Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people’s lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pl
Humanist, skeptic, acute observer of himself and others, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) was the first to use the term "essay" to refer to the form he pioneered, and he has remained one of its most fam
A new collection of songs, sonnets and lyric poems that focus on love in the widest sense, encompassing relationships of all kinds. This volume includes Ronsard's famous sonnets to Helene, Dorthy Par
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The most perfect of Jane Austen’s perfect novels begins with twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse comfortably dominating the social order in the village of Highbury, convin
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has sin
A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless
Proud, wilful and charismatic, Pechorin is Byronic in his wasted gifts and bored by his stifling world. With a predatory energy for any activity that will relieve his ennui, he embarks on a series of
William Shakespeare’s last four plays carry us across space and time—from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island—and they move as well into a wilder geography of the i
A new hardcover selection of the best writings of the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world. Selected and introduced by Andrea Wulf.Alexander von Humboldt (1
Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays.The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastruc
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of his comic imagination, which throughout his life enveloped and contained his tragic one. His early comedies—with
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Shakespeare’s later comedies were written at the astonishing pace of about two plays a year. In them, he moves beyond the farce of his earlier comedies to richer and more
George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel is considered by many to be her greatest. First published in installments in 1874-76, Daniel Deronda is a richly imagined epic with a mysterious hero
The only widely available hardcover edition of Victor Hugo's masterful historical novel of medieval Paris--one of the most beloved of world classics. ? The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is an epic of a whol
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Introduction by David EllisThe struggle for power at the heart of a family in conflict, the mysteries of sexual initiation, and the pain of irretrievable loss are the uni
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Dostoevsky’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues–brilliant charac
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philos
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his dest
