The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories Conan Doyle published in book form, following the popular success of the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which introduced the characters of Dr. John Watson and the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes. The collection contains twelve stories, all originally published in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892. Narrated by the first-person voice of Dr. Watson, they involve him and Holmes solving a series of mysterious cases. Some of the more well-known stories in this collection are “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in which Holmes comes up against a worthy opponent in the form of Irene Adler, whom Holmes forever after admiringly refers to as the woman; “The Redheaded League,” involving a bizarre scheme offering a well-paid sinecure to redheaded men; and “The Speckled Band,” in which Holmes and Watson save a young woman from a terrible death.

The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English. This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.

Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker. Running away from this situation, he walks to London and falls under the influence of a criminal gang run by an old man called Fagin, who wants to employ the child as a pickpocket. The novel graphically depicts the wretched living conditions of much of the poor people of Victorian times and the disgusting slums in which they were forced to live. It has been accused of perpetrating anti-Semitic stereotypes in the character of Fagin, almost always referred to as “the Jew” in the book’s early chapters. Interestingly, while the serial was still running in the magazine, Dickens was eventually persuaded that he was wrong in this and removed many such usages in later episodes. He also introduced more kindly Jewish characters in such later novels as Our Mutual Friend. Oliver Twist was immediately popular in serial form, with its often gripping story and lurid details. It has remained one of Dickens’ best-loved novels, and the story has often been made into films and television series, as well as into a very popular musical, Oliver!.

Walking along a mountain path towards a remote hot springs hotel, our unnamed protagonist muses on his theory of “unhumanity” and his hopes that it will break him out of his creative block. On arrival, the town itself has plenty of unhumanity on display, but while poems on those subjects spring easily to mind, painting still eludes him. Will the mysterious Nami-san, the daughter of the hotel owner, be the catalyst that unlocks that frustratingly out-of-reach art? Natsume Sōseki was already a household name in Japan after his previous novels I Am a Cat and Botchan, but it was the success of Kusamakura that allowed him to give up his role as a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University to focus on writing. Kusamakura translates to English directly as “grass pillow,” which for the Japanese reader has a connotation of a poetic wandering; for this edition Takahashi Kazutomo added the subtitle “Unhuman Tour” to bring the same feeling to the translation.

Whose Body?, published in 1923, is the first in a long and very popular series of mystery novels written by Dorothy L. Sayers and featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. In this novel we are introduced to Wimsey, his imperturbable and multi-skilled butler Bunter, and his close friend Charles Parker of Scotland Yard as they come together to investigate an extremely mysterious incident: the naked body of a man, wearing a golden pince-nez, has been discovered in the bath of a bewildered tenant of a flat in Battersea. There’s a good deal of humor in the book, carefully balanced against the grim reality of murder. Whose Body? was well-received on first publication, and provided a basis for Sayer’s successful career as a novelist. In sum, she wrote some eleven Wimsey novels as well as several short stories featuring the characters. Nevertheless, it appears that she herself felt that her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was her greatest literary work.

D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, the United State’s first spaceship. A life of calculations and equations in the United State leaves little room for emotional expression outside of the pink slips that give one private time with another Number. The façade however starts to crack when I-330, a mysterious she-Number with a penchant for the Ancients, enters the picture. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s fourth novel, was written in 1920–21, but remained unpublished until its English release in 1924 due to conditions in the Soviet Union at the time (it was eventually published there in 1988). Its dystopian future setting predates Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, and it’s now considered a founding member of the genre. It has been translated into English and other languages many times; presented here is the original 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg.

Three male explorers set out to reach a legendary land where only women live, and find—to their surprise—that the legends are true. This country hidden in the mountains is a feminist utopia. There are no men, nor is there war, poverty, or crime. The residents subsist on food from cultivated forests, maintain immaculate houses and roads, and reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis. Although the main characters are men, their role is to show us how their notions about society and womanhood are humorously upturned. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an outspoken activist and suffragist, most famous nowadays for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As a writer, she was stunningly prolific. She founded The Forerunner, a monthly magazine for which she personally wrote every article, story, and poem. Because she chose to run no advertisements, she covered the cost of printing the magazine herself. In contrast to many women’s publications of the day, Gilman advocated for equal rights and expanded social roles for women. Originally published serially in The Forerunner in 1915, Herland was not republished as a standalone work until decades later. It is the second in Gilman’s Utopian trilogy, along with Moving the Mountain and With Her in Ourland.

Jeeves Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the adventures of his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster. Wooster is a wealthy and idle young English gentleman of the interwar era. Jeeves is his extraordinarily competent valet whose name has since become synonymous with perfect service. The stories follow Wooster in his wanderings about London, around England, and across the Atlantic to New York, with Jeeves following in his wake and striving to keep his employer well-groomed and properly presented. Along the way Jeeves must somehow also manage to extricate Wooster and his friends from the various scrapes and follies they get themselves into. First published as early as 1915, the stories first appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine. They were later collected into books or reworked into novels. Though only less than 50 of Wodehouse’s over 300 short stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, they remain his most enduring characters. They’ve been copied, imitated, and featured in countless interpretations and adaptations. A century later, these stories still are as amusing and entertaining as they were when they were first published.

Even though Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he was also a prolific novelist, and The Lost World is one of his more famous non-Sherlock novels. Like many novels of the day, it was first published serially. In it we meet a group of adventurers who head to a deep South American jungle to explore rumors of long-lost dinosaurs. The plot is driven by their journey, discoveries, and subsequent narrow escape. Notably, The Lost World is the novel in which Doyle’s popular recurring character, Professor Challenger, is introduced. Doyle based many of the characters and locations on people and places he was familiar with: the journalist Ed Malone was modeled on E. D. Morel, and Lord John Roxton on Roger Casement; the Lost World itself was based on descriptions of Bolivia in letters sent to Doyle by his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett. The novel remains hugely influential and widely adapted today. The title might even remind modern readers of a certain very famous movie franchise about dinosaur theme parks!

In A Princess of Mars, John Carter is transported to a Mars inhabited by strange civilizations and embarks on various adventures on his quest home. Often held up as a seminal example of pulp science fiction, A Princess of Mars is the first entry in Burroughs’ epic Martian series, and the first to feature the character of John Carter. Though often categorized as just a pulp adventure tale, A Princess of Mars was hugely influential on many budding science fiction writers, professional scientists, and explorers of the day. The novel remains a light, fast-paced, and enjoyable read, and continues to inspire adaptations nearly a hundred years after its publication.