Serapis: 289 books

Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, this is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions tempts its main character into breaking his vows. This edition is based on the first edition of 1796, which appeared before Lewis’s revisions to avoid charges of blasphemy.

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray. The subtitle, A Novel without a Hero, is apt because the characters are all flawed to a greater or lesser degree; even the most sympathetic have weaknesses, for example Captain Dobbin, who is prone to vanity...

The Story of O is an erotic novel about love, dominance and submission by French author Pauline Reage. A tale of female submission about a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who is blindfolded, chained, whipped, branded, pierced, made to wear a mask, and taught to be constantly available...

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore, 5 July 1821.

The story is the first to mention Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. It is also notable as one of the first depictions of zombies as scientifically reanimated corpses, with animalistic and uncontrollable temperament. The narrator is a doctor who went to medical school with the titular character....

The novel centers, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot...

Astounding tales of the weird and fantastic. This is one of the few titles of fiction written by the famous Mme. Blavatsky. Content: a Bewitched Life, the Cave of the Echoes, the Luminous Shield, from the Polar Lands, the Ensouled Violin

Now it was on this flat plain, between the uplands of the two rivers and the sea, that the cradle of mankind was first rocked, and that the infant human race first opened its eyes and began to see what a wonderful place this world might be. Later, the uplands lying further up the rivers became important...

Ancient Rome was an Italic civilization that began on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants. In...

A story of the wildest kind of adventure in the only place in America where there are still cannibals. It is the strange story of a man who thought he had killed another and to escape punishment by death fled to Peru. Adventures more exciting than Tarzan's in a land more weird and wonderful.

Every action of body or mind which we do, every thought which we think, becomes fine, and is stored up in the form of a Samskâra or impression in our minds. It remains latent for some time, and then it rises up in the form of a mental wave and produces new desires. These desires are called in Vedanta,...

THE following pages are derived from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," one of the works put into the hands of mystic students in the East. The knowledge of them is obligatory in that school. For, unless a man perseveres seriously in the pursuit of self-knowledge, he will never lend a willing...

The purpose of these this book is to describe in concise outline the Doctrine of Evolution, its basis in the facts of natural history, and its wide and universal scope. They fall naturally into two groups. Those of the first part deal with matters of definition, with the essential characteristics...

Isis first pours out for Horos the sweet draught of immortality which souls receive from the Gods, and thus begins the most holy discourse. Heaven, crowned with stars, is placed above universal nature, O my son Horos, and nothing is wanting to it of that which constitutes the whole world. It is necessary,...