Helen Keller at age 12 was like a wild animal. Deaf, blind and utterly unable to communicate, she went through her young life alienated and terrified, struggling against all who tried to help her. Annie Sullivan was half-blind herself...

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel—a black man charged w...

For the condemned nobles during the French Revolution, there is a ray of hope: rescue by the Scarlet Pimpernel. His identity remains a mystery to his sworn enemy, the ruthless Chauvelin, and to his devoted admirer, the beautiful Lady ...

From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality—two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debutsIN AWARDING John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with T...

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,...

Prendrick, a survivor of a shipwreck, is picked up by a schooner bound for Noble's Isle. On the island, Prendrick encounters the Beast People, roughly human but with animalistic traits. It turns out that Dr. Moreau, a scientist who ca...

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...

CLASSIC SHORT STORIES FROM THE MASTER OF AMERICAN FICTIONFirst published in 1927, Men Without Women represents some of Hemingway's most important and compelling early writing. In these fourteen stories, Hemingway begins to examine the...

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...

Each edition includes:• Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play• Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play• Scene-by-scene plot summaries• A key to famous l...

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...

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is the thrilling account of the strange, eventful, and tragic voyage of His Majesty's Ship Bounty in 17881789, which culminated in Fletcher Christian's mutiny against Captain Bligh.

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...

ON February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W. On January the Fifth, 1888-that is eleven months and four days after-my uncle, Edward Prendick, a...

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...

The epic poem of war and adventure.Beowulf is the earliest extant poem in a modern European language. It was composed in England four centuries before the Norman Conquest. But no one knows exactly when it was composed, or by whom, o...

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...

A major rediscovery! This gripping domestic drama set in 1920s Montana is the finest, most powerful work by a much admired (and unjustly overlooked) novelist of the American West. It tells the story of two brothers - and a woman and h...

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...

A vivid, personal account of the epic expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark describes their trek through the wilderness between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast and the natural wonders, perils, people, and places th...