had waned, and it was only in the early twentieth century that his work, including these short stories,
Description Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker. Running away from this
Description The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a
Description After an unusual mission trading catnip to the catlike Salariki of planet Sargol, Dane Thorson and other low-ranking crew members of the Solar Queen watch in horror as the rest of their crew falls mysteriously ill. Only the four men left standing—and maybe the Captain’s bizarre pet Hoobat—can save their ship from drifting through space for all time, condemned as a plague ship. Originally published by Gnome Press in 1956 under the name Andrew North, Plague Ship is the second
Description A young man stumbles into a rural public house in western Ireland claiming to be on the run after having killed his father. He immediately becomes a source of awe and an object of adoration, and even love. But what happens when the inhabitants of this tiny village find out all is not as the stranger claims? J. M. Synge first presented The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the 26th of January, 1907. The performance immediately offended Irish nationalists
Description Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing towards the middle of his career, sometime between 1598 and 1599. It was first published in quarto in 1600 and later collected into Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of Much Ado About Nothing was performed for the newly-married Princess Elizabeth and Frederick the Fifth, Elector Palatine in 1613. Shakespeare’s sources of inspiration for this play can be found in Italian
Description School Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the trials, tribulations and adventures of the denizens of the turn-of-the-century English boarding school. First published in schoolboy magazines starting in 1901, the stories originally appeared in publications like The Captain and Public School Magazine. Some were also later collected into books. These stories, written more than a decade before he moved on to his more famous characters like
Description Just William, published in 1922, was the first of a long series of well-loved books about William Brown, an eleven-year old English schoolboy, written by Richmal Crompton. William is continually scruffy and disreputable, and has a talent for getting into trouble and becoming involved in various inventive plots and scrapes, to the exasperation of his long-suffering parents and older siblings. Crompton continued to write stories about the amusing adventures and mishaps of William
Description The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was the second novel written by Anne Brontë, the youngest of the Brontë sisters. First released in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell, it was considered shocking by the standards of the time due to its themes of domestic disharmony, drunkenness and adultery. Perhaps this was why it quickly became a publishing success. However, when Anne died from tuberculosis her sister Charlotte prevented its republication until 1854, perhaps fearing for her sister’s