John Updike takes the Hamlet story as the basis for this absorbing novel about power and lust in 12th-century Denmark. Using both Shakespeare's play and original historical sources, Updike concentrates his narrative on Danish history,...

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and wo...

`This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questio...

Two of Conrad's BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi's opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation  "One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi's opera La Traviata, the ...

Take a journey into the life of a young black male who gets caught up in the fast lane?fast cars, fast women and fast money. Feeling cheated, betrayed and unloved, he makes up his mind not to love anybody. He sets his goal to become t...

The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, follows the lives of Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by...

It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 ...

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, Rutherford College, University of Kent The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. Th...

Set on the Cote d'Azur, during the 1920s, this acclaimed, bestselling novel, first published in 1986, tells the story of a young American writer, his glamorous wife, and the dangerous, erotic games they play when they both fall in lov...

Capturing his thought-provoking insights on man and his relationship to nature and society, a collection of works from England's most distinguished poet, known as an unbending social critic and a biting satirist, includes "The Ra...

With a new introduction by Richard Ford'A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic.' --William StyronFrom the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction an...

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current ...

Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates character and exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of the Geats, a people of southern Sweden. Narrative combines mythical elements, Christian and pagan sensibilities, actual historical fig...

Dante's masterpiece of medieval literature contains many levels of meaning, including the literal (Dante's trip through hell, purgatory, and paradise); the allegorical (the progression of the soul toward goodness); and the moral (what...

...[W]hen I entered Louisiana, my imagination was already trapped in speculation about the struggle for power in the world of politics--specifically in a Southern state....[I]f you were living in Louisiana, you knew you were living in...

Translated with an Introduction by Andrew George.

The collection that established O’ Connor’ s reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “ The...

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glor...

While the Japanese army attacks Burma Road during World War II, a band of Chinese soldiers are sent to rescue a British-American platoon, pinned down in Burma. The dangers that await the brave soldiers are heightened, as they encou...

Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unva...

In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspe...

Based on the life of Vita Sackville-West, a close friend of the author, this novel pays tribute to their passionate friendship. At the beginning of the book Orlando is a young, melancholic, poetry-writing nobleman in the Elizabethan A...

In Theatre, W. Somerset Maugham–the author of the classic novels Of Human Bondage and Up at the Villa–introduces us to Julia Lambert, a woman of breathtaking poise and talent whose looks have stood by her forty-six years. ...

Now a major motion picture from USA Films starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sean Penn, and director Philip Haas (director of Angels and Insects).In Up at the Villa, W. Somerset Maugham portrays a wealthy young English woman who finds ...

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sle...

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER is a story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating atti...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This new Pen...

Robert Louis Stevenson's rousing seafaring classic. "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"  For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, Treasure Island has never been surpassed. From yo...

Set in 1831, The Confessions Of Nat Turner tells--in his own words--of a black man who awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. His name is Nat Turner and he is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in th...