Ann Veronica is a New Woman novel by H.G. Wells. Ann Veronica describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty," against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Victorian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the Women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter...

Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported from France to England. It would seem that they could take up the threads of their lives in peace. As fate would have it though, the pair are summoned to the Old Bailey to testify against a young Frenchman Charles Darnay falsely accused of treason. Strangely enough, Darnay bears an uncanny resemblance...

"In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven...

When an unidentified "monster" threatens international shipping, French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax and his unflappable assistant Conseil join an expedition organized by the US Navy to hunt down and destroy the menace. After months of fruitless searching, they finally grapple with their quarry, but Aronnax, Conseil, and the brash Canadian harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard in the attack, only to find that the "monster" is actually a futuristic...

American Fairy Tales is the title of a collection of twelve fantasy stories by L. Frank Baum, published in 1901 by the George M. Hill Company, the firm that issued The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the previous year. The twelve stories were published in this order in the first edition. "The Box of Robbers." "The Glass Dog." "The Queen of Quok." "The Girl Who Owned a Bear." "The Enchanted Types." "The Laughing Hippopotamus." "The Magic Bon Bons." "The Capture...

A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by Scottish writer David Lindsay. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. Critic and philosopher Colin Wilson described it as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century", and it was a central influence on C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. J. R. R. Tolkien said he read the book "with avidity". Clive Barker has stated " A...

When I was apprenticed to theatrical carpentering my master was John Haliday, who was Master Machinist - we called men in his post 'Master Carpenter' in those days - of the old Victoria Theatre, Hulme. It wasn't called Hulme, but that name will do. It would only stir up painful memories if I were to give the real name. I daresay some of you - not the Ladies (this with a gallant bow all round) - will remember the case of a Harlequin as was killed in...

2 B R 0 2 B is a science fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in the digest magazine Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1962, and collected in Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box (1999). The title is pronounced "2 B R naught 2 B", referencing the famous phrase "to be, or not to be" from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In this story, the title refers to the telephone number one dials to schedule an assisted suicide...

After the Storm was written by the very popular nineteenth-century American author who articulated and disseminated the values, beliefs, and habits of middle-class life in pre-Civil War America. T.S. Arthur (June 6, 1809 — March 6, 1885) was a popular 19th-century American author. He is most famous for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. He was...

A Martian Odyssey is a science fiction short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum. It was Weinbaum's second published story (in 1933 he had sold a romantic novel, The Lady Dances, to King Features Syndicate under the pseudonym Marge Stanley), and remains his best known. It was followed four months later by a sequel, "Valley of Dreams". These are the only stories by Weinbaum set on Mars. Early in the 21st-century, nearly twenty years after the invention of...