The 20th Jules Verne book has been added to the library. Read "Robur the Conqueror" and more today!

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne

"When people talk about early literary vampires, Bram Stoker’s magnum opus Dracula inevitably dominates the conversation...But a surprisingly infrequent visitor to the debate is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s lonely blood countess Carmilla."

Read our latest post, "The Hidden Vampiric Legacy of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” by Fija Callaghan.

https://standardebooks.org/blog

"Passion, like character, does not grow in crowded places. In great cities men are all more or less alike. It is only in solitary abodes that strong natures grow up in their own way."

– Henry Seton Merriman,
The Sowers

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-seton-merriman/the-sowers

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

– Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

What's your favorite way to read an ebook? Phone? Tablet? eReader? Computer?

F. Scott is wishing you a weird little weekend.

“In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high.”

― Ernst Jünger,
The Storm of Steel

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernst-junger/the-storm-of-steel/basil-creighton

Same, girl. Same. #october

"My thoughts, today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys, sorrows are as deep, and the more pain, the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? That will make an end of the world."

– Natsume Sōseki,
Kusamakura

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/natsume-soseki/kusamakura/takahashi-kazutomo

What is a book you wanted to hate but won you over?

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter—in the eye.”

― Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charlotte-bronte/jane-eyre

German surrealist author, Franz Kafka, referenced many books in his work. Here are a few public domain authors and books he was known to love.

Sentimental Education By Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain By Thomas Mann
The Sorrows of Young Werther By J.W. Von Goethe
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Short Fiction By Nikolai Gogol

Read now:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks

“A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on.”

― Not Edgar Allan Poe

While this is a great quote and a call to never stop reading, this isn’t anything Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote. It is typically attributed to Montresor from "The Cask of Amontillado," but it is simply not in the text or in any of Poe’s writings.

So, now you know! Read on! 🕯️

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”

– Rumi

“Cats – by day the most docile of God’s creatures, every one of them in the night enlisting under the devil’s banner – took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased.”

― W.H. Davies,
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

What's that one book your friends are tired of hearing you talk about?

"...autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling."

– Jane Austen,
Persuasion

“Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs — religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history ...”

Pauline E. Hopkins,
Contending Forces

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/pauline-e-hopkins/contending-forces

“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

― Gustave Flaubert,
Sentimental Education

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gustave-flaubert/sentimental-education/m-walter-dunne