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The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. The story revolves around a portrait of Dorian Gray painted by Basil Hallward, a friend of Dorian's and an artist infatuated with Dorian's beauty. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton and is soon enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life. Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and visually records every one of Dorian's sins.

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The picture of Dorian Gray

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket). It is science fiction, and involves both mysticism and reincarnation. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.

The Star Rover

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels. The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began with two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". The book describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and backwards in time, to construct an image of Clarissa's life and the inter-war social structure. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories.

Mrs Dalloway

The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London spent almost a year in the Yukon, and his observations form much of the material for the book. The story was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published later that year in book form. The book's great popularity and success made a reputation for London. As early as 1923, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.

The Call of the Wild

On Liberty is an essay by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Published in 1859, it applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. Mill suggests standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he considers prerequisite to the higher pleasures—the summum bonum of utilitarianism. Furthermore, Mill asserts that democratic ideals may result in the tyranny of the majority. Among the standards proposed are Mill's three basic liberties of individuals, his three legitimate objections to government intervention, and his two maxims regarding the relationship of the individual to society. On Liberty was a greatly influential and well-received work. Some classical liberals and libertarians have criticized it for its apparent discontinuity with Utilitarianism, and vagueness in defining the arena within which individuals can contest government infringements on their personal freedom of action. The ideas presented in On Liberty have remained the basis of much political thought. It has remained in print since its initial publication. A copy of On Liberty is passed to the president of the British Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office. Mill's marriage to Harriet Taylor Mill greatly influenced the concepts in On Liberty, which was published shortly after she died.

On Liberty

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no direct action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family, living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the highbrow Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. From Mr. Ramsay's seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf examines tensions and allegiances and shows that the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life could go on forever. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.

To The Lighthouse

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old friend Dr Henry Jekyll and a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and is considered to be a defining book of the gothic horror genre. The novella has also had a sizable impact on popular culture, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" being used in vernacular to refer to people with an outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil nature.

The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, telling a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action. The novel was originally serialised from 1881 to 1882 in the children's magazine Young Folks, under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co. It has since become one of the most often dramatized and adapted of all novels, in numerous media. Since its publication, Treasure Island has had significant influence on depictions of pirates in popular culture, including elements such as deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an "X", and one-legged seamen with parrots perched on their shoulders.

Treasure Island

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. The stories are set in a forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seeonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. The theme is echoed in the triumph of protagonists including Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal over their enemies, as well as Mowgli's. Another important theme is of law and freedom; the stories are not about animal behaviour, still less about the Darwinian struggle for survival, but about human archetypes in animal form. They teach respect for authority, obedience, and knowing one's place in society with "the law of the jungle", but the stories also illustrate the freedom to move between different worlds, such as when Mowgli moves between the jungle and the village. Critics have also noted the essential wildness and lawless energies in the stories, reflecting the irresponsible side of human nature.

The Jungle Book

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and economically important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition. Central to Conrad's work is the idea that there is little difference between "civilised people" and "savages." Heart of Darkness implicitly comments on imperialism and racism. The novella's setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his fascination for the prolific ivory trader Kurtz. Conrad draws parallels between London ("the greatest town on earth") and Africa as places of darkness.

Heart of Darkness

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is a novel by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1907. The story is set in London in 1886 and deals with Mr. Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy for an unnamed country (presumably Russia). The Secret Agent is one of Conrad's later political novels in which he moved away from his former tales of seafaring. The novel is dedicated to H. G. Wells and deals broadly with anarchism, espionage, and terrorism. It also deals with exploitation of the vulnerable in Verloc's relationship with his brother-in-law Stevie, who has an intellectual disability. Conrad’s gloomy portrait of London depicted in the novel was influenced by Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. The novel was modified as a stage play by Conrad himself and has since been adapted for film, TV, radio and opera.

The Secret Agent

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books (in the manner of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout. It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. The poem concerns the biblical story of the fall of man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Paradise Lost

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in The Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and then published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909. Eden represents writers' frustration with publishers. The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, which narrates an artist's formation and development. Eden differs from London in rejecting socialism, attacking it as "slave morality" and relying on Nietzschean individualism. Nevertheless, in the copy of the novel which he inscribed for Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."

Martin Eden

Lady Chatterley's Lover is the last novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Italy, and in 1929, in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable four-letter words.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. Though it was first published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing, rewriting, and expanding Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892. Six or nine individual editions of Leaves of Grass were produced, depending on how they are distinguished. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades. The first edition was a small book of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400. The collection of loosely connected poems represents the celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human's role in it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. Its poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.

Leaves of Grass

Sense and Sensibility is the first novel by the English author Jane Austen, published in 1811. On his deathbed, Henry Dashwood gets John, his son by his first wife, to promise to take care of his stepmother and half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret, from his inheritance. But Fanny, John's wife, persuades her husband not to support them financially, leaving them to survive on a greatly reduced income. Fanny’s brother Edward Ferrars comes on a visit, but when Elinor and he seem to be growing close, Fanny warns Mrs Dashwood that Edward is destined for higher things by their mother. Affronted by this, Mrs Dashwood decides to move her family to Barton Cottage in Devonshire, which has been offered her at a low rent by her second cousin, Sir John Middleton. Later, while dining with the Middletons at Barton Park, Marianne attracts the attention of a family friend, Colonel Brandon. However, he is aged thirty-five, which seems much too old to the romantic sensibility of sixteen-year-old Marianne.

Sense and sensibility

Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. that follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat. He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of "extraordinary" men. Once the deed is done, however, he finds himself wracked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical justifications lose all their power as he struggles with guilt and horror and is confronted with both internal and external consequences of his deed.

Crime and Punishment

The Iron Heel is a dystopian and political novel in the form of science fiction by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. The story proper begins with Avis Everhard, a daughter of a renowned physicist, John Cunningham, and future wife of socialist Ernest Everhard. At first, Avis Everhard does not agree with Ernest's assertion that the whole contemporary social system is based on exploitation of labour. She proceeds to investigate the conditions the workers live in, and those terrible conditions make her change her mind and accept Ernest's worldview. Similarly, Bishop Morehouse does not initially believe in the horrors described by Ernest but then becomes convinced of their truth and is confined to a madhouse because of his new views. The story covers the years 1912 through 1932 in which the Oligarchy (or "Iron Heel") arises in the United States. Japan conquers East Asia and creates its own empire, India gains independence, and Europe becomes socialist. Canada, Mexico, and Cuba form their own Oligarchies and are aligned with the U.S. (London remains silent as to events transpiring in the rest of the world.)

The Iron Heel

White Nights is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, originally published in 1848, early in the writer's career. Like many of Dostoevsky's stories, "White Nights" is told in the first person by a nameless narrator. The narrator is a young man living in Saint Petersburg who suffers from loneliness. He gets to know and falls in love with a young woman, but the love remains unrequited as the woman misses her lover, with whom she is finally reunited. Translated by Constance Garnett (1861-1946)

White nights

The Kreutzer Sonata is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. The novella was published in 1889, and was promptly censored by the Russian authorities. The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the "animal excesses" and "swinish connection" governing the relation between the sexes. During a train ride, Pozdnyshev overhears a conversation concerning marriage, divorce and love. When a woman argues that marriage should not be arranged but based on true love, he asks "what is love?" and points out that, if understood as an exclusive preference for one person, it often passes quickly. Convention dictates that two married people stay together, and initial love can quickly turn into hatred.

The Kreutzer Sonata

The Sorrows of Young Werther or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works. Most of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a story about a young man's extreme response to unrequited love, is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. These give an intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple ways. There he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who takes care of her siblings after the death of their mother. Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

War and Peace is a literary work by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the work mixes fictional narrative with chapters discussing history and philosophy. It is regarded, with Anna Karenina, as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement and remains an internationally praised classic of world literature. The book chronicles the French invasion of Russia and its aftermath during the Napoleonic era. It uses five interlocking narratives following different Russian aristocratic families to illustrate Napoleon's impact on Tsarist society. Tolstoy said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to classify War and Peace, saying it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." Large sections, especially the later chapters, are philosophical discussions rather than narrative.

War and Peace

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth published novel and his first major literary success. It was published on 23 November 1874. The novel is set in Thomas Hardy's Wessex in rural southwest England, as had been his earlier Under the Greenwood Tree. It deals in themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic, but often harsh, realities of a farming community in Victorian England. It describes the life and relationships of Bathsheba Everdene with her lonely neighbour William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the thriftless soldier Sergeant Troy.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Spoon River Anthology (1915) is a collection of short free verse poems by Edgar Lee Masters. The poems collectively narrate the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters's home town of Lewistown, Illinois. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manners of death. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create a candid tapestry of the community.

Spoon River Anthology

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, is the only complete novel by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaler called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole. The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on possible autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Pride and Prejudice is the second novel by English author Jane Austen, published in 1813. A novel of manners, it follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. Mr Bennet, owner of the Longbourn estate in Hertfordshire, has five daughters, but his property is entailed and can only be passed to a male heir. His wife also lacks an inheritance, so his family faces becoming poor upon his death. Thus, it is imperative that at least one of the daughters marry well to support the others, which is a primary motivation driving the plot.

Pride and prejudice

The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure novel by the French writer Alexandre Dumas. It was serialised from 1844 to 1846, then published in book form in 1846. Like many of his novels, it was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter, Auguste Maquet. It is regarded as a classic of both French and world literature. The novel is set in France, Italy, and islands in the Mediterranean Sea during the historical events of 1815–1839, the era of the Bourbon Restoration through the reign of Louis Philippe I. It begins on the day when Napoleon left his first island of exile, Elba, beginning the Hundred Days period of his return to power. The historical setting is fundamental to the narrative. The Count of Monte Cristo explores themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness. Edmond Dantès is a French nineteen-year-old first mate of a merchant ship. Arriving home from a voyage and set to marry his fiancée, Mercédès, he is falsely accused of treason. He is arrested and imprisoned without trial at the Château d'If, a grim island fortress off Marseille. A fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria, correctly deduces that Dantès's romantic rival Fernand Mondego, his envious crewmate Danglars and the double-dealing magistrate De Villefort are responsible for his imprisonment. Over the course of their long imprisonment, Faria educates the initially illiterate Dantès and, knowing himself close to death, inspires him to retrieve for himself a cache of treasure Faria had discovered. After Faria dies, Dantès escapes and finds the treasure. Posing as a member of nobility, he concocts the title Count of Monte Cristo. Fabulously wealthy, powerful and mysterious, he enters the world of Parisian high society in the 1830s focused on vengeance.

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