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The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. In the Penal Colony describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution...

The Trial (original ger title: Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 but not published until 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed to neither him nor the reader. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian transported to Mars and the initial protagonist of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories. His character is enduring, having appeared in various media since his 1912 debut in a magazine serial. (Wikipedia)

Excerpt: "The summer was a very happy period of repose for us all. The warmth of Indian suns was still in our veins. It seemed to us that we could never have enough of the greenness, the dewiness, the freshness of the northern landscape. Even its mists were pleasant to us, taking all the fever out...

Excerpt: "My plain story is of two Kentish damsels, and runs from a home of flowers into regions where flowers are few and sickly, on to where the flowers which breathe sweet breath have been proved in mortal fire."(Goodreads)

This is one of Balzac's fantastic reality tales, not only resounding in the supernatural and the occult, in diabolical elixirs, eternal life or in a piece of the conscious body that returns to the life of a corpse. There is a sharp criticism against some ways of the living of the bourgeoisie and especially on the institution of the Catholic Church. (Goodreads)

Somerset Maugham was one of the world's most prolific and popular authors. He wrote with great facility and at one time had four plays running simultaneously in four different London theaters. The "merry-go-round" was his term for London at the turn of the century. His narrator, Miss Ley,...

Excerpt: "The town’s bell rang through the dark of the winter morning with queer little jolts and pauses, as if Wanton Wully Oliver, the ringer, had been jovial the night before. A blithe New-Year-time bell; a droll, daft, scatter-brained bell; it gave no horrid alarums, no solemn reminders that...

"The Permanent Husband" is a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in 1870. The plot revolves around the complicated relationship between Velchaninov and Trusotsky, the husband of his deceased former lover.

“Poor Folk” is the first novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845. Dostoyevsky was in financial difficulty because of his extravagant living and his developing gambling addiction. Varvara Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin are second cousins twice-removed...

"The Gambler" is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky about a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian general. The novella reflects Dostoyevsky's own addiction to roulette, which was in more ways than one the inspiration for the book: Dostoyevsky completed the novella under a strict deadline to pay off gambling debts.

"The House of the Dead" is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1861 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts and events organised by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoyevsky...

The story "Uncle's Dream" was written by Dostoyevsky after a five-year exile in Siberia and covers the tale of a provincial family desperate to better itself through a marriage of their daughter to a senile prince. The old man is hoodwinked and almost forced into a wedding that is expected to last...

The scenes of this story are laid in Egypt -- Abu-Tabah, the inscrutable Egyptian, who appears and disappears so mysteriously, is not so blood-curdling a villain as Fu Manchu, but his exploits possess the same breathless interest that characterised the activities of the yellow doctor. In the latter...