A mysterious minister who never removes the black veil shrouding his face, an eccentric scientist who experiments with the fate of his friends, a cheerful tombstone carver who speaks the wisdom of the graveyard, these are but a few of the unusual New Englanders you'll meet in Twice-Told Tales.

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself sailing to Japan aboard the Ghost, he has to face weeks of brutality at the hands of Captain Wolf Larsen, until he decides to take desperate measures to save himself and the rest of the crew.

A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.

This is Mark Twain's humorous and poetic evocation of the history of the river. He recounts his years as a boy during the heyday of the steamboat era, the fulfillment of his dream of becoming a steamboat pilot, and above all, his love for the river. It also records his return to the Mississippi two decades later, to a way of life that had all but passed.

Eighteen sketches of the island-hopping warfare in the South Pacific during World War II.

"Set at the time of the Jacobite uprising, The Master of Ballantrae tells of a family divided. James Durie, Master of Ballantrae, abandons his ancestral home to support the Scottish rebellion--leaving his younger brother Henry, who is faithful to the English crown, to inherit the title of Lord Durrisdeer. But he is to return years later, embittered by battles and a savage life of piracy on the high seas, to demand his inheritance. Turning the people...

Through the intervention of four ghosts, Ebenezer Scrooge is shown the spirit of Christmas.

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to What he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the White Army and the Bolshevik Reds of the Russian civil war. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's...