FAMOUS AUTHORS
Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.
The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.
Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.
Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.
Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.
Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.
Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.
Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.
The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.
Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.
Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.
Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.
Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.
Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.
TEXTBOOKS
Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.
Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.
KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.
Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.
Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.
MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.
Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.
Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.
Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.
eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.
MATH AND SCIENCE
FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.
Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.
Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.
Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.
FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.
Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.
Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.
International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.
Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.
Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.
Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.
The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.
Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.
PLAYS
ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.
Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.
Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”
ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.
MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE
Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.
The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.
Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.
Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.
Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.
The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.
Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.
John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.
SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.
Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.
ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.
Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.
Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.
Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.
KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.
Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.
Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.
Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.
Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.
Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.
Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.
Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.
CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.
HISTORY AND CULTURE
LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.
The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.
Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.
Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.
Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.
RARE BOOKS
Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.
Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.
Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.
2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.
Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.
Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.
Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.
Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.
MYSTERY
MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.
TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.
Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.
POETRY
The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.
Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”
Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.
Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.
Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.
QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.
CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.
PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.
MISC
Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.
World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.
DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.
A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.
Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.
ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.
Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.
Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.
What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.
Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.
Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!
First of all, a lot of what you think of as “grammar” is actually orthography. Should I put a comma here? How do I spell this word in this context? These are questions of orthography (which is a fancy Greek word meaning “correct-writing”). In fact, most of the “grammar questions” you’ll see posted online pertain to orthography; this number probably doubles in spaces for writers specifically.
If you’re a native speaker of English, your grammar is probably flawless and unremarkable for the purposes of writing prose. Instead, orthography refers to the set rules governing spelling, punctuation, and whitespace. There are a few things you should know about orthography:
English has no single orthography. You already know spelling and punctuation differ from country to country, but did you know it can even differ from publisher to publisher? Some newspapers will set parenthetical statements apart with em dashes—like this, with no spaces—while others will use slightly shorter dashes – like this, with spaces – to name just one example.
Orthography is boring, and nobody cares about it or knows what it is. For most readers, orthography is “invisible”. Readers pay attention to the words on a page, not the paper itself; in much the same way, readers pay attention to the meaning of a text and not the orthography, which exists only to convey that meaning.
That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Actually, that means it’s of the utmost importance. Because orthography can only be invisible if it meets the reader’s expectations.
You need to learn how to format dialogue into paragraphs. You need to learn when to end a quote with a comma versus a period. You need to learn how to use apostrophes, colons and semicolons. You need to learn these things not so you can win meaningless brownie points from your English teacher for having “Good Grammar”, but so that your prose looks like other prose the reader has consumed.
If you printed a novel on purple paper, you’d have the reader wondering: why purple? Then they’d be focusing on the paper and not the words on it. And you probably don’t want that! So it goes with orthography: whenever you deviate from standard practices, you force the reader to work out in their head whether that deviation was intentional or a mistake. Too much of that can destroy the flow of reading and prevent the reader from getting immersed.
You may chafe at this idea. You may think these “rules” are confusing and arbitrary. You’re correct to think that. They’re made the fuck up! What matters is that they were made the fuck up collaboratively, by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. Whether you like it or not, you are part of that collaboration: you’re not the first person to write prose, and you can’t expect yours to be the first prose your readers have ever read.
That doesn’t mean “never break the rules”, mind you. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with English orthography, then you are free to break it as you please. Knowing what’s expected gives you the power to do unexpected things on purpose. And that’s the really cool shit.
Nobody is saying this. Only I am brave enough to say it.
Well, bye!
(I will boop everyone who reblogs this post, for the record 💖)
screen cap redraws
I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.
Deku's Birth [pixie au]
And a small after-snippet:
Save to Win
"they should teach media literacy in schools" english class "they should teach students how to spot misinformation" it's english class "they should teach kids critical thinking" it's called english class
Whew! This set took a lot of tweaking, but I really love how they came out! 🤩 This is another 10 generation challenge, this time it's the Solar System Legacy Challenge by @ginovasims
Graphics by me! 🖤 I had to paraphrase a few of them for the sake of space, but hopefully it's still clear. What challenge should I make graphics for next??
big fan of 'i'd find you in every universe'. BIGGER fan of 'there are maybe five universes where we find each other and in four of them it ends badly i think we're some kind of anomaly i think every law of everything points towards this being the death of us. but we could try to save it anyway.' THATS the good shit.
passenger princess? No, I’m the passenger knight. I’ve sworn an oath of homoerotic loyalty to the driver and will protect them until my last breath. I will carry out her road rage. I’m why the front passenger seat is called shotgun