Miles returns from school for the summer just after a letter arrives from the headmaster informing his caretakers that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears there is some horrible secret behind the expulsion.

"It contains the whole of India,—incalculably rich, unspeakably poor: with its teeming cities, barbaric, uralt; its forgotten temples crumbling to decay in the dusk of "caverns measureless to man;" its ravenous holy rivers and heart-breaking stretches of burning plain, and the overpowering grandeur of that mountain barrier upon the north, which dwarfs all the other highlands of the globe into practicable hills."

This black-and-white edition of Kipling's classic contains the original illustrations by Maurice and Edward J. Detmold. A full-color edition is also available.

The Jungle Book is an 1894 collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, although a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Most stories are set in a forest in India. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood.

Kipling's classic seafaring novel with full-color illustrations from the artwork of Henry Scott Tuke (also available in black and white edition).

Women in Love (1920) is D.H. Lawrence's most accomplished exploration of homosexual desire. Lawrence and his wife Frieda appear in the novel as Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Rupert and Ursula's tumultuous friendships with the couple Gerald and Gudrun in the novel are based at least in part on the relationship Lawrence and his wife had with John Middleton-Murray and Katherine Mansfield. While writing the novel Lawrence also became sexually involved with a farmer from Cornwall.

The Iron Heel has been hailed by some critics as the greatest of all dystopian novels. Published in 1908, the novel is a prophetic warning of the dangers of capitalist excess. The Oligarchy, a monopoly trust, has gained control and is in the process of squeezing out and shutting down small to midsize businesses and making farmers subservient to their wishes. They are opposed by the Brotherhood of Man, a group that embraces London's idea of a socialist collective.

Jack London's The Scarlet Plague, written in 1910, stands as one of the first dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels in literature. The story takes place in an unrecognizably savage America in 2073, sixty years after a plague ravaged the world. This edition contains the original illustrations by American painter Gordon Hope Grant.

Something of a cross between Captains Courageous and Billy Budd, Jack London's The Sea-Wolf is a psychological sea story. Humphrey Van Weyden, a literary critic, survives an ocean collision only to come under the dominance of Wolf Larsen, the powerful and amoral sea captain who rescues him, then both bullies him and nurtures him.

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Sir Thomas Malory weaves together legendary tales of King Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and the Knights of the Round Table.

This classic work is about a one-sided romance between an older German author on vacation in Venice and a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, age fourteen.

After Melville died, his wife discovered he had left behind Billy Budd, which many critics think the equal of Moby Dick. Never had Melville written a more effective plea for humanity, told a better story, or written a novel with more homoeroticism. Thomas Mann, who knew a thing or two about beautiful literature, called it, "One of the most beautiful stories in the world."

After publishing two works of autobiographical fiction that many readers found implausible (Typee and Omoo), Melville set about writing a work of fiction to see if the public might find it more believable. Mardi, however, is far more than the South Seas adventure of the first two novels. The book contains some of Melville's most splendid descriptions of nature and also substantial samples of the philosophical musings that would make Moby Dick famous.

"Omoo is a fascinating book; picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville, as a bit of a beachcomber. It is good reading. Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo. For once he is really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche.... For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals, careless of his ideals... That is good about Melville: he never repents."

"Redburn [is] one of [Melville's] most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. ... Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton... Nothing in Melville is more beautifully expressed than the mood of early sorrow in the forlorn passage at the opening of Redburn." -- Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books

Typee, a semi-autobiographical work, is Melville’s first novel. Like all his work, it is infused with a latent homoeroticism and is important not only as literature but as philosophical, psychological, and anthropological commentary. Most of all, however, it is a fine story that captured the public’s imagination and remained one of Melville’s most popular works throughout his lifetime.

This Classroom Edition of Melville's classic first novel contains questions for discussion to help students with reading comprehension, critical thinking, and a close reading of the text.

"Jack Chase, the educated, manly friend in White Jacket, was an actual shipmate never to be forgotten. … Chase stayed in the heart, forever cherished, the only unwavering, beyond the family, friendship of Melville’s life. In White Jacket he is addressed: ‘Wherever you may now be rolling over the blue billows, dear Jack! take my best love along with you, and God bless you, wherever you go!’" - Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Review of Books

"Plague Ship is a rip-snortingly inventive yarn that’s one of [Andrew North's] better novels, a combination of medical mystery, anthropological adventure and space gallop." - Patrick T. Reardon

Fifteen-year-old Graham dreams of a Greek friend whom he loves deeply. His father shatters this dream by sending him away to school, but Graham astonishingly meets a boy named Harold who looks exactly like his Greek god. Graham falls deeply in love.

Rafael Sabatini's seafaring novels are that rare delight: a fast-paced action and adventure beach read that is also literate and delightfully amusing. The Sea-Wolf was Sabatini's most popular novel and is regarded as a classic of the genre. The story involves a seafaring Cornish gentleman who is betrayed by a villanous half-brother, forced to serve as a galley slave, and is rescued by Barbary pirates. He joins them to plot his revenge.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a living being from assembled body parts. The novel explores themes of creation, responsibility, and the consequences of playing God.

“The world teeters in collective anxiety in the midst of a pandemic. A novel and lethal plague spreads its tentacles around the earth. It ravages human populations and simultaneously undermines their interconnected economic and political systems. … This story line should sound familiar. But I am not summarizing the news headlines about Covid-19. I am recalling the plot of a great work of literature. It is Mary Shelley’s futuristic novel about a global plague, The Last Man.” – New York Times

A hunting accident in which an older, athletic, and well-liked boy wounds a younger, delicate boy leads to an unlikely friendship that is marred only by the jealousy of the younger boy's father and, later, the older boy's girlfriend.

Bayard Taylor's novel, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which he considered his most successful work despite it being received poorly by the public, recounts an intimate friendship between two men and is believed to be based on that between the poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The book is now regarded as the first American gay novel. It was published fifty-eight years before British author Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928).

“Kerr has said that every attachment has two sides: one loves, and the other allows himself to be loved; one kisses, and the other surrenders his cheek. That is perfectly true. In the case of our own attachment it was I who kissed, and Dimitri who surrendered his cheek—though he, in his turn, was ready to pay me a similar salute. We loved equally because we knew and appreciated each other thoroughly, but this did not prevent...[me] from rendering him adoration."

Why is Huckleberry Finn a classic novel, often cited as the greatest in American literature? There are many reasons, but perhaps the most important is that the book contains one of the most profound junctures in American literature, when Huck Finn, who has been brought up to believe in a literal hell with its eternal fire and gnashing of teeth, writes a letter turning in his friend Jim, a runaway slave, so that his conscious will be clear and he can pray—but instead his conscious won’t let him s

The Hill is one of a trilogy of British boarding school novels that captured the public imagination. As with Tom Brown's Schooldays and Lord, Dismiss Us, the novel struck a chord in the hearts of Englishmen of its generation--in this case, the generation that would soon be sent to fight the First World War. As a beautiful story of friendship, the novel retains its relevance today.

The Sleeper Awakes is a dystopian, science fiction story about a man, Graham, who sleeps two hundred and three years, awaking to a London he barely recognizes. Among his many surprises, he finds that due to compound interest, he is now one of the world’s wealthiest men. The twist is that his fortune has been placed in a trust, governed by a group of capitalists called the White Council, and has been instrumental in establishing a new world order. And what a world order it is!

These stories, first told by Oscar Wilde at dinner parties, were originally published in two volumes titled Stories for Children. When asked directly if such intricate stories in the second volume as “The Fisherman and His Soul” were intended for children, Wilde replied, "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public." That disclaimer aside, there is much for adults to like in these deceptively simple tales.

This is the overtly homoerotic original version of Oscar Wilde's novel published in 1890.

This volume contains the original, overtly homoerotic version of the book that first appeared in 1890. Following the novel is a series of critical reviews of the book along with letters defending his work, which Wilde wrote to the various publication editors. There is also a detailed list of the passages expurgated from this first edition along with an account of Wilde's trial, in which the prosecutor constantly refers, quite naturally, to the original edition in trying to portray Wilde as homos

A collection of short dystopias focusing on plagues. Includes well-known works such as Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," as well as more contemporary fiction such as Charles Dye's "Syndrome Johnny," and a couple of historically-based accounts, including Jens Peter Jacobsen's "The Plague in Bergamo," which details an earlier plague set in the same city that is the epicenter of Italy's 2020 COVID-19 epidemic.

A collection of delightful fairy tales from around the world especially chosen to appeal to charming cross-dressers and their devoted friends and fans.

A collection of favorite fairy tales from around the globe known to appeal to the imagination of boys.

A collection of favorite fairy tales from folk culture around the globe.