Best-selling Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery published the first book in her charming series in 1908, making it a literary favorite for more than a hundred years. Published as a children's novel, the story of Anne Shirley, an orphan, was inspired by the author's childhood adventures on rural Prince Edward Island. It follows Anne's journey as she moves to a farm on Prince Edward Island to live with a middle-aged brother and sister who had intended to adopt a boy to help them with farming chores. The story follows Anne as she makes a home and comes of age on the island.

Anne of...

A classic piece of children's literature first published as a novel in 1911, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden is a story of transformation and renewal. Unwanted by her parents, Mary Lennox, a spoiled, selfish young girl is raised in India by servants. When cholera breaks out killing her parents and most of the servants, Mary is sent to live with a mostly absent uncle in England. It seems as though no one cares for Mary, and that Mary will never care for anyone--until she steps into the secret garden, and her life begins to change. Now available from Canterbury Classics, this...

Best-selling author Alexandre Dumas--who also wrote The Three Musketeers--tells this heartbreaking yet heroic tale of Edmond Dantes who takes revenge on the men responsible for his unjust fourteen-year imprisonment, keeping him from the woman he loved and the life he was supposed to live.

- This chic and inexpensive edition comes with a heat-burnished cover, foil stamping, luxurious endpapers, and a smaller trim size that's easy to hold.
- This widely popular classic, originally written in French, tells a tale of devastating consequences for the innocent as well as the guilty....

We all know the movie and storyline well. But have you ever read the original novel? Influenced by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum created this classic story and fantasy using the dream of young Dorothy on her journey home to demonstrate the theme of good vs. evil. Throughout her adventure, she encounters several newfound friends: a scarecrow, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion. They traverse the land of Oz together by following the famous yellow brick road to the stunning Emerald City. Though they encounter surprises along the way, what they find in the Emerald...

Most famous in the realm of holiday literature for his 1843 publication, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens was in fact a prolific writer in the yuletide genre and a great contributor to many now-prevalent traditions of the holiday itself. In 1944, A Christmas Carol, Dickens released The Chimes: A Christmas Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, which combined his usual sympathy for the poor with the notion that we must always strive to live in nobler ways. In 1845 came the novella The Cricket on the Hearth. The years 1846 and 1848...

The idea for the story came to the author, Mary Shelley, in a dream she had about a scientist who had created life and was horrified by what he had made. This Gothic-style romance is among the first of true science fiction novels, if not the first. A young scientist named Victor Frankenstein, after going through his own near-death experience, decides to play God and create life in the form of a grotesque creature, which turns into a nightmare. Through his experience, he learns that the gift of life is precious, not disposable. His journey and personal transformation has deeply affected...

Aesop was a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece around 620-564 BC. No writings by him exist (if they ever existed at all), yet numerous stories and tales have been credited to him and have been shared through oral tradition throughout the world. Many of these use animals as the main characters to convey deeper meanings and morals that have become ingrained in our cultural--and personal--belief systems. For example, in "The Goatherd and the Goat" we learn that there is no use trying to hide what can't be hidden. In "The Ass and the Purchaser" we find that people are known by the...

First released in serial form in 1844, a year before Dumas' publication of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers was an instant success, largely due to Dumas' transformation of the historical fiction genre. In The Three Musketeers, contrary to popular practice at the time, history acted as a backdrop for the story rather than the primary element, making it a fun and accessible read. The story follows young d'Artagnan and his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis as they defend honor amidst the power struggles of 17th-century France. Still popular with readers today, this...

"Call me Ishmael" is the iconic opening line of Herman Melville's classic American novel, Moby-Dick. Ishmael is a seaman aboard the whaling vessel, Pequod, under the vengeful captain, Ahab. Maniacally seeking retribution from the great white sperm whale called Moby-Dick -- the whale responsible for the captain's missing leg -- Ahab leads the crew on a quest to kill the infamous beast. A fictional work based on actual events, Moby-Dick is a classic that has been enjoyed for generations and is now available as part of the Word Cloud Classic series, making it a...

Dated to about the fifth century B.C., The Art of War is considered the world's oldest treatise on war. Attributed to Sun Tzu of the Zhou dynasty, the book is composed of 13 chapters, each addressing a particular aspect of warfare such as planning offenses, military combat, and the employment of spies. Influential in Eastern civilization for millennia and in Western culture since its first translation in the 18th century, the teachings of this book have been applied to scenarios as varied as office politics, the Vietnam War, and American football. Now this living military heirloom is...