Sheba Blake

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1595/96. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's...

A Daughter of the Snows is Jack London's first novel. Set in the Yukon, it tells the story of Frona Welse, "a Stanford graduate and physical Valkyrie" who takes to the trail after upsetting her wealthy father's community by her forthright manner and befriending the town's prostitute. She is also torn between love for two suitors: Gregory St Vincent, a local man, who turns out to be cowardly and treacherous, and Vance Corliss, a Yale-trained mining...

A Romance of Wastdale is a novel by the British writer A.E.W. Mason. In 1921, it was turned into a film of the same name directed by Maurice Elvey and made by Stoll Pictures, Britain's biggest studio of the silent era. A.E.W. Mason (7 May 1865 — 22 November 1948) was an English author and politician. He is best remembered for his 1902 novel of courage and cowardice in wartime, The Four Feathers and is also known as the creator of Inspector Hanaud,...

Collected Works of American author Edgar Allan Poe include many poems, short stories, and one novel. His fiction spans multiple genres, including horror fiction, adventure, science fiction, and detective fiction, a genre he is credited with inventing. These works are generally considered part of the Dark romanticism movement, a literary reaction to Transcendentalism. Poe's writing reflects his literary theories: he disagreed with didacticism and...

A Princess of Mars is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. It was first serialized in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine from February—July, 1912. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th-century pulp fiction. It is also a seminal instance of the planetary romance, a subgenre of science fantasy that became highly popular in the decades following its publication....

The journalistic production in "An Englishman Looks at the World" reflects Wells's turn from novel-writing to journalism, which began in the years before the outbreak of the Great War. He was more and more frequently invited to write articles for popular periodicals like the Daily Mail. Included in the collection are an account of "My First Flight," a long essay entitled "The Great State" that prefigured many of the themes of The Outline of History,...

Harvey Cheyne was fifteen years old, the son of an American business tycoon and spoiled by his parents. But then he was washed overboard from a transatlantic steamship and rescued by fishermen, and neither Harvey, nor his affluence could persuade them to take him ashore. However, the Captain of the WE'RE HERE, Disko Troop, took him on as a member of the crew until they returned to port. Harvey befriended the captain's son, Dan, with whom he had many...

Witty and caustic, Candide has ranked as one of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759. In the story of the trials and travails of the youthful Candide, his mentor Dr. Pangloss, and a host of other characters, Voltaire mercilessly satirizes and exposes romance, science, philosophy, religion, and government. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The winter's tale is a play in five acts by William Shakespeare, originally produced in 1610-11 with a plot based on the play Pandosto (1588) by Robert Greene. One of Shakespeare's final plays, it is a romantic comedy with elements of tragedy. Leontes, the jealous king of Sicilia, mistakenly believes that his faithful wife Hermione is having an affair with his old friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. Various mayhem ensues, after which the three...

What a stunning discovery: an old, coded note that actually contains directions for reaching the Earth's very core! And once he finds it, renowned geologist Professor Liedenbrock can't resist setting out with his 16-year-old nephew to go where only one man has gone before. Jules Verne takes young readers on one of the most incredible journeys ever imagined, from Iceland's frozen tundra far down into fantastic underground prehistoric worlds and back...