Otbebookpublishing: 2325 books

This 1872 instalment in Holmes’s popular Breakfast Table series is a fluent, gossipy exchange among the poet of the title and his breakfast companions—with the lion's share of conversation belonging to the poet, who delivers his somewhat eccentric and fitfully amusing opinions of books, people,...

When John Erskine was still a child he had inherited the house and estate of Dalrulzian in Scotland; but he had moved to England at age 13 when his mother remarried. Now twenty-five, he has come home at last - though everything is quite a bit smaller than he remembered it. He thinks fondly of a girl...

Excerpt: “He did not succeed to the title; he was born Earl of Cairnforth his father having been drowned in the loch a month before the wretched countess herself beholding the sight from her castle windows.

Sweet Ermengarde or The Heart of a Country Girl is a short comedy ( 2,740 words ) H. P. Lovecraft under the pseudonym "Percy Simple". It was probably written between 1919 and 1921 and is the only work of fiction by Lovecraft that cannot be dated with precision. The story is a parody of romantic...

Excerpt: “It was rather a beautiful old house—the house where Austin lived. That is, it was old-fashioned, low-browed, solid, and built of that peculiar sort of red brick which turns a rich rose-colour with age; and this warm rosy tint was set off to advantage by the thick mantle of dark green...

First published in 1850, Olive traces its eponymous heroine's progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife. The crippled child of parents who are disgusted by her physical 'imperfection', a curvature of the spine, Olive struggles to take her place in the world as artist and...

The story takes place during the time of the plague and huge areas of the city are uninhabited as a result. Whenever the plague is discovered, the district in which it was found is put under ban and no one is allowed into the area. Barricades are put up to prevent people from entering and exiting...

Above the Battle is an anti-world war I treatise by Romain Rolland written in 1916. (Excerpt) "A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets...

(Excerpt): "As for the other class of clocks—the common or always-wrong clocks—they are harmless enough. You wind them up at the proper intervals, and once or twice a week you put them right and "regulate" them, as you call it... But you do all this, not from any selfish motives,...

Fanny is a stage artist, with music and performance to her credit, and fame and name to boot, who happens to see someone she likes and he is in love with her for herself. Nevertheless he makes discreet enquiries regarding her family connections. (Goodreads)

(Excerpt): "Once upon a time in Zandam, which is by the Zuider Zee, there lived a wicked man named Nicholas Snyders. He was mean and hard and cruel, and loved but one thing in the world, and that was gold. And even that not for its own sake. He loved the power gold gave him—the power to tyrannize...

(Excerpt): "Do not blame me, Ladies, the fault lies with you. Every right-thinking man is an universal lover; how could it be otherwise? You are so diverse, yet each so charming of your kind; and a man's heart is large. You have no idea, fair Reader, how large a man's heart is: that is his trouble--sometimes yours."

Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels) is a humorous novel by Jerome K. Jerome. It was published in 1900, eleven years after his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). The sequel brings back the three companions who figured in Three Men in a Boat, this time on a bicycle tour through the German Black Forest. ( Wikipedia)

Although not the equal of his "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" (1886), one can still find sublime passages here and there that demonstrate the occasional genius of a wonderful observer and humorist. The passages are worth reading the rest. (Goodreads)