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This brilliant satirical novel, tracing the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex, has continued in popularity since its original publication in 1903. Every generation finds in The Way of All Flesh a reaffirmation of youth's rightful struggle against the tyranny of harsh parents and its admirable will for freedom of personal expression.

Although William Morris is known primarily as a designer, he was also a writer of poetry and prose. The novel News from Nowhere (subtitled An Epoch of Rest Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance) is his best-known prose work and describes a humane socialist future as experienced by William Guest, who is transplanted there from the 19th century. Set in London and Oxfordshire, the novel takes place in 2090, over a century after a revolutionary upheaval. It remains a distinctive literary contribution to the concept of the utopian ideal.

Fritz Leiber was one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of the mid-twentieth century. One of his frequent themes was "technology gone wrong." In "The Creature from Cleveland Depths", a writer and his wife refuse to move below-ground after the cold-war gets hot. However, he still serves as a consultant for a below-ground company seeking to come up with new "gadgets." His latest product idea is called "The Tickler," a device that is with you at all times to remind you of appointments and "suggests" little motivations to improve efficiency.

"The Coming Race" (1871) is a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It centers on a young, independent, unnamed, wealthy traveler (the narrator), who visits a friend, a mining engineer. They explore a natural chasm in a mine. The narrator reaches the bottom of the chasm safely, but the rope breaks and his friend is killed. The narrator finds his way into a subterranean world occupied by beings who seem to resemble angels. He befriends the first being he meets, who guides him around a city that is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian architecture.

Young Oxford tutor Theodore Gumbril has become thoroughly dismayed by the formality of college life and the staid British institutions of learning. An impetuous need for celebration, even rebellion, possesses him. He and his bohemian companions embark on wild and daring "bacchanalian" adventures that steer them resolutely away from stifling conventions of behavior. Antic Hay, first published in 1923, is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a 'novel of ideas' involving conversations which disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London's post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best -- a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere -- a novel that's always charged with excitement.

On Caprona, the Land that Time Forgot, all of the world's savage past still lives. Here are dinosaurs and flying reptiles, here are the most primitive of cavemen and the last of the Bronze Age barbarians. But there is one more secret that the claws and fangs and sharp-edged spears guard most of all. This is the story of the man who tried to find that final secret. When Bradley the adventurer dares to cross the last terrible barrier to the heart of Caprona, he enters a world of wonder, terror and danger beyond the imagination of any man - except the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In uncharted Caprona, a continent lost from the map of the Earth, where Time has stopped and all primeval creatures of long-gone ages still prowl, Bowen Tyler is lost. To find Tyler, Thomas Billings travels across the world to Caprona, where even stranger mysteries await him, and a barbaric civilization hides, torn between the impassable jungle on one side and an unknown menace on the other. The People that Time Forgot is an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in his most exciting tradition.

Brought to you by Penguin. Created by an Irish clergyman, Melmoth is one of the most fiendish characters in literature. In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries is pieced together through those who have been...

In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.

Bowen Tyler, his reluctant crew and a blonde heroine, find themselves marooned in a nightmare world of mighty dinosaurs and bestial apemen who kill on sight. This is the lost continent of Caspak, a hot, dark and mysterious prehistoric world located somewhere in the icy waters of the Antarctic. Their only hope of rescue is a note in a bottle flung into the sea. The survivors persist and penetrate the heart of Caspak to find the incredible secret that claws, fangs and spears have guarded since the beginning of time.

The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty.

Amid the dizzying rides, tantalizing games of chance, and fanciful attractions of a state fair, two teenage sweethearts on the cusp of life and love's pleasures find their way to a shadowy carnival tent brimming with curiosities. There, from the bizarre and enthralling Gypsy Mummy, a mechanized merchant of dreams and prognosticator of tomorrows, the young couple learns what fate promises for them. But fate, for Odd Thomas and Stormy Llewellyn, is something altogether different: full of dark corners, sharp edges, and things no seer or soothsayer could ever anticipate.

Considered one of the finest historical works in the English language, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is lauded for its graceful, elegant prose style as much as for its epic scope. Remarkably accurate for its day, Gibbon's treatise holds a high place in the history of literature and remains an enduring subject of study.

Gibbon's monumental work traces the history of more than 13 centuries, covering the great events as well as the general historical progression. This first volume covers A.D. 180 to A.D. 395, which includes the establishment of Christianity and the Crusades.

Written by H.G. Wells, the great visionary author, this legendary novel is both timeless and thought provoking. Listeners will thrill to this chilling masterpiece as man boldly takes evolution into his own hands for the first time. Dr. Moreau, a scientist expelled from his homeland for his cruel experiments, continues his transplantations on a small South Pacific island, creating hideous creatures with manlike intelligence.

Herman Melville’s tale of corporate discontent, Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells the story of a quiet, hardworking legal copyist who works in an office in the Wall Street area of New York City. The business where he works handles the official financial paperwork of wealthy men. One day, Bartleby’s employer requests he proofread one of the documents he has copied. Bartleby declines the assignment with the inscrutable “I would prefer not,” the first of what will become many refusals.