американская классика

In "The Masque of the Red Death" Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors – of the deadly approach of a terrible pendulum, of the awful end of an ancient and noble house, and of the impossible beating of a dead hea…

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

"What is Man?" was Twain's most serious, philosophical and private book. He kept it locked in his desk, considered it to be his Bible, and spoke of it as such to friends when he read them passages. He had written it, rewritten it, was finally satisfi…

The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk most of the wa…

The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him.

The story is the first to mention Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. It is also notable as one of the first depictions of zombies, as corpses arising, through scientific means, as animalistic, and uncontrollably violent creatures.

"Celephais" was created in a dream by Kuranes (which is his name in dreams—his real name is not given) as a child of the English landed gentry. As a man in his forties, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, he dreams it again and then, seeki…

The story tells of an unnamed narrator, who has moved from New England to New York City and greatly regretted it. One night, while wandering an older part of Greenwich Village, he happens upon a man strangely dressed in garments from the eighteenth c…

The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in World War I when he was a merchant marine officer.

"A Horse's Tale" is a novel written partially in the voice of Soldier Boy, who is Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. 7th Cavalry.

The story follows Walter Gilman, who takes a room in the Witch House, an accursed house in Akham, Lovecraft's fictional New England town. The house once harbored Keziah Mason, an witch who disappeared mysteriously from a Salem jail in 1692. Gilman di…

This story takes place in the ancient valley of Nis, in vegetation-covered stone ruins described by Lovecraft in great detail. These crumbling blocks of monolithic stone now serve only for grey toads and snakes to nest under. Interspersed in the ruin…

A university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One of the few …

The unnamed narrator describes the final fate of his good friend, Denys Barry, an Irish-American who reclaims an ancestral estate in Kilderry, a fictional town in Ireland. Barry ignores pleas from the local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog, with…

The story describe the appearance of Nyarlathotep as a "man" of the race of the Pharaohs, who claims to have been dormant for the past twenty-seven centuries, and his subsequent travels from city to city demonstrating his supernatural powers. Whereve…

Randolph Carter discovers, at the age of 30, that he has gradually "lost the key to the gate of dreams." As he ages, he finds that his daily waking exposure to the more "practical", scientific ideas of man, has eventually eroded his ability to dream …

The story is about a golden-haired youth who wanders into the city of Teloth, telling tales of the great city of Aira, where he was prince. While Iranon enjoys singing and telling his tales of wonder, few appreciate it. When a disenfranchised boy nam…

The story begins with the narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star, Polaris, which he describes as "winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to co…

A lighthouse keeper named Basil Elton engages upon a peculiar fantasy in which a bearded man piloting a mystical white ship is found sailing upon a bridge of moonlight. Elton joins the bearded man on this ship, and together they explore a mystical ch…

Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and so begins his journey through the Deep South, seeking independence and freedom. On his travels, Huck meets an escaped slave, Jim, who is a wanted man, and together they journey d…