Gulliver's Travels
A ship's surgeon is shipwrecked among tiny people, then among giants, then among philosophers who have lost interest in the world, and finally among horses who are rational and humans who are not. Swift published it as a travel book and readers have been arguing ever since about which parts are jokes.
The satire is not evenly aimed. The first two voyages are political allegory about England and Ireland; the last is a far more disturbing investigation of what happens when a person prefers animals to people. Read it as a children's adventure if you like, but the ending is not for children.
Public-domain status
First published in 1726. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Jonathan Swift died in 1745, so this work has been free to republish there since 1816.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 829 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- Dubliners — James Joyce, 1914
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce, 1916
- Dublin — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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