First published in 1919, W. Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence" is an episodic first person narrative based on the life of Paul Gaugin. At the center of the novel is the story of Charles Strickland, an English banker who walks away from a life of privilege, abruptly abandoning his wife and children, in order to pursue his passion to become an artist. Strickland leaves London for Paris and ultimately Tahiti, mirroring the life of Gaugin who...

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction...

A gripping thriller of love, betrayal, and murder, in which the declining marriage of one couple pulls everyone around them into the dark Warren Thompson-Bupps to his closest friends-wants nothing more than for his law partner and best friend, Jim Felderson, to win his sister's hand in marriage. Helen can be capricious, at times even outright cold, but the wedding moves ahead anyway. All appears to be fine, until one day, Helen announces that she's...

The consequences of letting your irritation get the better of you are humorously portrayed in this story of a self-important man who fires a shotgun at an annoying cat on his fence… and hits a man skulking in the bushes. What did the cat do to enrage him? Why was the man in the bushes? And how can the whole matter be covered up and done away with before the neighbors start gossiping?