Classic Books

In this most paradoxical of all novels, Destiny takes revenge on the ungrateful cousin Betty. It is a tale of unfaithfulness, deception, betrayal, lust, and hatred, set in nineteenth century Paris, a world of high finance and politics. The Hulots are a wealthy family, and Hortense — Betty’s cousin — has made a fortunate marriage . . . to Betty’s beloved. Hortense is good to her cousin, bringing her to live with them in a beautiful house. The Hulots are good to her, but Betty wants only revenge. Betty tries with all her wiles to destroy the family. Certainly she has many opportunities to do it, because the Hulots are flawed, and intrigue is Betty’s favorite sport, intrigue with meanness and cruelty. But no good comes from bad deeds, and life, always ironic, will not allow Betty’s deeds to accomplish her revenge.

He was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of ez’ee/ofs than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more comparatively harmless satisfactions. His connoisseurship has, of course, been questioned one connoisseur would be nothing if he did not question the competence of another, if not of all others. It seems certain that Balzac frequently bought things for what they were not and probable that his own acquisitions went, in his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb described inimitably.

First published in the year 1918, the present book ‘Creating Capital’ by Frederick L. Lipman is an essay on moral values of thrift. This is a broad discussion of money-making in its moral aspects, an examination of its prevalence as an aim among people generally and the moral standards which obtain among those who consciously seek to make money.

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us—an idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings—that is to say, in making geometricians.

A spirited guide to mental and business success, this inspirational book was written by the founder of the Religious Science movement. A simple, direct manual for understanding the nature of the universe and the mind’s creative power, this classic explains how “right thinking” can help achieve independence and prosperity.

It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction. It has produced its Gissing without producing its Scott. Everything that is most sad and scientific, everything that is most grim and analytical, everything that can truly be called most modern, everything that can without unreasonableness be called most morbid, comes from these fresh and untried and unexhausted nationalities. Out of these infant peoples come the oldest voices of the earth.

This contradiction, like many other contradictions, is one which ought first of all to be registered as a mere fact; long before we attempt to explain why things contradict themselves, we ought, if we are honest men and good critics, to register the preliminary truth that things do contradict themselves. In this case, as I say, there are many possible and suggestive explanations. It may be, to take an example, that our modern Europe is so exhausted that even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is difficult for every one except the most robust.

Pausing momentarily on the midway staircase-landing, which
has prominent place between the second and third stories of the
Bradstreet establishment at 279, 281 and 283 Broadway, New York,
an undefined sensation, which attains almost to inspiration, comes to
the hand that traces these lines as the eye falls upon the army of
busy workers below—an inspiration creating an intense desire to
learn, if possible, what battle of life that army is engaged in fighting
so earnestly—whether the cause in which its daily engagements are
being made is a just or an unjust, a noble or an ignoble, one; whether
engendered in generous or selfish-minded motives, and also whether
the day is being lost or won by the serried ranks of men and women
there drawn up in battle array.

Surely it is sheer neglect of opportunity offered by an official position if, being an editor, one has no prefatory word to say of the work that one is editing. It is said that that which is good requires no praise, but it is a saying that is contradicted at every turn—or else all that is advertised must be very bad. While it is our firm belief that the merits of the present book—The Country Life Cricket Book—are many and various (it would be an insult to the able heads of the different departments into which the great subject is herein divided to think otherwise), we believe also that the book has one very special and even unique merit. We believe, and are very sure, that there has never before been given to the public any such collection of interesting old prints illustrative of England’s national game as appear in the present volume. It is due to the kind generosity of the Marylebone Cricket Club, as well as of divers private persons, that we are able to illustrate the book in this exceptional way; and we (that is to say, all who are concerned in the production) beg to take the opportunity of giving most cordial thanks to those who have given this invaluable help, and so greatly assisted in making the book not only attractive, but also original in its attraction.

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.”

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.

In the year 1906 the Young Men’s Christian Association of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, rejected the application of an actor for membership on the ground that one of his profession could not be a moral person. Viewing the action as a slur cast on the whole theatrical profession, Mr. Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, offered to give one thousand dollars to charity if it could be shown that actors, man for man, were not as good as ministers of the gospel. No champion of the cloth appearing to claim Mr. Dixey’s money on that proposition, he went further and offered another thousand dollars if there could not be found a minister in jail for every state in the Union.

First published in the year 1942, ‘Cross Creek’ was written by a twentieth century American novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. “Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon. We are five white families; “Old Boss” Brice, the Glissons, the Mackays and the Bernie Basses; and two colored families, Henry Woodward and the Mickenses. People in Island Grove consider us just a little biggety and more than a little queer. Black Kate and I between us once misplaced some household object, quite unreasonably.” -Preface

First published in the year 1831, the present humorous fictional novel ‘Crotchet Castle’ was the sixth novel by the famous English author Thomas Love Peacock. In this novel, Peacock assembles a group of eccentrics, each with a single monomaniacal obsession, and derives humour and social satire from their various interactions and conversations.

Crucial Instances’ is renowned writer Edith Wharton’s short story collection. It was first published in the year 1901. The stories narrated here are written in the classic Victorian style.

First published in the year 1597, the present book ‘Daemonologie’ is originally a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient Black magic written by King of England James I.

Traveling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social conventions in the way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of them? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behavior leaves her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of an enigmatic and independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

In Damaged Goods the horrors of venereal disease are explored in this social drama. The story centers on a young couple whose future is endangered when the husband makes a terrible mistake.Novelized version of the Great Play, Les Avaries, with the approval of the author Eugene Brieux. American novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writer, whose works reflect socialistic views.

The present book ‘Dangerous Days’ was written by Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was first published in the year 1919. Set on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, this complex, multi-generational family drama focuses on an ambitious businessman, Clayton Spencer, who is increasingly estranged from his wife and rebellious son, Graham.

First published in the year 1876, the present book ‘Daniel Deronda’ was written by one of the foremost novelists and social critic of the Victorian era George Eliot. It was the last novel she completed and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her day. The work’s mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with its sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and Kabbalistic ideas, has made it the controversial final statement of one of the most renowned of Victorian novelists.

On Longus, there is nothing to say. On his book and on Amyot’s translation, the Translator’s Preface gives all the desirable information.

It was in 1807 that Paul-Louis Courier discovered in the Laurentian Library, in Florence, a manuscript of the Pastorales de Longus containing a rather long passage hitherto unknown. Later, he transcribed this fragment, and in 1810 he had a complete edition of the Greek text printed in Rome, which was printed at only fifty-two copies. The same year, he had sixty copies of Amyot’s version printed in Florence, in which he had introduced a translation [Pg 6]of the newly discovered fragment, made by him in the style of the first translator.

In 1813, he published at Firmin Didot a “complete translation according to the Greek text of the best manuscripts”. In this translation he had preserved as much as Amyot’s.

David Copperfield, is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens. The novel’s full title is, The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery.

Among the records of the English state trials are to be found many strange stories, which would, as the phrase is, make the fortune of a modern novelist. But there are also numerous cases, not less stimulating to imagination and curiosity, which never attained more than local notoriety, of which the law was able to take but comparatively small cognizance, although they became subjects of much unofficial discussion and mystification. Among these cases none, perhaps, is better worth recalling than that of David Poindexter. It will be my aim here to tell the tale as simply and briefly as possible—to repeat it, indeed, very much as it came to my ears while living, several years ago, near the scene in which its events took place. There is a temptation to amplify it, and to give it a more recent date and a different setting; but (other considerations aside) the story might lose in force and weight more than it would thereby gain in artistic balance and smoothness.

The present book titled ‘Dead Giveaway’ was written by Randall Garrett. It was “produced from Astounding Science Fiction August 1959.”

The very beginning of this affair, which involved me, before I was aware of it, in as much villainy and wickedness as ever man heard of, was, of course, that spring evening, now ten years ago, whereon I looked out of my mother’s front parlour window in the main street of Berwick-upon-Tweed and saw, standing right before the house, a man who had a black patch over his left eye, an old plaid thrown loosely round his shoulders, and in his right hand a stout stick and an old-fashioned carpet-bag. He caught sight of me as I caught sight of him, and he stirred, and made at once for our door.

First published in the year 1842, Russian writer-activist Nikolai Gogol’s book ‘Dead Souls’ was one of the most appreciated satirical works of the 19th century Russian literature. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the flaws and faults of the Russian mentality and character.