Standard Ebooks - Newest Ebooks

Banjo

2026-05-19T17:51:50Z

Banjo, Claude McKay’s second novel, follows a band of beachcombers made up of members of the African diaspora as they live as vagrants in Marseilles. Their de facto leader is the titular Banjo, an easygoing African-American musician and veteran of World War I, who aspires to assemble the band of beach boys into an orchestra. The novel also follows Ray, an itinerant Haitian writer and intellectual who debuted in McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem. Structured as a series of vignettes, Banjo explores themes of Pan-Africanism and transnational racial identity in its depiction of the international black precariat.

Bel Ami

2026-05-18T19:26:15Z

Georges Duroy returns to Paris from military service in Algeria penniless. After meeting up with an old friend, he finds journalism work at a renowned newspaper. He gradually climbs the ranks to chief-editor—but all this time, he hasn’t been using his wit as a writer, but rather the clever manipulation of the women around him, to get ahead.

Bel Ami is Guy de Maupassant’s second novel. It was first published in 1885 and was an instant success, with fifty more editions appearing in the following two years. This translation by Vizetelly & Co. was published in 1888. Bel Ami shows the rampant corruption prevalent in 19th century French high society.

Saïd the Fisherman

2026-05-14T18:16:19Z

Saïd is a fisherman who has carefully saved up a small fortune to buy a coffeehouse. He imagines this to be the start of his upward climb in social status, until his savings mysteriously disappear. Convinced that this is the work of a jinni, he packs up his belongings and leaves with his wife, headed for a new start somewhere else.

Along the way, Saïd gets ahead smoothly by cunning and thievery, yet his fortunes are just as easily reversed by a turn of luck or the trickery of others.

After some rises and falls in his fortunes, Saïd is finally established as a merchant—but will his relentless greed cause his downfall?

Perishable Goods

2026-05-13T14:56:03Z

Jonathan Mansel, leader of the Blind Corner expedition, has been robbed; but they’ve taken none of the money in his safe—just a bundle of letters. The thieves, however, knew specifically what they were looking for: the letters were from the wife of a close friend, and Mansel is worried that the contents may have exposed his weakness to his enemies. Sure enough, when she goes missing during a riding excursion while on holiday in Austria, and a ransom demand for half a million pounds arrives, it’s obvious who’s behind this. The next day, Mansel along with his friends and trusty dog are back in the Rolls and speeding through Europe on a rescue mission.

In Perishable Goods, set six months after the events of Blind Corner, we see the newly rich and professionally idle Richard Chandos and friends once again pitted against the inimitable Rose Noble. Dornford Yates, buoyed by the success of his first Chandos novel, brings the same characters together again, but this time the protagonists are not motivated by money, but by love. Many of the same themes are revisited: struggles against a powerful enemy, desperate escapes from impossible situations, and, of course, the great houses of Austria, which are almost a character in and of themselves.

Sailing Alone Around the World

2026-05-13T14:50:37Z

In 1898 Joshua Slocum completed the first solo circumnavigation of the earth. His voyage in his thirty-six foot sailboat Spray is still considered to be one of the greatest nautical feats of all time—and this, his first-person account of the voyage, is one of the all-time classics of adventure literature.

During his three-year, 46,000 mile journey, Slocum faces the kinds of trials you might expect—storms, monster waves, dangerous shoals, powerful currents, and more. But he also has to contend with everything from pirates armed with bows and arrows, to a stowaway goat, to villagers who are convinced he’s the Antichrist.

Slocum’s prose wonderfully combines details of his day-to-day life at sea with meditations on the beauties and dangers of the ocean, all with a touch of a 19th-century New Englander’s sense of humor. It’s a tale that has charmed sailors and landlubbers alike for more than a century.

The Fifth Queen Crowned

2026-05-13T13:53:56Z

With Thomas Cromwell fallen and her rival’s schemes in ruins, Katharine Howard stands at the summit of Tudor power as Henry VIII’s crowned queen. Yet the court she now presides over is no less treacherous for the removal of its greatest schemer. Around her, Protestant and Catholic factions maneuver ceaselessly for mastery of the king’s conscience, and the very virtues that won Katharine Henry’s devotion—her candor, her learning, her uncompromising piety—make her enemies as readily as they make her friends.

Ford Madox Ford’s concluding volume of The Fifth Queen trilogy traces the arc of Katharine’s brief reign with the impressionistic intensity that distinguishes the previous books. Henry himself is rendered with remarkable ambivalence: a man of genuine intelligence and feeling whose will is at the mercy of his moods and of the whispers that reach him through layers of courtly deception. Katharine, idealistic to the last, believes she can restore the old faith and reform the king’s court by the force of moral example alone, a conviction that her adversaries, from Archbishop Cranmer to the spy Lascelles, find easier to exploit than to refute.

Praised by Joseph Conrad as “a noble conception,” the trilogy concludes here with an inevitability that feels both tragic and dignified.

Dr. Wortle’s School

2026-05-09T16:09:18Z

Dr. Wortle, village rector and headmaster, needs a respectable married couple to serve as assistant master and matron of the school he runs. Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke seem to be the perfect candidates, and soon settle into life in the quiet town of Bowick. But in a society where reputation is everything, rumors about their past cause a scandal that threatens to upend the Doctor’s quiet life.

In this 1879 novel, written just three years before Trollope’s death, Trollope uses the Doctor’s predicament to explore the difficult choices that must be made when rigid social and moral codes stand in conflict with personal integrity and simple human compassion.

The Nature of a Crime

2026-05-09T15:44:04Z

The unnamed narrator of The Nature of a Crime is a lawyer in a difficult situation: he has been entrusted with looking after the assets of a wealthy family—but he’s lost most of it gambling. Some small portion remains, and he still has hopes of recovering his losses. But when his client announces that he’s getting married and requires his funds returned immediately, the narrator finds himself on the verge of suicide. He writes letters to his lover explaining his predicament in an attempt to come to terms with his actions.

This short story, first published in 1909, is the last of three collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. It never saw contemporary critical or commercial success and thus remained out of print for many years. In 1924 it was reissued with new prefaces by the authors written about two months before Conrad’s death.

Hamilton

2026-05-08T02:41:32Z

Founding father Alexander Hamilton is enticed into an extramarital affair by Mrs. Reynolds, perhaps with the connivance of his political enemies, then blackmailed by her husband. When his payments to her husband are exposed, Hamilton is accused of exploiting his office. Will Hamilton sacrifice his personal honor and future ambitions to preserve the integrity of the office? The play is based on historical fact, but condenses the timeline, capturing the essence of Hamilton’s sincerity, dedication, honor, and courage.

The Walls of Jericho

2026-05-06T20:17:56Z

When Fred Merrit, a wealthy and light-skinned black lawyer, decides to move into an exclusively white neighborhood in Manhattan, he hires three of the toughest movers in Harlem, Joshua “Shine” Jones, Jinx Jenkins, and Bubber Brown, to bring his possessions safely into his new home. Under the surface, all is not well. Fred Merrit’s new neighbors, like the haughty Miss Agatha Cramp, resent his intrusion into their neighborhood, while the working-class “rats” of the Harlem community resent the cultural mores of professional “dickties” like Fred Merrit. These confrontations all come to the fore in The Walls of Jericho, a comedy of manners depicting everyday life during the Harlem Renaissance.

The Wolf-Leader

2026-05-04T18:15:14Z

Thibault, a French shoemaker in his mid twenties, has his craft and the possibility of marriage with Agnelette, but he’s unhappy with his status in society and wants to move up the social ladder. A contretemps with the Baron of Vez leads to Thibault’s failed attempt to poach a deer from the Baron’s land, but Thibault’s wishes are unexpectedly answered when a black wolf that walks on its hind legs—and speaks!—delivers him the buck. The wolf explains that Thibault can have anything he desires, in exchange for just a few of his hairs. The wishes granted by this compact become reality—but not necessarily in the way that Thibault expects.

The Wolf-Leader, written in 1857, isn’t considered to be one of Dumas’ classic works, but it remains of interest as an early example of werewolf fiction. Many of the werewolf tropes modern readers are familiar with aren’t present in this work: rather, the werewolf is primarily an agent of the devil, sent to tempt Christians away from the moral life. Dumas’ portrayal builds on the 15th-century French legend of the loup-garou: a werewolf who’s as much wizard as shapeshifter, and who has magical powers like invulnerability and the ability to disappear at will.

Gullible’s Travels

2026-05-04T00:10:35Z

Published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1917, the stories that make up Gullible’s Travels follow the comical misadventures of a long-suffering husband and his aspiring socialite wife. The unnamed protagonists and their hapless attempts to climb the social ladder serve as a canvas for Ring Lardner to satirize marriage, social dynamics, and the newly emerging middle class of the late 1910s.

In 1917, the first five stories about the unnamed narrator and his “Missus” were compiled in book form as Gullible’s Travels, Etc. This Standard Ebooks edition also includes a later sixth story, “A Friendly Game,” which didn’t make it to print until after the contents of that book were finalized. Each story shares a common “fish out of water” theme wherein the narrator and his wife find themselves in social situations in which they’re clearly out of their element, including grand operas, Palm Beach resorts, and bridge clubs. The stories also explore timeless, familiar struggles of domestic life, like squabbling over the in-laws and introducing new acquaintances into established social circles.

Unlike much of Lardner’s writing, the subject matter of these stories is much more generally relatable. This, coupled with the more approachable writing style compared to some of his more epistolary works like the Jack Keefe stories, led these stories to be well-regarded. They gained enough popularity for a second printing in 1925 and eventually a paperback edition in the 1960s—though these subsequent editions still lacked the sixth story.

The Adventures of Sally

2026-05-03T23:46:53Z

New Yorker Sally Nicholas turns twenty one, comes into an inheritance, and bids her boardinghouse and ballroom dance life goodbye. She funds her fiancé’s new Broadway play when it loses its original backer, and takes a vacation to France where she has a chance encounter with a man named Ginger Kemp. Both her and Ginger’s family force her to navigate many unexpected challenges and new adventures, all while trying to maintain her financial independence.

Wodehouse wrote and collaborated on numerous Broadway shows during and after World War I. This novel reflects his both Broadway experiences and English origins, combining them with his signature wit and humor into a feel-good love story that spans continents.

The Perennial Bachelor

2026-04-22T03:36:34Z

The Campion family of Delaware is living a genteel existence, even after the sudden, unexpected death of the family patriarch. When the family’s first son, Victor, is born, he’s doted on by his mother and three sisters. But as the days turn to decades the family’s devotion to Victor, and their hopes that he’ll be the key to their entrance into Gilded Age society, robs them of their own chances for happiness. Victor grows into a man of charm and social promise but little real urgency, drifting through opportunities and relationships while remaining the unquestioned center of the household. In the end, the Campions are left to confront the consequences of a life organized around possibility rather than fulfillment.

The Perennial Bachelor is Anne Parrish’s most acclaimed novel. It won the Harper Novel Prize in 1925, and was one of the top ten most popular books of the year.

Martin Birck’s Youth

2026-04-21T18:48:48Z

Narrated in a collection of vignettes, the start of Martin Birck’s young life in Stockholm is filled with the joys and frustrations of children everywhere. As he ages, his idealism falls away in a series of small shocks: stories of local murders told by an older friend, having to hold his own in school, an encroaching disbelief in the Christian faith his mother has instilled in him. These, along with his perceived trajectory, lead to the shattering revelation: “So this is life.”

Written in 1901, Martin Birck’s Youth is split into three parts, covering Martin’s experiences as a child, a late teenager, and a young man. It seems at least partially based on Hjalmar Söderberg’s own life, and shares themes with his other work, including a deep interest in the psychology of his characters and a pervasive feeling of melancholy. These days it’s seen as one of Söderberg’s major works, alongside Doctor Glas and The Serious Game.