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Description The Night Land is science fiction ahead of its time. Published in 1912, the book introduces a 17th-century gentleman who loses his wife. He soon discovers himself somehow reanimated in Earth’s far future, millions of years from now, when the sun has died and the Earth has become a hellish waste. What remains of humanity lives in titanic mile-high pyramids surrounded by energy shields to protect them from the abhuman monsters lurking in the darkness. The human survivors soon receive

Description Shirley, published in 1849, was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel after Jane Eyre . Published under her pseudonym of “Currer Bell,” it differs in several respects from that earlier work. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person of Jane Eyre, and incorporates the themes of industrial change and the plight of unemployed workers. It also features strong pleas for the recognition of women’s intellect and right to their independence of

Description Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus. In these discourses, Epictetus explains how to gain peace-of-mind by

Description The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morris’s death in 1897 by Kelmscott Press—Morris’s own printing company—the novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw. After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witch’s clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both

Description Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union when the bride’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns from a failed marriage overseas. As Newland endeavors to help Countess Olenska be reinstated into the family’s good graces, his affections for her grow. Newland soon finds himself torn between his desire to conform to the society he knows and his new-found passion for the forbidden Countess. The Age of Innocence was originally published

Description Between 1906 and 1921 John Galsworthy published three novels chronicling the Forsyte family, a fictional upper-middle class family at the end of the Victorian era: The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let. In 1922 Galsworthy wrote two interconnecting short stories to bind the three novels together and published the whole as The Forsyte Saga. While the novels follow the Forsyte family at large, the action centers around Soames Forsyte—the scion of a nouveau-riche London tea