Start Classics: 796 books

William Le Queux was a famous journalist, writer and celebrated novelist, a master of the spy genre, and a vociferous critic of Britain's weak military defences before the First World War, known at the time and for the next twenty years as "The Great War". He is acknowledged as the principal precursor...

Once regarded as comparatively minor amongst Conrad's works, Victory has grown in reputation. Its depiction of the central character, Axel Heyst, and his renunciation of the world, is influenced by Conrad's reading of Schopenhauer.

The five stories brought together in Tales of Unrest (1898) mark a turning point in the writer's career. Conrad's first short story collection evidences a writer firmly in control of his new craft staking a claim to diverse cultural and fictional territories. The introduction situates the writing...

Notoriously unreliable and digressive in structure, it is nonetheless the principal contemporary source for information about the author's life.[citation needed] It tells about his schooling in Russian Poland, his sailing in Marseille, the influence of his Uncle Tadeusz, and the writing of Almayer's...

Nobody who has followed the gallant sailor--diminutive, but oh, my!--in his previous adventures around the earth, is going to miss this red-hot volume of marvelous exploits.

Philosophical text written by William Stebbing, author of "Five Centuries of English Verse" and "Sir Walter Ralegh A Biography"

He was a reporter from Venus with an assignment on Earth. He got his story but, against orders, he fell in love—and therein lies this story.

John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) has earned comparison with Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum for his humorous fantasies, including "A Houseboat on the Styx" and these wildly adventurous "Andiron Tales" -- featuring talking andirons, bellows and fire-pokers . . . and a voyage to the crescent Moon

In space, a vengeful fleet waited.... Then the furred strangers arrived with a plan to save Earth's children. But the General wasn't sure if he could trust an ALIEN OFFER.

The title of this series, "Makers of Canada," seemed to impose on the writer the obligation to devote special attention to the part played by George Brown in fashioning the institutions of this country. From this point of view the most fruitful years of his life were spent between the time when the...

Are you one of those people who save the best things for the last ... who eat all the chocolate sundae away from under the maraschino cherry? If so, you are very like the Peter W. Merrill Moonplant.

What will the world be like, the day after Tomorrow, for the lonely ones who will have talents that others will half fear, half envy? William Gerken describes this strange world in which young and old will have to find new values and pursue new dreams, as they search for the answer.... When he opened...

McHarry's classic handbook offers recipes and distillation methods for a variety of spirits and liqueurs. A thorough overview of the numerous processes by which whiskey and other alcohol varieties are derived, The Practical Distiller is also notable for detailing the history of alcohol and safety precautions associated with myriad distillation techniques.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a prolific Scots man of letters, a poet, novelist, literary critic and contributor to anthropology. He now is best known as the collector of folk and fairy tales. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, St Andrews University and at Balliol College, Oxford. As a journalist,...