Interactive Media: 1158 books

A nightingale finds a young romantic student in tears because he cannot find a red rose for his beautiful ball partner. There are no red roses in the garden. The nightingale visits all the rose-trees in the area, and one of the roses tells her there is a way to produce a red rose, but only if the nightingale...

I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. I know how it must hurt you to become the subject of the public talk: and yet, upon an occasion so generally known, it is impossible but that whatever relates to a young lady, whose distinguished merits...

After his legs were set, they carried Bailey into the study and put him on a couch before the open window. There he lay, a live—even a feverish man down to the loins, and below that a double-barrelled mummy swathed in white wrappings. He tried to read, even tried to write a little, but most of the time he looked out of the window.

Matthew Bramble, his family and servants are traveling through England and Scotland. Although the primary motivation for the expedition is to restore the health of the gouty Matthew Bramble, each member of the family uses the excursion to achieve their ends. Leaving from Bramble's estate, Brambleton...

Laevsky is a dissipated romantic given to gambling and flirtation. He has run off to the sea with another man's wife and quickly grown tired of her, but two obstacles block his route to escape: he is broke, and he faces the absolute enmity of Von Koren, an arrogant zoologist and former friend who can...

A native Frenchman no longer tutors the wealthy landlord's children as they've grown up and left the house. The Frenchman is now paid simply to be around, to be properly dressed, to smell of scent, and to listen to Kamyshev's babble, to eat and drink and sleep. It may sound like a dream job but there's always a catch.

Strizhin, who normally leads a sober and regular life, comes home from a christening party where he had permitted himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine, the taste of which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil. And of course spirituous liquors being like sea-water...

Yegor the huntsman, walking down a country road accidentally meets his estranged wife Pelageya whom he's been married for twelve years but visited just several times, and even then, drunk and violent. She weeps and, fawning before him, implores him to visit her more often. He tries to explain why...

Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a dressmaking establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop looking about for some one. Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed, with frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared a place on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka with a smile.

The cabman Iona's son recently died. He desperately and unsuccessfully tries to have a talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. He ends up talking to his horse.

Obviously he was born a mouse catcher, a worthy son of his bloodthirsty ancestors. Fate had destined him to be the terror of cellars, store-rooms and cornbins, and had it not been for education . . .

In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes....

Natalya Bronin is lying in her bedroom, her whole being abandoned to repose. She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking of her little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her grandmother or aunt. The child is more precious to her than the public, bouquets, notices in the papers, adorers and she would...

A poor girl, gymnasium student, with five brothers, marries a rich state official who counts every single piece of bread, demands from her subserviance and gratitude, is scornful of her relatives... She endures all this, trying not to argue with him, so as not to fall back into destitude again. Then...