There is an island in the sky, and not everyone can see it. A harmless village boy living in the rural lands, Iolani Tori is afraid of heights and loud noises. Taken by surprise when he receives a mysterious letter addressed to him, Io finds out that the floating island wasn't a figment of his imagination after all. A...
Fanny Price is a young girl from a large and relatively poor family, who is taken from them at age 10 to be raised by her rich uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas, a baronet, and Lady Bertram, of Mansfield Park. She had previously lived with her own parents, Lieut. Price and his wife, Frances (Fanny), Lady Bertram's sister. Sh...
The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in L...
The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naively unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of the...
Intrigue, revenge, disastrous results. One of Shakespeare's masterpieces that deals with race, class, and the deadly sin of envy.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is the title of a collection of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare, which covers themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man; the last 28 to a woman. The sonnets are almost all constructed from three quatrains, which are four...
This book has been banned numerous times since original publication because of its content. "Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology."
"Macbeth" tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and parano...
This text has been banned in the United States for issues of obscenity. Also known as "One Thousand and One Nights", it is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. The Arabian Nights is the English language edition selected and edited by An...
Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, "Hamlet" dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. Cover by @vkbloodgood
Shakespeare's play was banned at one time because of adult language and references to mature themes and violence. "The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607."
This play has been banned because of characterization of racial stereotypes. The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. "In 16th century Venice, when a merchant must default on a large loan from an abused Jewish moneylender for a friend with r...
Othello (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603. It is based on the story Un Capitano Moro ("A Moorish Captain") by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565. The story revolves around its two central characters: Othello, a...
Gulliver's Travels is a famous satirical novel by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726. It was originally banned because of the politically sensitive references the author makes in the novel, but the work has also been censured for displays of madness and for being "wicked and obscene, blasphemous, filthy in word a...
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, t...
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle featuring his famous detective.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes...
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...
Emma Woodhouse, aged 20 at the start of the novel, is a young, beautiful, witty, and privileged woman in Regency England. She lives on the fictional estate of Hartfield in Surrey in the village of Highbury with her elderly widowed father, a hypochondriac who is excessively concerned for the health and safety of his lo...
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertf...
"Anna Karenina" is the tragedy of married aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing—something that prefigures her own later situation, though with less tolerance for h...
