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Also known as "A Political History of the Devil" This book is divided into two parts: first, the history of the devil from his fall from heaven up to the time the book was written and second about his private conduct. Partly funny, partly religious, and partly critical of what was written before, the book is purely delightful to read. This is a lesser known work by the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. ( Stav Nisser.)

In a rundown farmhouse near isolated, rural Dunwich, a bizarre family conjures and nurtures an evil entity from another realm, with the purpose of destroying the world and delivering it to ancient gods to rule, and only an aged university librarian can stop them. The Dunwich Horror was first published in 1929 in Weird Tales. (Summary by Mark Nelson)

Strauss was an early pioneer in the ongoing 'Quest of the Historical Jesus' movement, and his Life of Jesus is one of the few landmarks in the field. The first edition of Strauss' book was published in Germany in 1835, when he was only 27 years old. He focused his attention on battling two theological fronts which were current at the time - the biblical Literalists who believed the miracles in the Gospels were to be taken as literal history, and the Rationalists, who believed that the Gospel miracles were true but could be explained by natural and rational causes. Strauss rejected both camps ...

H. P. Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror fiction. His major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. This collection contains 24 Lovecraft works that are in the public domain. You'll find more versions of these stories throughout LibriVox's short story collections and short horror story collections. (adapted from Wikipedia)

Charlotte Brontë was a British author, the eldest of the three famous Brontë sisters who have become standards of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, one of the greatest classics of all time. Just two years after Charlotte's death, her friend Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her biography. Want to know more about Charlotte Brontë? If you do, please read this biography. Summary by Stav Nisser. A recording of Volume 2 of this work is also available.

The novel is a fictionalized account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague struck the city of London. The book is told roughly chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings.

The full title of the novel is Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress Or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess de Wintselsheim. The novel concerns the story of an unnamed "fallen woman", the second time Defoe created such a character (the first was a similar female character in Moll Flanders). In Roxana, a woman who takes on various pseudonyms, including "Roxana," describes her fall from wealth thanks to abandonment by a "fool" of a husband and movement into prostitution upon his abandonment. Roxana moves up and down through the ...

Twenty years ago, now, I attempted (but was not especially successful in the task) to establish upon the personal knowledge that my own residence as a pupil in the historical Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle, at Bruxelles gave me of the facts of Charlotte Brontë's relationships to Monsieur and Madame Heger, right impressions about the experiences and emotions she underwent between 1842 and 1846, and that supply the key and clue to the right interpretation of her genius. Every opinion I then ventured to state, not upon the authority of any special power of divination or of psychological ...

Don Quixote is an early novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story in the character of the Morisco historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, whom he claims to have hired to translate the story from an Arabic manuscript he found in Toledo's bedraggled old Jewish quarter. The protagonist, Alonso Quixano, is a minor landowner who has read so many stories of chivalry that he descends into fantasy and becomes convinced he is a knight errant. Together with his companion Sancho Panza, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha sets out in ...

The book examines the role of education in the lives of the characters and how such education and study has affected the characters. Rosamond Vincy's finishing school education is a foil to Dorothea Brooke's religiously-motivated quest for knowledge. Rosamond initially admires Lydgate for his exotic education, and his intellect. A similar dynamic is present in Dorothea and Casaubon's relationship, with Dorothea revering her new husband's intellect and eloquence. In both cases, however, the young wives' expectations of their husbands intellects are not reflected in reality. Despite extreme ...

De Profundis (traduzione dal latino: Dal profondo o Dalle profondità) è una lunga lettera che Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) scrisse nel 1897, durante la sua reclusione al carcere di Reading, a "Bosie", il suo amante Lord Alfred Douglas, dopo essere stato condannato per "gross indecency", il reato che criminalizzava l'attività sessuale tra maschi adulti.Nella prima metà, Wilde racconta la precedente relazione e lo stravagante stile di vita intercorso tra loro due, che lo condusse alla totale rovina e all'incarcerazione. Egli incolpa di ciò sia la vanità del giovane aristocratico che la propria ...

Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony from the time of the Parthian War to Cleopatra's suicide. The major antagonist is Octavius Caesar, one of Antony's fellow triumviri and the future first emperor of Rome. The tragedy is a Roman play characterized by swift, panoramic shifts in geographical locations and in registers,...

A fairy tale with real life consequences, All's Well That Ends Well concerns a poor physician's daughter who goes to Paris to heal the King and asks of him a husband; not himself, but the Count Rousillon, in whose house her good father had lived. He weds her but does not bed her, flees to the wars where he is followed by his wife in a pilgrimage of which he is the object. How she uses his lust for a virtuous young woman to trick him into bedding her and giving her a child is but the real life drama to which, or so it would appear, a good woman is forced to commit herself to get herself a ...

"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," published complete in this issue, is an utterly amazing novelette. It is much more than a mere piece of fiction, for it so far transcends human experiences, and even the wildest dreams of human beings, that the ideas and thoughts set forth in the tale are titanic. One searches the dictionaries in vain for words to describe this brilliant and astounding tale, which for sheer imaginative daring goes beyond anything ever printed before. It is the joint product of two of your most popular authors. - Summary by Weird Tales, July 1934

A well-to-do French farm family is destroyed by a flood. The story, thrilling to the very end, is told from the point of view of the family's 70-year-old patriarch. The story speaks of the helplessness of mankind in the face of the forces of nature. (Summary by Karen Merline)

La vida transcurre plácida en un pequeño pueblo francés donde el tio Merlier gestiona hábilmente su molino. Los preparativos para el enlace entre su hija Francisca y el joven Domingo se verán interrumpidos por la llegada de un batallón francés que decide atrincherarse en el molino para frenar el avance de las tropas prusianas. Cuento largo en el que Zola plasma los dilemas y sufrimientos que la población civil tiene que soportar en medio de una guerra, en este caso un intrascendente episodio del conflicto franco-prusiano. (Introducción por Epachuko)

In this essay Lovecraft traces the history of hair-raising fictional stories with a focus on things that go bump in the night, starting with the examples from the Antiquity and ending with a detailed discussion of the works of his contemporaries. - Summary by Piotr Nater This recording was originally published on Legamus.eu and was later released on Librivox when US copyright permitted

"Herbert West—Reanimator" is a story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft that was first serialized in February through July 1922 in the amateur publication Home Brew. The story was the basis of the 1985 horror film Re-Animator and its sequels, in addition to numerous other adaptations in various media. You want zombies? Listen to this because Lovecraft was one of the very first and he got zombies right: scary, evil, implacable and out to get you. (Summary by Phil Chenevert)

Unspeakable monstrousness overhung the crumbling, stench-cursed town of Innsmouth... and folks there had somehow got out of the idea of dying... - Summary by Weird Tales, January 1942

El ensueño es una obra que forma parte de la serie de veinte novelas que Zola tituló “Les Rougon- Macquart”. Entre “La tierra y La bestia humana” surge “Le rêve” en ella nos cuenta una enternecedora historia de amor entre una niña huérfana y un noble. ( Montse González)