The World Set Free

This book represents a great historical artifact of the anti-masonic movement of the 19th Century. While supposed detailed descriptions of Masonic ritual abound on the internet today, at the time this tell-all book was meant to shock a nation where many influential politicians belonged to the Masonic Fraternity. William Morgan paid a high price for publishing this book after being turned away from membership in a Masonic Lodge. His infamous murder sparked not only an anti-masonic movement, but also an anti-masonic political party.

This book is not about some secret conspiracy to run the World, as some say is the Masonic purpose.

Instead, it is a detailed description of the meeting rituals and qualifications to join and advance in the Masonic orders. What is revealed is a religious (primarily Protestant Christian) fraternity whose secretism comes from the times of the Crusades when being a Christian could be a death sentence.

The Old Curiosity Shop is the story of Little Nell, a beautiful and virtuous young girl who lives with her grandfather in his shop of curiosities. Her only friend is Kit, an honest young lad who works at the shop, and whom she is teaching to write. Unbeknownst to Nell, her grandfather is obsessed with their precarious financial position, trying to make Nell a good inheritance by winning at cards. He keeps these nocturnal activities a secret but borrows heavily from the evil Quilp. Losing everything, the grandfather and Nell are forced to go on the run.

Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, The Mysterious Island is considered by many to be Jules Verne’s masterpiece. Here is the enthralling tale of five men and a dog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island of bewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncover the island’s secret.

A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing his new character of Sherlock Holmes, who later became one of the most famous literary detective characters. He wrote the story in 1886, and it was published the next year. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes to his sidekick Doctor Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
The story, and its main character, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Only 11 complete copies of Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887 are known to exist now and they have considerable value. Although Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon. The novel was followed by The Sign of the Four, published in 1890. A Study in Scarlet was the first work of fiction to incorporate the magnifying glass as an investigative tool.

FEATURES:
* Author Biography
* Interactive Table of Contents
* Free Audiobook Download

"NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND"  - Popular Classic Novels included Free AudioBook Links, NEW illustrations, Clickable Table of Contents for both the list of included books and their respective chapters.The text and chapters are perfectly set up to match the layout and feel of a physical copy, rather than being haphazardly thrown together for a quick release.

Notes from Underground (Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapiski iz podpol'ya) (also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881),[b] sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer and essayist. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russia. Although he began writing in the mid-1840s, his most memorable works—including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov—are from his later years. His work consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and three essays. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow. He was introduced to literature at an early age—through fairy tales and legends, but also through books by English, French, German and Russian authors. His mother's sudden death in 1837, when he was 15, devastated him. Around that time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a liberal lifestyle. He soon began translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which allowed him to join St. Petersburg's literary circles.

In 1849 he was arrested for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle—a secret society of liberal utopians as well as a literary discussion group. He and other members were condemned to death, but at the last moment, a note from Tsar Nicholas I arrived at the scene of the firing squad, commuting the sentence to four years' hard labour in Siberia. There, he was diagnosed with epilepsy during a period when his seizures increased. After his release, Dostoyevsky was forced to serve as a soldier, but was discharged due to ill health.

In the following years Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later a serial, A Writer's Diary. He began travelling around western Europe, and developed a gambling addiction that led to financial hardship and an embarrassing period of begging for money. Nevertheless, he eventually became one of the most widely read and renowned Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages and have sold around 15 million copies. Dostoyevsky influenced a multitude of writers, from Anton Chekhov and James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.

The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adventures of Dorothy and Trot and the Wizard of Oz, Together with the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger and Cap'n Bill, in Their Successful Search for a Magical and Beautiful Birthday Present for Princess Ozma of Oz is the thirteenth Land of Oz book written by L. Frank Baum. Published on June 7, 1919, one month after the author's death, The Magic of Oz relates the unsuccessful attempt of the Munchkin boy Kiki Aru and former Nome King Ruggedo to conquer Oz.
The novel was dedicated to "the Children of our Soldiers, the Americans and their Allies, with unmeasured Pride and Affection."

At the top of Mount Munch, lives a group of people known as the Hyups. One of their numbers, a Munchkin named Bini Aru, discovered a method of transforming people and objects by merely saying the word "Pyrzqxgl". After Princess Ozma decreed that no one could practice magic in Oz except for Glinda the Good Witch and the Wizard of Oz, Bini wrote down the directions for pronouncing "Pyrzqxgl" and hid them in his magical laboratory.
When Bini and his wife are at a fair one day, their son Kiki Aru, who thirsts for adventure, finds the directions and afterwards transforms himself into a hawk and visits various countries outside the land of Oz. When he alights in the land of Ev, Kiki Aru learns that he needs money to pay for a night's lodging (versus Oz, where money is not used at all) and changes himself into a magpie to steal a gold piece from an old man. A sparrow confronts the then-human Kiki Aru with knowledge of the theft, and Kiki says that he did not know what it was like to be wicked before, he is glad that he is now. This conversation is overheard by Ruggedo, the Nome who was exiled to the Earth's surface in Tik-Tok of Oz, and he sees through Kiki Aru's power a chance to get revenge on the people of Oz.
Kiki changes himself and Ruggedo into birds and they fly over the Deadly Desert into the Land of Oz. They enter Oz as animals to escape detection by Glinda and to recruit an army of conquest from the country's wild animal population. When they first appear in the Forest of Gugu in the Gillikin Country, Kiki changes himself and Ruggedo into Li-Mon-Eags (fictional creatures with the heads of lions, the bodies of monkeys, and the wings of eagles as well as having the tails of donkeys) and lies that they've seen the people of the Emerald City plan to enslave the animal inhabitants of the Forest. Ruggedo claims that they the Li-Mon-Eags will transform the animals into humans and march on the Emerald City and transform its inhabitants into animals, driving them into the forest. Ruggedo proves their power (for Kiki's the only one who knows "Pyrzqxgl") by having Kiki transform one of the leopard king Gugu's advisors, Loo the unicorn, into a man and back again. Gugu offers to meet with the leaders of the other animal tribes to decide on this matter of invasion.
Dorothy and the Wizard arrive with the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger in the Forest of Gugu during this council of war with a request for monkeys to train in time for Ozma's upcoming birthday party. Ruggedo recognizes his old enemies and inspires Kiki to begin transforming people and animals left and right — including Ruggedo, whom Kiki turns against by transforming him into a goose, a transformation that the Nomes most fears because as a goose he might lay an egg.
The Wizard, whom Kiki transformed into a fox, follows the Li-Mon-Eag with his magic bag, the transformed Kiki, deep into the forest where he begins transforming monkeys into giant human soldiers. However, Kiki makes them so big that they cannot move through the trees. The Wizard, however, heard how to correctly pronounce "Pyrzqxgl" and first stops Kiki and Ruggedo by transforming them into a walnut and a hickory nut. Then the Wizard resumes his rightful form and changes Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger, and Gugu back to their forms, and he agrees to change the soldiers back into monkeys. The Wizard recruits several of the grateful monkeys and shrinks them down to bring back to the Emerald City and train.
On arriving there, Dorothy and the Wizard are dispatched to a magic island where Cap'n Bill and Trot went to get a magic flower for Ozma's birthday. However, the island itself causes anything living that touches it to take root there, and that is how the sailor and his friend are found when Dorothy and the Wizard arrive. The Wizard uses "Pyrzqxgl" to change Cap'n Bill and Trot into honeybees which narrowly avoid being eaten by the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger. When they are human again, Cap'n Bill retrieves the flower by strapping a wood plank onto his good leg, walks with that and his wooden leg onto the island, and retrieves the flower.
Back at the Emerald City, Ozma and her friends celebrate her birthday (though without quite the pomp and fanfare from The Road to Oz) and then decide how to deal with the evil magicians transformed into nuts. The Wizard uses "Pyrzqxgl" to change them back to Kiki Aru and Ruggedo and make them thirsty enough to drink the Water of Oblivion, which will make them forget all that they have ever known. The now-blank slate Kiki Aru and Ruggedo will live in the Emerald City and learn to be good and kind.

A scholar, Dr. Samuel Ferguson, accompanied by his manservant Joe and his friend Richard "Dick" Kennedy, sets out to travel across the African continent — still not fully explored — with the help of a hot-air balloon filled with hydrogen.