Otbebookpublishing: 2325 books

Excerpt: “A University college varies its facial expression about as frequently as The Sphinx and about as violently as a treacle-well. This remark specially applies between the hours of breakfast and luncheon. The courts, with their monastic cloisters and inviolable grassplots, lie basking in a...

The publication of A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) marked the debut of Robert Frost as a major talent and established him as the true poetic voice of New England. Four of his volumes would win the Pulitzer Prize before his death in 1963, and his body of work has since become an integral part of the American national heritage. (Goodreads)

Mountain Interval (1916), Robert Frost’s third published poetry collection describes a certain sense of the future as circumscribed by the choices of the past one has made. The collection’s first and most famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” in which Frost deploys the forked path in the woods...

"Kholstomer" is one of the most striking stories in Russian literature. It was started by Leo Tolstoy in 1863 and left unfinished until 1886, when it was reworked and published as "Kholstomer: The story prominently features the technique of defamiliarization by adopting the perspective of a horse to expose some of the irrationalities of human conventions. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

The narrator prefaces the story with his comments on a crushed, but still living thistle he finds in a field (a symbol for the main character), after which he begins to tell the story of Hadji Murat. Murat is a separatist guerrilla who falls out with his own commander and eventually sides with the...

The standard Russian text of "War and Peace" is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and an epilogue in two parts. "War and Peace" has a large cast of characters, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. Some are actual historical figures, such as Napoleon and Alexander I. While the...

This is a collection of Kai Lung's entertaining tales, told professionally in the market places as he travelled about; told sometimes to occupy and divert the minds of his enemies when they were intent on torturing him. (Goodreads)

The story was maybe better than the original "Tartarin of Tarascon". As usual, Tartarin doesn't have a clue what's happening in the world around him, falls pathetically in love, and bumbles through. (Goodreads)

The Provençal town of Tarascon is so enthusiastic about hunting that no game lives anywhere near it, and its inhabitants resort to telling hunting stories and throwing their own caps in the air to shoot at them. Tartarin, a plump middle-aged man, is the chief "cap-hunter", but following his enthusiastic...

(Excerpt): “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours.""

Vikram and the Vampire, translated and adapted by Sir Richard Burton, is a group of tales told by a baital (not really a vampire but a kind of spirit who can inhabit dead bodies) to King Vikram (described by Burton as the King Arthur of India). The stories are somewhat in the style of the tales of the Arabian Nights. (Goodreads)

(Excerpt): "Western Africa was the first field that supplied the precious metal to mediaeval Europe. The French claim to have imported it from Elmina as early as A.D. 1382. In 1442 Gonçales Baldeza returned from his second voyage to the regions about Bojador, bringing with him the first gold....

Chock full of ethnographical information about the Muslims of Somalia, Richard Burton's "First Footsteps in Africa" is a great look at a white man's first forays into that area of the continent. (Goodreads)

‘The genius of Eastern nations,’ says an established and respectable authority, ‘was, from the earliest times, much turned towards invention and the love of fiction. The Indians, the Persians, and the Arabians, were all famous for their fables. Amongst the ancient Greeks we hear of the Ionian...