Author: Jules Verne

Published: 1875

Shipwrecks occur in other of Verne's tales; but this is his only story devoted wholly to such a disaster. In it the author has gathered all the tragedy, the mystery, and the suffering possible to the sea. All the various forms of disaster, all the possibilities of horror, the depths of shame and agony, are heaped upon these unhappy voyagers. The accumulation is mathematically complete and emotionally unforgettable. The tale has well been called the "imperishable epic of shipwreck."

Published: 1865

The story of the Harmon ''dust'' fortune and those who inherit it. Although somewhat a mystery, an important point concerning the identity of certain characters is revealed halfway through, without hinting as to the ending.

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Published: 1881

Published: 1890

This short story was adapted for an episode of the television show The Twilight Zone which aired February 28, 1964

Author: Lewis Carroll

Published: 1871

A sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Published: 1859

Sidney Carton is almost the only case in which Dickens has drawn a hero on the true heroic scale, and his famous act of self-sacrifice is unmatched in fiction. The book must be ranked very high among the great tragedies in literature.

Published: 1899

The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time, Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story. Wikipedia

Published: 1898

A neurotic governess, believing that the two children in her care are being haunted by malevolent ghosts, seeks to exorcize them. One of the great intellectual ghost stories of all time.

Published: 1865

Followed by Through the Looking Glass.

Published: 1901

To quote a reader, ''If all you know of Oz comes from the movie musical then you owe it to yourself to read the book that inspired Hollywood.'' Learn about Dorothy and her friends in the first of thirteen volumes by L. Frank Baum.

Published: 1920

Author: Anonymous

A collection of sacred scripture of Christianity.

Based on translations of Kinder und Hausmarchen by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes.

Translated from the Arabic by the Rev. J.M. Rodwell

Published: 1599

Portraying the conspiracy against the Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, his assassination, and its aftermath, this drama is just one of several of Shakespeare's plays to be based on historical events.

Author: Herman Melville

Published: 1851

The voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab, who leads his crew on a hunt for the great whale Moby Dick, reveals a profound meditation on society, nature, and the human struggle for meaning, happiness, and salvation. Often considered the epitome of American Romanticism, the novel is now considered one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Published: 1919

What secret compulsion made this lovely girl the handmaiden to unnatural horrors?

Author: Jules Verne

Published: 1874

The book tells the adventures of five American prisoners of war on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. Begining in the American Civil War, as famine and death ravage the city of Richmond, Virginia, five northern POWs decide to escape in a rather unusual way – by hijacking a balloon! This is only the beginning of their adventures...

Author: Homer

Published: 1900

This ancient Greek epic poem centers on the hero Odysseus (or Ulysses, as he was known in Roman myths) and his long journey home following the fall of Troy. In the ten years it takes him to reach Ithaca his family assumes he has died, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with a group of unruly suitors, the Mnesteres, who compete for Penelope's hand in marriage.

Published: 1913

In the early 1900s, Alexandra Bergson, daughter of a Swedish immigrant, inherits the family farm when her father dies and she chooses to devote her life to making the farm work -- at a time when other immigrants are leaving the prairies of Nebraska. The novel also follows the romance between Alexandra and a family friend, and between Alexandra's brother and a married woman.

Published: 1922

Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin of Leopold Bloom during an unremarkable day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer's Odyssey, and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works. Written from 1914 to 1921, the novel was serialized in the American journal The Little Review from 1918, until the publication of the Nausicaa episode led to a prosecution for obscenity. The book was first published in its entirety in Paris in 1922, but was banned in both the United States and United Kingdom until the 1930s. The work was blacklisted by Irish customs.