This is a guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed.

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826.

H. G. Wells, in his 1906 In the Days of the Comet uses the vapors of a comet to trigger a deep and lasting change in humanity's perspective on themselves and the world.

Charlotte Bronte's Villette is the gothic tale of Lucy Snowe, who travels to the fictional town of Villette in Belgium to teach at a girl's school.

H. G. Wells' comic 1910 novel, The History of Mr. Polly, stars Alfred Polly, a timid man who is more successful at daydreaming than working in the local draper's shops.

One of H. G. Wells' first ventures outside of the science fiction realm, the novel Love and Mr. Lewisham was published in the year 1900.

Catherine, a seventeen year old girl, travels with her family to Bath and makes many new acquaintance, including two young men who pursue her.

The niece of James Fenimore Cooper and a good friend and correspondent of Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson was a well known short story writer in the later part of the 19th century.

The Turn of the Screw is s ghostly Gothic tale by Henry James.

Lady Susan is the only full novel written by Jane Austen that was not published in her lifetime.

Washington Square by Henry James is the story of the gentle, dull Catherine Sloper who falls for the ambivalent Morris Townsend, who her father believes is a fortune hunter.

The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.

Student! Your life is your own. You have only yourself to thank for what you are, have been and will be.

Creative Unity is a collection of essays from Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 became Asia's first recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Death consists in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing.

In Jack London's 1910 story Before Adam a young boy dreams that he is living the life of an early hominid, giving human evolution an early and entertaining portrayal.

Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf became an instant bestseller on its release in 1904.

Knut Hamsun's novel The Growth of the Soil won the Norwegian writer a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

Christine is brought up by her itinerant musician father, whose death she mourns endlessly.

Thomas Hardy (1840 1928) was a naturalist and writer, whose fiction sits on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and is filled with an imminent sense of nostalgia for the coming transformation of the British countryside.