Aeterna Classics: 81 books

Civilization might have been spared much of the damage suffered in the world wars this century if the influence of Clausewitz's On War had been blended with and balanced by a knowledge of Sun-tzu's The Book of War. --B.H. Liddel Hart

The author was born "Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov" on March 16, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia -- which was later renamed in his honor after his death (ordered by Stalin himself, it is rumored). The bitterness of his early life led him to choose the name Maxim Gorky (which means "the...

Lawrence's first novel is a compelling exploration of the interpersonal influences that cause unhappiness in relationships and is based on the lives of three individuals, the lively Lettie and George and Leslie.

Maxim Gorky, like Leo Tolstoy, was primarily an autobiographical author, and the material here is considered amongst the greatest of his writings. Not only do they give the astonishingly varied life of Gorky from childhood through youth, but they also provide us with an unforgettable picture of one...

"Anthony Trollope's novels have been out of fashion for many years; but of late a disposition to reconsider his place among English writers is evident." -The Literary Digest "If I have not yet said that I think Anthony Trollope the most English of the English novelists I will do so...

Hardy distrusted the application of nineteenth-century empiricism to history because he felt it marginalized important human elements. In The Trumpet-Major, the tale of a woman courted by three competing suitors during the Napoleonic wars, he explores the subversive effects of ordinary human desire...

It was not until my second season's hunting with Koenraad du Plessis that I heard of Verloren Vlei, a place I am never likely to forget. Du Plessis was a Transvaal Boer, descended, as his name implies, from that good Huguenot stock which, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, made its way to the Cape to replenish the Dutch settlers.

Pauline Quenu, the daughter of shopkeepers in the Parisian business district Les Halles (see The Fat and the Thin, aka The Belly of Paris), is taken in by relatives on the coast of Normandy following the death of her parents. There, Pauline - kind and open-minded - is confronted with a gout-plagued...

Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon) (1879-1940) was an English writer who wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt. His most famous book is King of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure (1916), which is set in India under British Occupation. He wrote many other books and stories, including...

I was then five-and-twenty, -that was a sufficient indication that I had a past, said he, beginning. My own master for some little time, I resolved to travel, -not to complete my education, as they said at the time, but to see the world...

"There's something weird and mysterious about the robbery, Kennedy. They took the very thing I treasure most of all, an ancient Peruvian dagger." Professor Allan Norton was very much excited as he dropped into Craig's laboratory early that forenoon. Norton, I may say, was one of the younger...

Excerpt from Three Men: A Novel There are many solitary graves amid the woods of Kerschentz; within them moulder the bones of old men, men of an ancient piety, and of one of these old men, Antipa, this tale is told in the villages of Kerschentz. Antipa Lunev, a rich peasant of austere disposition,...

The new managing director of Schemes Ltd. has an elegant London office and a theatrically dressed assistant. However Bones, as he is better known, is bored. Luckily there is a slump in the shipping market and it is not long before Joe and Fred Pole pay Bones a visit. They are totally unprepared for...

The Outcry, Henry James's final novel, is an effervescent comedy of money and manners. Breckenridge Bender, a very rich American with a distinct resemblance to J.P. Morgan, arrives in England with the purpose of acquiring some very great art; he is directed to Dedborough, the estate of the debt-ridden...