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Sometimes he came round and patted me, saying in his quiet, pleasant way, "This horse has got a good master, and he deserves it." It was a very rare thing for any one to notice the horse that had been working for him. I have known ladies to do it now and then, and this gentleman, and one or two others have given me a pat and a kind word; but 99 persons out of 100 would as soon think of patting the steam engine that drew the train. This is the heart-warming story of Black Beauty, his masters, and his friends.  

This book contains two plays by Henrik Ibsen. Norma is a satirical opera designed as a dramatic parody of Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma, in which the characters are portrayed as central figures in the political life of contemporary Norway. St. John's Night is a fairy-tale comedy that takes place during a midsummer feast on a farm in Telemark. It is inspired by many sources, most notably A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, and features many of the same themes.

Mansfield Park is the third published and perhaps most subtle of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of Fanny Price, who, at the age of 10, is sent from her impoverished household to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle and be raised alongside her cousins. Fanny grows up as a misfit, not truly a member of the Bertram family, but too genteel to feel comfortable with her parents. 

The Victorians had a fondness for scaring their offspring straight with cautionary tales - moral stories featuring children who misbehaved and suffered the consequences. Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales are a parody of the Victorian moral fables: irresistible, irreverent and downright jolly.

It is probably no surprise that Edward Lear felt the need to make children laugh. He was born in 1812 in North London, youngest-but-one of 21 children. Money problems led to his leaving home at the age of four with an older sister, who looked after him as a mother until she died.

While studying medicine in the 1870s, Arthur Conan Doyle began writing and a decade later published his first novel featuring famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Doyle would soon adopt the short story as his means of portraying the exploits of his brilliant detective, and the first collection of stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1892.

Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.E.) is the author of eighteen extant plays and many more only surviving in fragments. He is the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Hippolytus, bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta, has sworn chaste allegiance to the goddess Artemis, thus severely offending the goddess Aphrodite by failing to revere her. Aphrodite swears revenge and promises that he will die before the day is done, taking with him Queen Phaedra, wife of Theseus.

A Woman of No Importance takes place in a 24-hour period during a house party hosted by Lady Hunstanton at her country estate. The upper echelons of English society mix, mingle and flirt, including Lady Caroline Pontefract (who is on her fourth husband), the witty and ironic Mrs. Allonby and the dandyish Lord Illingworth. Wilde balances these worldly characters with a visiting young American woman, Hester Worsley.

Jack Carlisle is driving through an unnamed town when he spots lights on at the library. Needing a break, Jack stops only to begin a strange journey requiring him to make choices that lead to unexpected consequences.

Lewis Carroll's delightful sequel to Alice in Wonderland finds seven-year-old Alice off on another exciting adventure into Looking-Glass World. On her journey, she meets life-size chess pieces, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, and a host of fairy-tale creatures.

What would it be like to be invisible? What would you do? What if you couldn't change back? Griffin, an albino, unlikable, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, works himself almost to madness in his quest for invisibility. Once he succeeds, he does not care for it as much as he expected to. Cold, jostled by strangers, attacked by dogs - unable even to eat without becoming visible, he comes to the conclusion that invisibility is good for only one thing - for killing.

Louis Esson is considered to be the first great Australian dramatist. As with most of his work, these four plays depict life from the view of the common man and provide vivid presentations of life, both urban and rural, in Australia before the First World War.

Gogol's phantasmagorical tale about a man whose nose decides to abscond and begin living a life of its own is one of the earliest and most celebrated examples of absurdist literature. Apart from its recondite humor, it is remarkable for Gogol's skill in characterization and his ability to paint a picture of contemporary life in Russia in a few verbal brushstrokes.

Stephen Leacock was a prolific and brilliant writer, whose tongue-in-cheek writings have been amusing Canadian fans for decades. He first published Winsome Winnie in 1920 as part of a compendium of short stories entitled Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels. It relates the trials and tribulations of the recently orphaned and penniless Winnifred Clair.

A rich widow finds that the man she wishes to marry is already engaged. He has just suddenly become a peer and cannot, he thinks, break his promise.

This collection contains Oscar Wilde's four best-known comedies: The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere's Fan; An Ideal Husband; and A Woman of No Importance. All of them satirize upper-class English society of the 1890s, dramatizing scandalous secrets, political and marital intrigue, and dandyish bad behavior with Wilde's trademark wit and wisdom.

"In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women." This is how our guide and narrator, Mary Smith, introduces us to the small English country town of Cranford. Young, modern Mary gives us her Austen-like view of small-town customs, Victorian values, decorum, and etiquette. Mary gives us a charming, sometimes gently mocking comedy of manners.

Listeners are invited to sit back and enjoy this collection of classic Yuletide tales....

Franz Kafka was one of the first and greatest masters of dystopian literature. In his bleak world view, man is presented as helpless and ineffectual, his destiny determined by distant, obscure and essentially unfriendly agencies. In none of his works is this savage and unreasoning enslavement presented more vividly than in Metamorphosis, a novella in which Gregor Samsa, a respectable employee and dutiful son, wakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (aka PG Wodehouse) wrote in excess of 90 books, 40 plays, and 200 short stories between 1902 and 1974 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest humorists of the 20th century. Right Ho, Jeeves! is his second in a series of books written about a luckless young British millionaire named Bertram Wooster and his sharp valet, Jeeves.