Harperperennial Classics: 218 books

Join Mowgli, the “man-cub” who is saved from the evil, man-eating tiger Shere Khan and adopted by a wolf pack, as he grows up in the jungle. Growing from boy to man, Mowgli learns the ways of the animals from Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose, and others. HarperPerennial...

In this story of artistic obsession, a wounded man finds shelter in an abandoned château in the Appenines and with his valet settles into a small apartment in a remote turret. The oddly shaped room is full of paintings, and on his pillow the man finds a small book that appears to tell their stories....

A tenderhearted man with a life-long love of animals begins to neglect, and even misuse, the domestic pets his wife has collected for his pleasure. Eventually, even his favourite, a large and beautiful black cat named Pluto is not immune to his master’s maltreatment. A pioneer of the short...

An unnamed narrator performs a remarkable experiment when he hypnotizes a man In articulo mortis—at the point of death. Because the story wasn’t identified as fiction when it was first published in 1845, many readers believed Edgar Allan Poe’s sensational work to be a true account. A...

At a banker’s party fifteen years ago, a young lawyer defends the position that life in prison is far less humane than capital punishment. The banker disagrees and proposes they bet—two million rubles in exchange for fifteen years of solitary confinement. The terms of their agreement allow the...

Eaten away by illness, an elderly coffin maker named Yakov reflects on his life—in particular his indifferent relationship with his now-deceased wife, Marfa, and his antipathy towards Rothschild, the flutist in the Jewish klezmer orchestra in which Yakov occasionally plays. HarperPerennial...

Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan is Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novella about the unsinkable ship Titan, which goes down after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Disgraced former naval lieutenant John Rowland is working as a deckhand on the Titan when it strikes an iceberg and capsizes. Saving...

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ground breaking story follows a number of characters through their vastly different journeys and disparate points of view. Whether on the road to freedom travelling the Underground Railroad, or remaining in captivity, Stowe’s narrative exposed the bleak and harrowing nature...

Written as a continuation of her sensational 1852 text, Roughing it in the Bush, Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Backwoods continues the narrative of her experience as a settler in mid-nineteenth century Upper Canada. By relating her own experiences and those of the community of pioneers also living...

While serving time in a prison camp, a man witnesses the savage beating of another prisoner. A fellow inmate, who comes from wealth in his home country of Poland, comments on the brutality of the peasant prisoners, leading the young man to reflect on an event from his childhood that had demonstrated...

The indomitable Letitia Carberry, known as Tish, leaps before she looks, leading her spinster-friends, Aggie and Lizzie, headfirst into hilarious, often perilous, circumstances. But as resourceful and resolute women of a certain age and station, the three friends inevitably gain the upper hand, solving...

Tish Carberry and her spinster-friends Aggie and Lizze are at it again. From unknowingly backing—and then winning—crooked motorcar races to subsidizing an exploitive émigré and his bride to joining the Simple Life movement and taking up residence in the woods, life is never dull for the three...

Set on the Great Plains during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific coast, The Prairie is the third of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels to feature Natty Bumppo, the famous Hawkeye. Now in his eighties, Bumppo has left New York for the untouched expanses of the frontier. There...

At the end of an enchanted evening a glass slipper is lost, but true love is found. Young and beautiful, Cinderella is forced to work as a servant, and as the day for the royal ball approaches, she fears that she will not be allowed to attend. But with the help of a fairy, a single magical night brings...