In 1811, Jane Austen's first published work, Sense and Sensibility," " marked the debut of England's premier novelist of manners. Believing that "3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on," she created a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly. Romantic walks through lush Devonshire and genteel dinner parties at a stately manor draw two pretty sisters into the schemes and manipulations of landed gentry determined to marry...

Plotting against the King of France, Aramis bribes his way into the Bastille, where a certain prisoner has been entombed for eight long years, and only Aramis knows this man's secret identity--a dangerous revelation that will topple the King from his throne.

"An American frigate tracks down a ship-sinking submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo." *** "The voyage of the 'Nautilus' permitted Verne to describe the wonders of an undersea world almost totally unknown to the general public of the period. Indebted to literary tradition for his Atlantis, he made his major innovation in having the submarine completely powered by electricity, although the interest in electrical forces goes back to Poe...

In 1751 in Scotland, cheated out of his inheritance by a greedy uncle who has him kidnapped and put on a ship to the Carolinas, seventeen-year-old David Balfour escapes to the Highlands with the help of the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart and there encounters further danger and intrigue as he attempts to clear his name and regain his property.

While Hank Morgan, Twain's time-displaced Yankee traveller, keeps up a steady stream of flippancies, founding the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, and organizing a game of baseball between armour-clad knights, he also keeps up a steady commentary on the social mores of King Arthur's court, criticizing the hereditary social classes and state church still strong in the Victorian England of Twain's own day, and championing...

Gulliver's strange adventures in some of the most unusual lands ever imagined have made this one of the rare classics with an enduring and wide-ranging appeal to all ages. Gulliver's bad luck at sea not only gets him shipwrecked and castaway, but repeatedly throws him into strange societies of even stranger people. Readers are likely aware of Gulliver's experiences in Lilliput, where he meets a kingdom of six-inch-tall people with a set of prejudices...

For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...

After being transported by a cyclone to the land of Oz, Dorothy and her dog are befriended by a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion, who accompany her to the Emerald City to look for a wizard who can help Dorothy return home to Kansas.

A classic novel of the future follows the Time Traveller as he hurtles one million years into the future and encounters a world populated by two distinct races, the childlike Eloi and the disgusting Morlocks who prey on the Eloi.

H.G. Wells' "scientific romance," published first in serial form and then as a book in 1898, attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast "Invasion from Mars" by Orson Welles. It was also made into an early 1950s science fiction adventure movie. Stover (emeritus, Illinois Institute of Technology) describes Wells' story as "a prophecy of startling originality foreseeing the coming of totalitarianism...