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"The Green Door" is one of O. Henry’s most popular short stories. By a strange coincidence, Rudolph is led to green door at the top of a dentist’s building. His knock is answered by a starving young woman; the one he had been searching for, and whom he saves.

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is a fantasy novel by the Scottish author George MacDonald, first published in 1858. It is the story of a young man, Anodos, who enters a dreamlike realm where he experiences breathtaking adventures, while encountering a host of entities like tree spirits, gnomes, monsters, and giants as well as his own shadow. All the time, he searches for his ideal of female beauty, in the form of the "Marble Lady". After having been killed in Fairy Land, Anodos wakes up on Earth, retaining the memory of his adventures in the realm of dreams.

The Will to Power is an audiobook of notes compiled from the literary remains of Friedrich Nietzsche. The title derives from a work that Nietzsche himself had intended to write. The "will to power", a prominent concept in his philosophy, describes what Nietzsche believed to be the main driving force in humans.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 - circa 1914) was a short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. Bierce wrote realistically of the terrible things he had seen in the Civil War in stories like "The Affair at Coulter's Notch", making him a pioneer of the psychological horror story. In this tale, a Captain Coulter leads the way in a fierce battle between Federal and Confederate forces to capture a house. After the battle, a horrible scene is revealed. The theme of "Coulter's Notch" is to question the nature of war and highlight the sacrifice of the individual.

The Blithedale Romance (1852) by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a dark romantic novel set in the farming commune of Blithedale where some utopian city slickers have gathered in order to improve the world. The narrator, Miles Coverdale, gets acquainted with the reformer Hollingsworth, the feminist Zenobia, her sister Priscilla, her father Old Moodie, and Professor Westervelt. They pursue their individual egotistical paths and get entangled in their conflicting ambitions.

"The Twilight of the Idols" was written by Nietzsche in 1888 as a short introduction to his work. In it, he labels the era’s German culture as decadent and nihilistic, and criticizes certain British, French and Italian cultural figures who, in his view, represented similar tendencies. By decadence, he means a fading of life, vitality and an embrace of weakness. In contrast to those alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche holds up historical personages like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Thucydides and the Sophist philosophers as healthier types.

"The Song of the Cardinal" by Gene Stratton-Porter is the story of a big male Cardinal bird in the Wabash Valley, Indiana. Living in a tree near the home of a farmer and his wife, the bird sings with passion and joie de vivre to attract a mate, which he finds, and a charming romance develops. Unfolding at a leisurely pace, the story portrays the varied natural settings of the region in a most engaging way. The theme of nature and mankind’s responsibility to care for it, is present throughout the narrative.

Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the poet, polymath, musician, and artist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who modernised Bengali literature and Indian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tagore is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal". First published in 1912, the English Gitanjali or Song Offerings is a collection of Tagore's own English translations of his Bengali poems

The Analects or Selected Sayings is an ancient Chinese text comprising sayings and wisdom teachings attributed to Confucius and his contemporaries, as well as fragmentary dialogues between the philosopher and his students. The Analects has been one of the most influential books in China for the last two millennia, and continues to contribute to Chinese and East Asian culture and thought.

Parzival is a medieval epic poem written by the knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. It is divided into 16 books, each composed of several 30-line stanzas of rhyming couplets. Regarded as one of the literary masterpieces of the Middle Ages, the romantic poem commonly dated to the early part of the 13th century. The verse narrative focuses on the Arthurian hero Parzival and his long quest for the Holy Grail after his initial failure to achieve it.

Herman Melville wrote the 1855 novella Benito Cereno, a story about a revolt on a slaver ship, the San Dominick, off the coast of Chile in 1799. It is an adventure story which highlights the cruelty of slavery and the hopeless desperation that slaves experience. The tale begins when Captain Delano of the whaling ship Bachelor's Delight spots another ship approaching, floating listlessly with torn sails.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, a knight and a poet from 13th century Germany, is the author of this Arthurian romance. Parzival is the revival and completion of a narrative left incomplete by its initiator Chrétien de Troyes. It follows Parzival from his boyhood and career as a knight at the court of King Arthur to his ultimate achievement as King of the Temple of the Grail. This is both a tale of chivalry, and an epic quest for spiritual insight, as the hero Parzival must overcome his pride, and learn to be humble before he can finally win the Holy Grail.

Jason and the Golden Fleece, also titled The Argonautica, is the epic poem of Jason's quest for the golden fleece of the winged, golden-woolled ram, Chrysomallos, which was a symbol of authority and kingship. Written by Appolonius of Rhodes in the third century BCE, it is the only surviving Greek epic which bridges the gap between Homer and late antiquity. Jason travels with a group of kings and demigods to Colchis, after various detours where the crew faces monsters, storms, and other obstacles.

The Silverado Squatters is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his 1880 honeymoon trip with his bride and her son Lloyd Osbourne to Napa Valley, California. On May 19, 1880, he married Fanny Vandegrift, and they decided to spend their honeymoon in a three-story bunkhouse at an abandoned mining camp called "Silverado" in the Mayacamas Mountains. The book offers fascinating historical views of late 19th-century California. During their two-month honeymoon, Stevenson visits a petrified forest, encounters some wine growers, and meets various colorful characters.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by Herman Melville, first serialized in a magazine in 1853, and reprinted with minor edits in The Piazza Tales in 1856. Set in the mid-19th century on Wall Street, the story tells of a lawyer who employs Bartleby, a new clerk, who, after an initial stint of hard work, refuses to perform any task required of him, with the words, "I would prefer not to." The narrator attempts to reason with Bartleby to no avail, and Bartleby starts living at the office.

The Iliad - attributed to Homer - is the most famous ancient Greek epic poem. It recounts the struggle between King Agamemnon and the hero Achilles during the final months of the Trojan War, with frequent detours into earlier legends and myths. In its portrayal of battle scenes and the constant interventions of the gods, The Iliad explores themes of wrath, glory, and fate, and has provided the subject matter for many later Greek, Roman, and Renaissance writings.

A Girl of the Limberlost, a novel by the writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter, was published in 1909 as the sequel to her earlier novel Freckles. The tale unfolds in and around the Limberlost Swamp of north-eastern Indiana and in the nearby town of Onabasha. The main character, Elnora Comstock, lives with her widowed mother, Katharine Comstock, on the edge of the wetlands. The embittered Katharine blames her daughter for the death of her husband, who was swallowed by quicksand.

Of the two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, The Odyssey serves to some extent as a sequel to The Iliad. The poem describes the journey home of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. In the Greek sources, the Trojan War lasted 10 years, and Odysseus spent 10 more years on the return journey due to the hostility of Poseidon, the god of earth and sea. Odysseus' fantastical adventures include a period of captivity on Calypso’s island, a visit to the lethargic lotus eaters, an encounter with a one-eyed Cyclops, and more.

Mark Twain’s essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", was published in the North American Review in 1901. This dark satire exposes the imperialism behind the Chinese Boxer Uprising, the Boer War, and the Philippine-American War. In this, Twain's most famous anti-imperialist work, he indicts the brutalities of the British, French, German, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and American governments for their actions around the world. He also attacks the imperialist greed of missionaries like William Scott Ament, then-head of the American Board for Foreign Missions.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella, White Nights, was originally published in 1848. The tender narrative is an appealing blend of realism and romanticism. A daydreamer, the hero is a lonely young man in Saint Petersburg who lives in a fantasy world. After a chance encounter, he falls in love with a young woman, Nastenka, whom he meets in the same place over four nights. Sharing a sense of alienation, they exchange information on their respective backgrounds and grow fond of one another in a short time.