What happens when curiosity turns into desire?In Lesbian Firsts, shy librarian Elena Carter is about to discover the thrilling world of romance and intimacy she's only ever dreamed of. At 24, she has spent her life entrenched in books, feeling invisible and unfulfilled as she watches her friends embark on passionate adventures. But when she meets the captivating Vivienne Hartley at a book signing, everything changes.Invited to an after-hours gathering, Elena's heart...

In these searching essays, Percy Bysshe Shelley turns love, life, death, and morality into a single restless inquiry. "On Love" defines love as a longing for sympathy, understanding, and union with another soul, while also hinting that nature itself may answer that need. "On Life" widens the vision, treating existence as a mystery that habit, language, and false distinctions conceal, and urging a more "Intellectual Philosophy" in which consciousness is part of a larger unity rather than a ...

Adonais opens with William Michael Rossetti's thoughtful preface and notes, which frame Shelley's elegy for John Keats as both a tribute to the dead poet and a revealing work in Shelley's own artistic development. The poem's classical form, elevated style, and dense allusiveness are presented alongside candid commentary on its beauties, its flaws, and the historical grief that shaped it. Before the lament begins, Shelley's moving letters to Keats and Keats's reply establish a world of affe...

All she wants is to be an engineer, but her parents—and society—will never allow it. Until riots break out in steampunk London and she seizes her chance...It’s 1889, and Claire Trevelyan is expected to do nothing more with her life than catch a rich husband. Unfortunately, her talents lie not in the ballroom, but in the laboratory, where things have a regrettable habit of blowing up. When her father gambles the estate on the combustion engine despite the fact that everyone...

Workday friends. Nighttime lovers...A teeny-tiny crush. Maggie Drummond has one on her close friend Connor Grey. Unfortunately, he prefers leggy blondes, and Maggie is stuck with her deep brown hair and determined curves.Then, there is her newfound pursuit of kinky—no, more adventurous sex. Nothing too bad, you understand. It was reading the steamy romance that sent her on a jaunt down Spanking Avenue, and now she has set up an anonymous blog to explore her...

This four-book set contains the “Claire Quartet”—Lady of Devices, Her Own Devices, Magnificent Devices, and Brilliant Devices, an edition of over 250,000 words.London, 1889. Victoria is Queen. Charles Darwin’s son is Prime Minister. And steam is the power that runs the world.At 17, Claire Trevelyan, daughter of Viscount St. Ives, was expected to do nothing more than pour an elegant cup of tea, sew a fine seam, and catch a rich husband. Unfortunate...

Three fierce shifters. Three destined mates. Three love stories that prove sometimes the best things happen when you stop looking for them.Meet a scarlet woman, a determined secretary, and a runaway wife—each about to discover that alpha shifters don't give up on forever.MY SCARLET WOMANEmily's husband left her for his secretary and died in a car accident—all on the same day. Six months later, she's ready to prove she's still desira...

From Washington Irving's early American hauntings to Virginia Woolf's modernist unease, this sweeping collection gathers thirty tales of ghosts, curses, and things that should not be. Mary Shelley's gothic imagination, Charles Dickens's haunted houses, M. R. James's antiquarian terrors, and Henry James's psychological dread sit alongside Oscar Wilde's wit and H. G. Wells's speculative chills, tracing the occult and supernatural short story across a century of English-language fiction. Whet...

Originally curated by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot as a complete liberal education in fifty volumes, the Harvard Classics gathers philosophy, science, literature, and history into a single indispensable library. Plato's dialogues and Marcus Aurelius's meditations sit alongside Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis Bacon's essays, Charles Darwin's scientific writing, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, tracing the foundations of Western thought from ancient Greece to the modern age. Homer...

The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

Fifty essential works, one sweeping introduction to the world's greatest storytellers. This first volume gathers Jane Austen's social wit, Charles Dickens's unforgettable characters, Fyodor Dostoevsky's psychological depth, Victor Hugo's romantic grandeur, Herman Melville's seafaring epic, and Edgar Allan Poe's dark imagination alongside giants from Cervantes to Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters to Shakespeare. Spanning centuries and continents, from the Spanish Golden Age to Gothic romance, Vic...

Swiss student Victor Frankenstein creates a monster – and thereby unleashes a force he cannot control. For just like Prometheus, the monster brings both blessing and curse.With her Gothic novel, 19-year-old Mary Shelley created a myth that lives on to this day.Englischsprachige AusgabeHochwertig ausgestattetes TaschenbuchMit einem persönlichen deutschsprachigen Nachwort von Ulrike Draesner»Mit radikaler Konsequenz zeigt der Roman, wie unfä...