Books published by publisher Tantor Media Inc

When three late-Victorian gentlemen escape from their claustrophobic suburban life to go on a cycling tour in the Black Forest of Germany, their trip turns into a comic expedition. Many of their humorous adventures and mishaps relate to the nuances in language and customs; one attempts to board a train unconventionally to avoid German procedures; when riding the Bummel in Dresden one butts and rolls into German passengers who, being familiar with the route know how to brace themselves and don't see the humor, the dull lot; another tries to buy his aunt a cushion and gets angry after he pays for it because he gets only a kiss from a young girl instead. Three Men on the Bummel is one of the most popular classics in English comic fiction.

Claire Danvers has her share of challenges---like being a genius in a school that favors beauty over brains, dealing with the homicidal girls in her dorm, and above all, finding out that her college town is overrun with vampires. On the up side, she has a great roommate (who tends to disappear at sunup) and a new boyfriend named Shane, whose vampire-hunting dad has called in backup: cycle punks who like the idea of killing just about anything. Now a fraternity is throwing its annual Dead Girls' Dance and---surprise!---Claire and her equally outcast best friend, Eve, have been invited. When they find out why, all hell is going to break loose. Because this time both the living and the dead are coming out---and everybody's hungry for blood.

Sara Crewe, ten years old, leads a delightful life. Her father, a British officer, provides her with all of the comfort his wealth and charm allow. When he dies, a cold-hearted schoolmistress turns Sara into a drudge. How does she cope? Sara is unquenchable. Her father taught her that every girl is a princess, rich or poor. That gift -- along with grace, spirit and imagination -- give her serenity and puts the fall from riches to rags in perspective.

Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility is a wonderfully entertaining tale of flirtation and folly that revolves around two starkly different sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. While Elinor is thoughtful, considerate, and calm, her younger sister is emotional and wildly romantic. Both are looking for a husband, but neither Elinor's reason nor Marianne's passion can lead them to perfect happiness---as Marianne falls for an unscrupulous rascal and Elinor becomes attached to a man who's already engaged. Startling secrets, unexpected twists, and heartless betrayals interrupt the marriage games that follow. Filled with satiric wit and subtle characterizations, Sense and Sensibility teaches that true love requires a balance of reason and emotion.

The Circular Staircase is perhaps Mary Roberts Rinehart's most famous story. The tale mixes bone-chilling suspense and romance with good humor to produce an absorbing and entertaining mystery. Wealthy, middle-aged spinster Rachel Innes is persuaded by her niece Gertrude and nephew Halsey to take a house in the country for the summer. Rachel is unaware that the house hides a sinister secret, and soon unexplained happenings and murder follow.

Born of noble parents marooned on the savage West African coast, the young lord Greystoke is orphaned in his first year of life. Named Tarzan by the great apes that raise him, he must learn the law of the jungle to survive. As he matures, his strength and agility develop to match those of the beasts that surround him, yet he realizes that he is different. He combines higher intelligence, superhuman strength and his jungle training to become the unconquerable Lord of the Jungle! But, when a group of civilized people invade his paradise, his life is changed forever, for with them is Jane. She is the first woman Tarzan has ever seen and he must have her as his own! How can this uncivilized ape-man hope to win her?

After the death of his parents, Jim is sent to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska plains. By chance on that same train is a bright-eyed girl, Antonia, who will become his neighbor and lifelong friend. Her family has emigrated from Bohemia to start a new life farming but soon lose their money and must work hard just to survive. Through it all, Antonia retains her natural pride and free spirit. Jim's grandparents have a large and tidy farm. They are kind to him, but conventional. Later Jim becomes a scholar and Antonia becomes a 'hired girl' in town. She blossoms in the new freedom that town life offers. Jim can only taste this life vicariously through her recounting of town gossip and of the 'dance tent.' Antonia's strong will, spirit, and honesty allow her to thrive in the midst of hardship. Cather paints a rich picture of life on the prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century and depicts some of the many cultures that came to comprise the United States.

Richard Gale, a college football star, travels to Mexico to prove himself after failing in every business opportunity that his wealthy father had handed him. When he arrives at an Arizona border town, a chance meeting with an old friend launches him into an adventure to save a young Spanish beauty from a ruthless Mexican bandit. Discover the meaning of a haunting secret that symbolizes Grey's spirituality. Within the mystical beauty of the desert landscape, this extraordinary novel touches on many complexities of humanity including honor, lust, vengeance and love.

When a brute of a man tramples an innocent girl, apparently out of spite, two bystanders catch the fellow and force him to pay reparations to the girl's family. The brute's name is Edward Hyde. A respected lawyer, Utterson, hears this story and begins to unravel the seemingly manic behavior of his best friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and his connection with Hyde. Several months earlier, Utterson had drawn up an inexplicable will for the doctor naming Hyde as his heir in the event that he disappears. Fearing his friend has been blackmailed into this arrangement, Utterson probes deeper into both Jekyll and his unlikely protégé. He is increasingly unnerved at each new revelation. In a forerunner of psychological dramas to come, Robert Louis Stevenson uses Hyde to show that we are both repulsed and attracted to the darker side of life, particularly when we can experience it in anonymity.

“They were not railway children to begin with. I don't suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook's, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with colored glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bath-room with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and 'every modern convenience', as the house-agents say.” -- Excerpt In this classic story, first published in 1906, a false accusation places the father in jail, leaving his wife and three children on their own. Circumstances force mother and the children to leave their ideal life in London to live near a train station in a rustic cottage. As the good natured children work to rescue their father they befriend and help others along the way.