Dostoevsky was still a student when he started writing Poor Folk. His parents were very hard-working, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. This...

Once upon a time there was an old cat, called Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, who was an anxious parent. She used to lose her kittens continually, and whenever they were lost they were...

Emma Woodhouse, aged 20 at the start of the novel, is a young is a young, beautiful, witty, and privileged woman in Regency England. As the novel opens, Emma has just attended the...

Gulliver’s adventure in Lilliput begins when he wakes after his shipwreck to find himself bound by innumerable tiny threads and addressed by tiny captors who are in awe of...

A young wealthy gentleman looses everything in speculation and is forced into a humble life of a grocer. He finds his circumstances tragic at first and keeps his fate secret from...

Between five and six in the evening. A fairly well-known man of learning is sitting in his study nervously biting his nails. 'It's positively revolting,' he says, continually...

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel following life of a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. The unnamed narrator turns to a series of...

Jane Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey—published posthumously in 1818—tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and...

The story of Ivan the Fool and his two brothers Simon the Warrior and Taras the Pot-Bellied, and of his deaf and dumb sister, and the old Devil and three little Devilkins.

In September of 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson, then in his mid-thirties, moved with his family to Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England, where in the brief span of...