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...

An inspired work of science fiction and a biting political allegory, Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs tells of a brilliant scientist whose experiments with life spiral terribly—and fatefully—out of control. Foreword by Doris Lessin...

A thrilling-and prophetic-voyage into the depths of the unknown aboard the legendary submarine Nautilus, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea explores the limitless possibilities of the imagination-and the darkest labyrinth of human nature.....

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 ...

1898. With 34 illustrations. Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, is universally recognized as the greatest and most popular story teller for children in her generation. She has known the way to the hearts of young people, n...

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...

Twain's two characters, 'Mr. Brown' and himself, tour Europe and send home a series of raucous, deadpan, hilarious reports that serve both to declare the independence of American writers from their European models, and to initiate the...

Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, this five-part story charts the changing fortunes of the Jia family. It sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, even murder - within the context of the Buddhis...

His last and greatest work Driven by intense passion, four brothers become involved in the brutal murder of their own father, one of the most loathsome characters in all literature.

Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecessor and one that would illustrate “the folly” of tumbling down on posterity “an avalanche of ill-...

Hemingway's Classic Novel About Smuggling, Intrigue, and LoveTo Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling...

Joyce's bildungsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's alter ego. In order to pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the end of the ...

The first historical novel and an international bestseller. Sir Walter Scott was one of the bestselling novelists of the nineteenth century and is credited with establishing the historical novel. His first novel, Waverley (1814), te...

As his father lies dying, Joseph Wayne decides to trade his Vermont farm for a new life in California. Once established on his ranch, he comes to revere a huge tree as the embodiment of his father's spirit. Joseph's brothers and thei...

Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Ch...

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author's ambitious claim that the work 'was done to last ...

With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak d...

...a story of passion carried to within sight of the highest classical pitch. It must be one of the most cleverly and intricately constructed novels in the English language, a marvel of craftsmanship in which skill is given its proper...

A young boy in Hollywood struggles to comprehend his parents, sadly aging ex-movie stars who haven't a clue about bringing up children, and to make his own way in a bizarre world. Originally published in 1977, the novel takes place in...

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into th...

First published in 1931, this classic psychological melodrama has been viewed as more of a social document in his tragic legend of the South than mere story. From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, b...

A new edition of the classic selection of entertaining, poetic, and erotic stories ranges from lyrical love to high comedy and deals with such subjects as the exotic pleasures of Paris in the 1930s and a woman's awakening to her sexua...