It’s 1885, and Raina’s bourgeois Bulgarian family is cought up in the heady patriotism of their war with Serbia. The beautiful and headstrong Raina eagerly awaits her fiance’s victorious return from battle – but instead meets a soldier who seeks asylum in her bedroom. This is one soldier who definitely prefers romance and chocolate to […]

“The Philosophy of Style,” explored a growing trend of formalist approaches to writing. Highly focused on the proper placement and ordering of the parts of an English sentence, [Spencer] created a guide for effective composition. Spencer’s aim was to free prose writing from as much “friction and inertia” as possible, so that the reader would […]

On 27 February 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave this address at the Cooper Union in New York City. When he gave the speech, Lincoln was considered by many to be just a country lawyer. After he gave the speech, he soon became his party’s nominee for president. (Summary by henkelsc)

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published in 1886, is a collection of humorous essays by Jerome K. Jerome. It was the author’s second published book and helped establish him as a leading English humorist. The book consists of 14 independent articles arranged by themes. (Summary from Wikipedia)

While “The Battle of Life” is one of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books – his annual release of a story just before Christmas – this one breaks the tradition by not being concerned with Christmas. Rather, its subtitle, “A Love Story”, reveals more of the plot. The major events of this book take place on land […]

Civil Disobedience is an essay by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government, it expressed Thoreau’s belief that people should not allow governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty both to avoid doing injustice directly and to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable […]