Rastro Books: 200 books

"The Forerunner" is a collection of poems and short stories that will leave you laughing, crying, and swimming in irony. It brings you into people's minds and emotions flawlessly to provide insights to life that you would never have imagined. Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese-American...

“My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.” ―...

In his book on William Blake, Chesterton says, “We all wake up on a battlefield.” In 1915, when he emerged from his coma-like state after his physical collapse several months earlier, Chesterton, in effect, did wake up on a battlefield. England was in the midst of the Great War with Germany. Though...

'Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is', is the last original book written by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche before his final years of insanity that lasted until his death in 1900. It was written in 1888 and was not published until 1908. According to one of Nietzsche's most prominent English translators,...

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history, and it has never been out of print.

Mr. Justice Raffles is a 1909 novel written by E.W. Hornung. It featured his popular character A. J. Raffles a well-known cricketer and gentleman thief. It was the fourth and last in his four Raffles books which had begun with The Amateur Cracksman in 1899. Unlike the three previous works, the book...

The Common Reader, collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932. Most of the essays appeared originally in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Athenæum, New Statesman, Life and Letters, Dial, Vogue, and The Yale...

"The visitor looked around him. There were no desks; no pillars of drawers; no japanned-metal boxes that held documents; no cupboards; no books; no pictures..." (Excerpt) Robert Barr (1849 –1912) was a Scottish-Canadian short story writer and novelist. Barr wrote fiction in an episode-like...

Biography of the poet, polemicist and English man of letters Joh Milton, written by Mark Pattison. Mark Pattison (1813 – 1884) was an English author and a Church of England priest. He served as Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford.

A biography of Edmund Burke written by John Morley. Edmund Burke ( 1729 – 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman born in Dublin, as well as an author, orator, political theorist and philosopher, who after moving to London in 1750 served as a member of parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in...

A tribute from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thoreau. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two famous Transcendentalists in the mid-1800’s.

Biography of Voltaire by John Morley. John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, (1838 – 1923), was a British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor. Morley was a Trustee of the British Museum from 1894 to 1921, Honorary Professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy of...

"Nature" is an essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and published in 1836. In the essay Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Transcendentalism suggests that the divine, or God, suffuses nature, and...

Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespeareanliterary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject. In the book, Twain expounds the view that Shakespeare...