Laptev, the rich but unattractive scion of a merchant, renounces his independent-minded, intelligent, devoted, but equally unattractive mistress Polina in order to marry the beautiful young gold-digger Yulia. Their life together quickly deteriorates into a loveless agony, Laptev seeking some sort of meaning in his life while Yulia whiles away her youth with the sparkling young Moscow social scene. The compelling question of the story is whether or not Laptev and Yulia can redeem something of lasting value from what seems to be a hopelessly empty relationship. Here Chekhov again explores the subtle dilemmas of modern conventional marriage and its effects, both positive and negative, on the...

LibriVox readers bring you 20 short stories in various genres by authors including Edna Ferber, Charlotte Brontë, Stephan Crane, W. Somerset Maugham, Lord Dunsany, Saki and Honoré de Balzac.

Thomas Traherne's best known work is a collection of paragraphs, divided into what he called "Centuries", meditating in a particularly intense and visionary manner on God, nature and His relationship with the life of man.

This second letter from the Apostle Paul to the congregation of believers in the bustling port city of Corinth gives us a much more personal understanding of Paul's apostleship. He defends it rigorously, convincing his followers of his authority from God and his rights under that authority. His appeals to patience and understanding display a great emotional vulnerability in the seasoned preacher and missionary. He discusses the need to support the congregation in Jerusalem with their gifts, and reaffirms and vindicates his position as apostle to the Gentiles.

Reputedly inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories, Austrian criminal jurist and examining magistrate Hans Gross wrote the first handbook on criminal investigation. This treatise covers everything from the qualities of a good investigating officer and how to utilize various experts, to tactics employed by criminals, how to analyze footprints and blood stains, and ways that criminals perpetrate crimes. Some of the remarks relate directly to India, such as disguising one's caste.

Volume 1 (of 3) consists of Part 1 of the 4 parts in the work.

After having written and released an initial draft of this proclamation in September of 1862, minor changes were made and Lincoln signed it on January 1st, 1863. It declared free the slaves in 10 states not then under Union control, with exemptions specified for areas already under Union control in two states. Lincoln spent the next 100 days preparing the army and the nation for emancipation, while Democrats rallied their voters in the 1862 off-year elections by warning of the threat freed slaves posed to northern whites.

Once the abolition of slavery in the rebel states became a military objective, as Union armies advanced south, more slaves were liberated until all three million of...

This is a collection of poems by Dora Sigerson Shorter, whose subject are the Sad Years 1914-1918.

A major work by Spenser, The Faerie Queen, was published between 1590 and 1596. As an allegorical work, it can be read on many levels. According to Jeanie Lang, Spenser always looked for the beautiful and the good when he wrote. Lang said, "There are many stories in The Faerie Queen, and out of these all I have told you only eight." The eight are "Una and the Lion," "St. Gergoe and the Dragon," "Britomart and the Magic Mirror," "The Quest of Sir Gregory," "Pastorella," "Cambell and Triamond," "Marinell the Sea-Nymph's Son," and "Flormell and the Witch."

The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization is a book written in 1885 by an Irishman, George F. Dillon, DD. It was republished by Fr. Denis Fahey in 1950 as Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked as the Secret Power Behind Communism. The central theme of the book alleges that atheistic Illuminism, through the infrastructure of Grand Orient freemasonry, driven by the ideology of the philosophies laid the foundations for a large scale, ongoing war against Christendom in general and Catholic Church in particular. The document claims that this had been manifested primarily through manipulating the outbreak of various radical liberal republican revolutions. Particularly those ...

The Frozen North offers short sketches of the first men who bravely took great risks to explore the unknown polar regions and unlock the mysteries held there.