Nowadays The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the most famous and popular novel by an American writer Mark Twain (his real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Huckleberry Finn is a teenager who runs away from his alcoholic father that was constantly beating him. On the way, an escaped black slave...

On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1885 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. In the essay, Twain laments the dour ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's «most faithfull friend.» He concludes...

In «The Embroidered Towel» by Mikhail Bulgakov the young doctor arrives at his new post after a bone-jarring 24-hour wagon ride. He frets about how young he looks, and feels intimidated by the well-stocked pharmacy and medical library his predecessor has left behind. He also worries that he'll...

The Scarlet Letter – published first in 1850, was in its time considered as an innovative and at the same time scandalous novel, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This book was strongly disapproved by the fellow countrymen of the author and banned by the Russian tsars Now «The Scarlet Letter» is...

One Autumn Night by Maxim Gorky, April 1902. It’s a touching tale of a young man who finds himself without shelter or food on a cold “Autumn Night” in Moscow. The strong opening lines of the narrator set the stage nicely: “Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and inconvenient...

Desperate in his search of the secret of life, young Dr Victor Frankenstein attempts to construct and then bring to life a previously inanimate creature. He succeeds, yet immediately finds himself horrified and repulsed by the fruit of his long-lasting labors and, as a result, abandons the creature...

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel Tom Sawyer has several adventures, often...

December is a time for traditions and rituals, from hanging the familiar decorations and singing carols to making that family Christmas cake recipe or sharing a seasonal story. We’ve picked ten classic books with a festive theme that have timeless appeal and will give parents and grandparents the...

Her Lover is a short story by Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Debates three views. The first one is human loneliness, lack of communication, fragmented and lost identity in modern industrialized Russian society, which was actually a general view in the early decades of the twentieth century. Secondly,...

В сборник вошли русские народные сказки в редакции А. Н. Толстого. Автор предлагает своё прочтение сказок близко к тексту в стихотворном изложении. В конце каждой сказки автор делает вывод – о чём данная сказка. Детям младшего возраста должно понравиться, для родителей некоторые сказки могут...

Краткий курс равновесия. Научиться «равновесно» взвешивать жизненные ситуации, неприятные слова или поступки других людей, «выбивающие из колеи» замечания близких – это значит владеть своими эмоциями, управлять ими себе во благо, быть победителем в любой ситуации. Несбыточная мечта? – Конечно, нет!...

"The Reluctant Dragon" is an 1898 children's story by Kenneth Grahame, originally published as a chapter in his book Dream Days. It is Grahame's most famous short story, arguably better known than Dream Days itself or the related The Golden Age. It can be seen as a prototype to...

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social...

In «A Letter to a Hindu», Tolstoy argued that only through the principle of love could the Indian people free themselves from colonial British rule. These ideas ultimately proved to be successful in 1947 in the culmination of the Indian Independence Movement. In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath...

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. "Usually classed among the best examples of the novella", The Death of Ivan Ilyich...

The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals (Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger) in a pastoral version of Edwardian England....

A Russian Christmas Party by Leo Tolstoy is about a generous family on the brink of ruin whose mother pins their hopes for restoring their fortune on their son, Nicolas' marriage to a wealthy bride. Nicolas isn't cooperating, for he loves a poor girl named Sonia. Alas! How will they see...

The Tao Te Ching is a Taoist philosophical treatise. Lao Tzu, a great Ancient Chinese philosopher and teacher, is considered to be the author of this book. We owe this book to an unnamed guardian who kept safe the far western borders of a country, Zhou in the fifth century BC. The legend says that...

"God Sees the Truth, But Waits" is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he didn't commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles «The...