LocalBooks Classics

Read the classics and discover the places behind their stories. Availability varies by country.

Tao Te Ching LaoziLocalBooks Classics
Eighty-one short chapters praise the strength of water, the usefulness of empty spaces and the ruler who governs best by doing least. Tradition says an archivist of the Zhou court at Luoyang wrote them down at a frontier pass on his way out of China.
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Tarzan of the Apes Edgar Rice BurroughsLocalBooks Classics
Orphaned in the West African jungle, the son of an English lord is raised by a band of great apes. Teaching himself to read from his dead parents' books, he grows up strong and alone until other humans arrive.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas HardyLocalBooks Classics
When a parson tells her father that the family descends from the noble d'Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kinship with a rich household, and meets the man who will ruin her. Working the dairies and turnip fields of Hardy's Wessex, she tries to start again with an idealistic clergyman's son.
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan DoyleLocalBooks Classics
Twelve cases from Holmes's busiest years, from a king's indiscretion and a club for red-headed men to a speckled band in a locked bedroom. The stories that made Holmes the most famous detective in the world.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark TwainLocalBooks Classics
Tom Sawyer would rather do almost anything than whitewash a fence, go to school or behave in church. Growing up in a sleepy Mississippi River town, he and Huck Finn witness a murder in a graveyard at midnight and have to decide whether to tell.
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The Aeneid VirgilLocalBooks Classics
Escaping burning Troy with his father on his back, Aeneas leads the survivors across the Mediterranean toward a promised home in Italy. A storm drives him to Carthage and into the arms of Queen Dido, but fate will not let him stay.
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The Age of Innocence Edith WhartonLocalBooks Classics
Newland Archer, a young lawyer in 1870s New York high society, is engaged to the perfectly suitable May Welland when her unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe trailing scandal.
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The Analects ConfuciusLocalBooks Classics
Collected by his followers, these brief sayings and exchanges show Confucius teaching about honest government, family duty, ritual and learning for its own sake. The Master is by turns stern, funny and impatient with students who ask the wrong questions.
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The Arabian Nights Andrew LangLocalBooks Classics
To stay alive, Scheherazade tells her new husband the sultan a story each night and stops at the best part. Aladdin's lamp, Ali Baba's forty thieves and Sindbad's voyages are among the tales she spins, set in the bazaars and palaces of Baghdad, Cairo and Basra.
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The Beautiful and Damned F. Scott FitzgeraldLocalBooks Classics
Anthony Patch is waiting to inherit his grandfather's fortune, so why work? He and his beautiful wife Gloria throw themselves into New York parties in the Jazz Age, while the money, and the waiting, wear them down.
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The Bhagavad Gita VyasaLocalBooks Classics
On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, the warrior Arjuna lowers his bow rather than fight his own cousins and teachers. His charioteer Krishna answers him with a dialogue on duty, action and the self that has become one of Hinduism's central scriptures.
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The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor DostoevskyLocalBooks Classics
When the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, suspicion falls on his passionate son Dmitri, while his brothers, the skeptical Ivan and the gentle novice Alyosha, wrestle with faith, doubt and responsibility.
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The Call of Cthulhu H. P. LovecraftLocalBooks Classics
Sorting his late great-uncle's papers, a Boston man pieces together a worldwide cult, a sculptor's fevered dreams and a sailor's account of a nightmare city risen from the Pacific, all pointing to something dead but dreaming beneath the sea.
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The Call of the Wild Jack LondonLocalBooks Classics
Buck, a big, comfortable family dog in California, is stolen and sold to haul sleds in the Klondike gold rush. Among brutal men and harder dogs, he has to learn the law of club and fang to survive.
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The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey ChaucerLocalBooks Classics
Thirty-odd pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark and agree to a storytelling contest on the road to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. A knight, a miller, a prioress and the much-married Wife of Bath each tell a tale, from courtly romance to bawdy farce.
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The Canterville Ghost Oscar WildeLocalBooks Classics
An American family buys an English castle with a resident ghost and refuses to be scared. Sir Simon, haunting the place for three centuries, is outraged, in Wilde's comic ghost story.
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The Communist Manifesto Karl MarxLocalBooks Classics
Written in Brussels for a small workers' league and printed in London on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, this short pamphlet tells history as a struggle between classes. It describes how industry remade the world and calls on the workers of every country to unite.
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The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence DunbarLocalBooks Classics
Every poem by the Dayton poet who became the first nationally famous Black American poet: the songs and dialect verse of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), which William Dean Howells introduced to the country, and later poems such as "We Wear the Mask" and "Sympathy," whose line "I know why the caged bird sings" Maya Angelou took for the title of her memoir. Lyrics of love, nature and Ohio country life, and some of the sharpest poems of their time about race.
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The Conjure Woman Charles W. ChesnuttLocalBooks Classics
A Northern couple buys a run-down vineyard in North Carolina after the Civil War, and Uncle Julius, who was once enslaved there, tells them the plantation's old stories of conjure: a man turned into a tree, grapevines that live and die with the man who eats their fruit. Behind the folk tales is a sharp picture of slavery and of the people who profited from it. Chesnutt's first book, with two related stories added at the end.
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The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre DumasLocalBooks Classics
On the day of his wedding, young sailor Edmond Dantès is falsely accused and thrown into an island prison for life. Years later a mysterious, enormously rich count appears in Paris society with a long memory.
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The Dain Curse Dashiell HammettLocalBooks Classics
What starts as a stolen-diamond case for the Continental Op becomes a string of deaths around Gabrielle Dain Leggett, who believes she carries a family curse. The trail runs through a strange California cult.
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The Decameron Giovanni BoccaccioLocalBooks Classics
While the Black Death empties Florence in 1348, seven young women and three young men retreat to villas in the hills and pass ten days telling a hundred stories. Clever wives, lusty friars, merchants and kings fill tales that are by turns bawdy, tragic and very funny.
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The Dunwich Horror H. P. LovecraftLocalBooks Classics
In the decaying hill town of Dunwich, Massachusetts, the strange Whateley family carries out rituals on the hilltops, and the swiftly growing Wilbur Whateley comes to Miskatonic University looking for a forbidden book.
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The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan PoeLocalBooks Classics
Summoned by an old friend, the narrator travels to a gloomy mansion where Roderick Usher and his twin sister are the last of their line. The house seems to share their sickness, and it is about to give way.
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