What makes his work great is that it can be felt and understood...by anybody,' said Leo Tolstoy of Chekhov's plays, which express life through subtle construction, everyday dialogue, and an electrically charged atmosphere.

First serialized in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, "Heart of Darkness" is the story of steamboat captain Charlie Marlow's voyage into the primitive interior of the Congo of Africa. As a manager of a Belgian ivory company, Mar...

Set during the French and Indian Wars, The Deerslayer vividly captures the essence of both the murderous humanity and the natural beauty that distinguished America's founding. The last of Cooper's famous Leatherstocking Tales, it is f...

One man can be an island The classic tale of a man shipwrecked on a remote island, and his struggle to retain his humanity against the forces of nature, as well as do battle with his own fears and loneliness.

In the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. A sterling example of Dickens's genius for character, dramatic construction, and social satire, this novel was hailed by Edmund Wils...

Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a sc...

Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by 'one of the finest and most singular artists of our time' (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight...

Raskolnikov is an impoverished former student living in Saint Petersburg, Russia who feels compelled to rob and murder Alyona Ivanovna, an elderly pawn broker and money lender. After much deliberation the young man sneaks into her apa...

A predecessor to such monumental works as "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov", "Notes from Underground" represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side....

In the final volume of the 'Alexandrian Quartet', Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle - on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal. The story is su...

Faulkners first novel, published in 1926, is one of the most memorable works to emerge from the First World War. The story of a wounded veterans homecoming, it is partly autobiographical, filled with hope, dark laughter, and despair.

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Re...

This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family's retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in a stolen motorcar. The astonishing a...

Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.

a room with a view

Howards End is considered by many to be E. M. Forster's masterpiece. First published in 1910, this beguiling and completely captivating tale explores social conventions, codes of conduct, and relationships in turn-of-the-century Edwar...

This monumental trilogy by the Nobel Prize-winning author chronicles the lives of three generations of an upper-middle-class London family obsessed with money and respectability. The Forsyte Saga enormously influenced views held by Am...

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pag...

This new translation, in rhymed verse, of Goethe's Faust--one of the greatest dramatic and poetic masterpieces of European literature--preserves the essence of Goethe's meaning without resorting either to an overly literal, archai...

I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred th...

Eight Neanderthals encounter another race of beings like themselves, yet strangely different. This new race, Homo sapiens, fascinating in their skills and sophistication, terrifying in their cruelty, sense of guilt, and incipient corr...

"This inaugural volume in the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, featuring the first woman sleuth in a series, is a must for genre buffs."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) The first book in the Library of Congres...

Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates ...

From a master storyteller of Old West adventures comes this novel of romance and redemption. Zane Grey, author of Riders of the Purple Sage, introduces Hell-Bent Wade, a gunfighter with a shadowy past. Wade arrives at a Colorado homes...

Rider Haggard wrote this novel in a few days shortly after his success with "King Solomon's Mines", and in it he again uses his African experiences and his familiarity with old legends. But there is a greater and more fright...

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” (Time Out), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starv...

In Thomas Hardy's classic novel, an ambitious man discovers that the blind energies and defiant acts that brought him to power can also destroy him.

A fiftieth anniversary edition of Catch-22, one of the twentieth century's most revered novels.

The creator of Hemingway on Fishing returns with a loving tribute to the writer's passion for game hunting, retracing his various expeditions throughout the world, from the snow of Kilamanjaro to his American adventures. Reprint. 25,0...

At the age of twenty-two, Ernest Hemingway wrote his first short story, 'Up in Michigan.' Seventeen years and forty-eight titles later, he was the undisputed master of the short-story form and the leading American man of letters. The ...