Complete Works
Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, sonnets, and narrative poems in one complete Commonplace collection.
Drama and poetry
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Carefully prepared public-domain editions, downloadable as ordinary EPUB files and available directly inside Commonplace.
The opening catalogue
Leaves of Grass
Whitman's continually revised lifetime collection of expansive American poetry, presented in its definitive 1892 form.
Poetry
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On Liberty
Mill's foundational argument for liberty of thought, expression, and individual action within society.
Philosophy and ideas
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Ulysses
Across one day in Dublin, Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom move through a city rendered in radically changing styles.
Modernism
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The Damnation of Theron Ware
A young Methodist minister's encounter with art, science, and worldly ambition unsettles his faith and his sense of himself.
Essential novels
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The Iliad
Achilles' wrath, Hector's courage, and the human cost of the Trojan War unfold in the foundational Greek epic.
Epics and classics
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The Odyssey
Odysseus struggles home through monsters, enchantments, and divine opposition while Penelope and Telemachus endure in Ithaca.
Epics and classics
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The Divine Comedy
Dante journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise toward a vision of justice, love, and the divine order.
Epics and classics
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Don Quixote
An aging reader of romances becomes a knight-errant, drawing the practical Sancho Panza into adventures comic, cruel, and profound.
Essential novels
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War and Peace
Families, soldiers, and rulers are swept through the Napoleonic wars in Tolstoy's vast inquiry into history and private life.
Essential novels
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The Brothers Karamazov
A father's murder draws three brothers into a drama of faith, doubt, desire, responsibility, and judgment.
Essential novels
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In Search of Lost Time
A taste of a madeleine opens a search through memory, society, and love that runs from a childhood bedroom to the whole of a vanished world.
Essential novels
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The Republic
Socrates and his companions ask what justice is, constructing an ideal city to examine education, power, knowledge, and the good life.
Philosophy and ideas
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The Essays
Montaigne tests his judgment against friendship, custom, mortality, education, experience, and the instability of the self.
Philosophy and ideas
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Poems
The complete three-series nineteenth-century collection of Dickinson's compressed, startling poems of nature, death, faith, love, and the mind.
Poetry
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Crime and Punishment
A destitute student commits murder in pursuit of an idea and enters a fevered struggle with guilt, pride, love, and confession.
Essential novels
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Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy confront error, vanity, money, and attraction in Austen's exacting comedy of judgment.
Essential novels
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The Histories
Herodotus investigates the peoples, customs, ambitions, and conflicts that culminated in the wars between Greece and Persia.
History and civilization
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History of the Peloponnesian War
A participant's rigorous account of the war between Athens and Sparta examines power, fear, rhetoric, plague, and political collapse.
History and civilization
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The Aeneid
Aeneas escapes ruined Troy and follows a divine mandate toward Italy, bearing the losses and violence of an empire's imagined beginning.
Epics and classics
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The Castle
The land surveyor K. enters a village governed by an inaccessible castle and becomes trapped in its opaque, multiplying bureaucracy.
Modernism
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My Bondage and My Freedom
Douglass expands the story of his enslavement, self-education, escape, and emergence as an abolitionist writer and public speaker.
History and civilization
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Paradise Lost
The rebellion of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve become an epic inquiry into freedom, obedience, temptation, and providence.
Poetry
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Metamorphoses
From the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Caesar, Ovid’s interlocking myths make transformation the governing principle of desire, violence, art, grief, and survival.
Epics and classics
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The Canterbury Tales
A company of pilgrims traveling from Southwark to Canterbury turn their journey into a storytelling contest encompassing romance, fabliau, sermon, beast fable, tragedy, satire, and confession.
Epics and classics
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Complete Short Stories
Across 192 stories and novellas, Chekhov observes doctors, clerks, teachers, peasants, artists, lovers, and families with exacting humor, compassion, and a revolutionary refusal of easy conclusions.
Short fiction
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Faust, Parts I & II
The scholar Faust wagers his soul against a moment of perfect satisfaction, passing from the intimate tragedy of Gretchen into the vast political, classical, and metaphysical theatre of Part II.
Drama
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The Prince
Machiavelli’s unsent counsel to a Medici prince studies how states are won, armed, governed, feared, judged, and lost, testing political action against fortune, necessity, and power.
Philosophy and ideas
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Confessions
Augustine searches his remembered life—from infancy, ambition, and divided desire through conversion and grief—for the nature of memory, time, creation, and the soul’s rest in God.
Philosophy and ideas
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The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin recounts his formation as printer, reader, civic organizer, moral experimenter, scientist, diplomat, and public servant in one of the foundational works of American life-writing.
History and memoir
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Common Sense
Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet dismantles hereditary monarchy, distinguishes society from government, and argues with unmatched directness for American independence and republican self-rule.
Philosophy and ideas
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Heart of Darkness
Marlow’s voyage into the colonial Congo becomes an inquiry into exploitation, self-deception, storytelling, and the darkness he finds within Europe’s civilizing claims and the human mind.
Essential novels
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The Island of Doctor Moreau
Shipwrecked Edward Prendick discovers Moreau’s island laboratory, where vivisection, imposed law, and unstable human form turn a scientific romance into a lasting nightmare of ethics and identity.
Gothic and strange
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Notes from Underground
A retired Petersburg civil servant argues against reason, progress, and his imagined readers before recounting the humiliations and cruelties that made his freedom indistinguishable from self-sabotage.
Essential novels
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus grows through sensation, shame, faith, language, and revolt toward the vocation of art, while Joyce’s prose grows with the consciousness it renders.
Modernism
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Orlando
Orlando lives from Elizabeth’s court to 1928, changing sex while pursuing love, property, poetry, and a self no age or convention can permanently define.
Modernism
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The Age of Innocence
Newland Archer’s engagement to May Welland seems to secure his place in old New York until Ellen Olenska exposes the cost of its beautiful manners and his own obedience to them.
Essential novels
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn and Jim flee down the Mississippi on a raft, meeting fraud, cruelty, friendship, and the moral demands that respectable society has taught Huck not to recognize.
Essential novels
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A boy in a Mississippi river town whitewashes a fence, witnesses a murder, attends his own funeral, and is loose in a cave with a killer before the summer is out.
Essential novels
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A nineteenth-century engineer wakes in Camelot and sets about industrialising it, in a comedy that turns steadily darker until it ends in a battlefield of his own making.
Essential novels
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My Ántonia
Jim Burden recalls Ántonia Shimerda, whose strength, hardship, and vitality become inseparable from his memory of the Nebraska prairie and the immigrant world they shared.
Essential novels
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The Moon and Sixpence
Charles Strickland abandons family, money, and ordinary decency to paint, pursuing an absolute artistic vision from London and Paris to Tahiti.
Essential novels
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Lord Jim
A young seaman’s single act of cowardice drives him eastward in search of a life that can redeem it, until Patusan gives him one last test of honour.
Essential novels
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Nostromo
In Costaguana, a silver mine, a revolution, and the legend of an incorruptible capataz bind private desire to political power and turn treasure into ruin.
Essential novels
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On the Origin of Species
Darwin assembles observation, experiment, geology, and analogy into the argument that species change through descent with modification and natural selection.
Science and nature
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein arranges propositions and their descendants into a severe inquiry into facts, pictures, language, logic, value, and the boundary between what can be said and what can only be shown.
Philosophy and ideas
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The Waste Land
Across five fractured movements, voices from a spiritually exhausted postwar world mingle private memory, urban desolation, myth, ritual, and the difficult prospect of renewal.
Poetry
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The Essays
In fifty-eight compressed meditations, Bacon weighs truth, death, love, ambition, friendship, study, public office, private conduct, and the practical arts of living among others.
Philosophy and ideas
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Don Juan
Byron turns the legendary seducer into an ingenuous traveler borne through shipwreck, slavery, war, courts, and English high society by an epic whose real hero is its mercilessly comic voice.
Poetry
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The Varieties of Religious Experience
James studies religion through the testimony of individual experience, comparing healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, conversion, saintliness, mysticism, philosophy, and plural belief.
Philosophy and ideas
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As I Lay Dying
Fifteen voices follow the Bundrens through flood, fire, betrayal, and stubborn endurance as they carry Addie’s coffin across Mississippi to fulfill a promise whose meaning changes for each.
Essential novels
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A Farewell to Arms
An American ambulance lieutenant and an English nurse try to make a private life amid the Italian front, military retreat, escape across a dark lake, and the impersonal violence of fate.
Essential novels
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The Sound and the Fury
Four radically different perspectives circle the Compson family’s decline, making time, memory, Caddy’s absence, Jason’s fury, and Dilsey’s endurance the broken measures of a Southern tragedy.
Essential novels
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Wuthering Heights
Lockwood’s arrival on the Yorkshire moors opens Nelly Dean’s history of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff: a love so absolute that cruelty, revenge, inheritance, and even death cannot contain it.
Essential novels
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Jane Eyre
An orphaned girl survives Gateshead, Lowood, and the mysteries of Thornfield to claim moral independence, chosen love, and a life narrated wholly in her own uncompromising voice.
Essential novels
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The Wings of the Dove
Kate Croy and Merton Densher’s private bargain gathers around the wealthy, gravely ill Milly Theale in London and Venice, where love, money, pity, and betrayal become impossible to separate.
Essential novels
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Middlemarch
Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, and the people around them pursue vocation, love, reform, money, and reputation through the densely interconnected moral life of an English provincial town.
Essential novels
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Bleak House
The endless suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce spreads fog, secrecy, and ruin through London, while Esther Summerson’s search for her origins draws together lives ignored by law and society.
Essential novels
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A Doll’s House
Nora Helmer’s concealed loan and Krogstad’s threat expose the terms of her marriage, forcing a reckoning with law, duty, motherhood, and the right to become a self beyond the domestic role assigned her.
Drama
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Tartuffe
Orgon welcomes the pious-seeming Tartuffe into his home and hands him trust, property, and power, while the family struggles to expose the appetite concealed beneath the impostor’s devotional mask.
Drama
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Life Is a Dream
Prince Sigismund, imprisoned from birth to thwart a prophecy, is briefly raised to Poland’s throne and returned to chains, forcing him to decide how one should act when life itself may be a dream.
Drama
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Poetics
Aristotle analyzes poetry as imitation and asks how plots, action, character, diction, recognition, reversal, pity, and fear combine to give tragedy and epic their distinctive artistic power.
Philosophy
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Symposium
At Agathon’s banquet, Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and others offer rival accounts of love before Diotima’s teaching turns desire toward the contemplation of beauty itself.
Philosophy
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Apology
Before an Athenian jury, Socrates answers the old slanders and the formal charges against him, explains his philosophical mission, and meets condemnation without abandoning the examined life.
Philosophy
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Ethics
In a geometric sequence of definitions and proofs, Spinoza argues from God or Nature through mind, emotion, bondage, reason, and the intellectual love that makes human freedom possible.
Philosophy
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s prophet descends from solitude to proclaim the death of God, the overcoming of humanity, eternal recurrence, and the creative discipline needed to become faithful to the earth.
Philosophy
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On the Genealogy of Morals
Across three linked essays, Nietzsche traces the histories of ‘good and evil,’ guilt and bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal, asking how moral values arose and whose forms of life they serve.
Philosophy
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Beowulf
A Geatish warrior crosses the whale-road to free Hrothgar’s hall from Grendel and his mother, then returns decades later as an old king to face the fire-dragon threatening his people.
Poetry
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Le Morte d’Arthur
Malory gathers the rise of Arthur, the fellowship and fractures of the Round Table, the Grail quest, the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the king’s dolorous death into England’s defining Arthurian chronicle.
Myth and legend
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Anna Karenina
Anna’s catastrophic love for Vronsky unfolds beside Levin and Kitty’s search for a sustaining life, as Tolstoy examines family, desire, society, faith, labor, and the possibilities of moral renewal.
Essential novels
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Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary tries to escape provincial marriage through romance, luxury, and debt, while Flaubert’s exacting realism measures the distance between inherited dreams and the world that consumes them.
Essential novels
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The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud argues that dreams are meaningful formations of unconscious wish and conflict, developing the methods and concepts—condensation, displacement, symbolism, regression, and dream-work—that founded psychoanalytic interpretation.
Psychology
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The Cloud of Unknowing
An anonymous fourteenth-century English contemplative teaches a young seeker to pass beyond concepts into a loving attention to God, striking through the cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love.
Spirituality
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The Popol Vuh
Lewis Spence presents the Kiché Maya creation narrative, the defeat of Vukub-Cakix, the Hero Twins’ harrying of Xibalba, and the emergence and history of humankind, then sets the stories within a comparative study of Mesoamerican religion.
Myth and epic
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The Book of the Cave of Treasures
An ancient Syriac sacred history carries the biblical story from Creation to Christ, weaving Adam’s relics, the patriarchs, the Flood, Melchizedek, the Magi, and the treasures hidden in the cave into a single late-antique vision of salvation history.
Spirituality
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Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud asks why civilization, built to protect and organize human life, also makes its members unhappy, tracing the conflict among desire, aggression, conscience, guilt, and the cultural demands that bind people together.
Psychology
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber traces how disciplined Protestant ideas of vocation, proof, and worldly asceticism helped form the rational conduct and moral temper of modern capitalism, even after their religious roots receded.
Philosophy and ideas
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The Misanthrope
Alceste demands absolute honesty from a society sustained by flattery, accommodation, and performance, while loving Célimène, the most brilliant practitioner of the manners he despises.
Drama
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Alice in Wonderland
Alice follows a White Rabbit into Wonderland, then passes through a looking-glass into a living chessboard: two adventures of logic, language, identity, and inexhaustible nonsense in one volume.
Essential novels
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The complete final collection of the Brothers Grimm: two hundred fairy tales and ten legends, from Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White to the stranger reaches of the German folk tradition.
Myth and legend
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The Complete Tales and Poems
Poe’s complete tales and poems: Gothic terror, ratiocinative mysteries, satire, speculative voyages, dream visions, and the haunted lyric music of The Raven, Annabel Lee, and Ulalume.
Gothic and strange
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One Thousand and One Nights
Scheherazade’s inexhaustible night-world of framed stories, voyages, jinn, merchants, lovers, rulers, rogues, and marvels, presented in the full sixteen-volume Burton corpus.
Myth and legend
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The Unfortunate Traveller
Jack Wilton, page, trickster, soldier, and involuntary witness, crosses a violent sixteenth-century Europe in Thomas Nashe’s restless, grotesque, and darkly comic prose fiction.
Essential novels
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The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Love’s Labour’s Lost
Love’s Labour’s Lost, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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As You Like It
As You Like It, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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All’s Well That Ends Well
All’s Well That Ends Well, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Edward III
Edward III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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King John
King John, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Richard II
Richard II, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Henry IV, Parts I & II
Henry IV, Parts I & II, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part I, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Henry V
Henry V, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Henry VI, Parts I–III
Henry VI, Parts I–III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Richard III
Richard III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Henry VIII
Henry VIII, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Hamlet
Hamlet, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Othello
Othello, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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King Lear
King Lear, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Macbeth
Macbeth, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Coriolanus
Coriolanus, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Cymbeline
Cymbeline, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Winter’s Tale
The Winter’s Tale, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Tempest
The Tempest, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens & The Two Noble Kinsmen
Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens & The Two Noble Kinsmen, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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The Sonnets
The Sonnets, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Poetry
Poetry, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
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Red Cavalry
Thirty-four despatches from a Cossack regiment in the Polish campaign, written by the Jewish intellectual riding with it, each a few pages long and none of them comfortable.
Short fiction
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Fairy Tales and Other Stories
The tin soldier, the sea maid, the match girl and the emperor's new clothes, in the plain and unsoftened English of the Craigies' 1914 translation.
Short fiction
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Great Expectations
Pip's unexpected fortune draws him away from the marshes and into a painful education in love, loyalty, and gentility.
Essential novels
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Frankenstein
Victor Frankenstein gives life to a being he immediately rejects, setting creator and creation on a path toward ruin.
Gothic and strange
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Dracula
Journals, letters, and records recount Count Dracula's journey to England and the desperate pursuit that follows.
Gothic and strange
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait might age in his place, and discovers the cost of a life without restraint.
Gothic and strange
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Meditations
The Roman emperor's private reflections on reason, duty, mortality, and living in accordance with nature.
Philosophy and ideas
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Walden
Thoreau's account of two years at Walden Pond examines simplicity, self-reliance, nature, labor, and the terms of a deliberate life.
Philosophy and ideas
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Mrs Dalloway
Across one June day in London, Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party while private memory and public life converge around her.
Modernism
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Dubliners
Fifteen stories trace Dublin lives from childhood through maturity, culminating in Joyce's great winter meditation, “The Dead.”
Modernism
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The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway observes Jay Gatsby's glittering pursuit of a lost love and the ruin hidden beneath Long Island wealth.
Modernism
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What is an OPDS catalogue?
It is a bookshelf list that reading apps can understand. The list tells Commonplace each book’s title, cover, and download address. When a new edition is added here, the app can find it without putting the book inside an app update.