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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the world’s first novel, more than three centuries befo

(Jacket Status: Jacketed)Edgar Allan Poe’s gift for the macabre–his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things–was so extraordinary that he exerted

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)If William Shakespeare had never written a single play, if his reputation rested entirely upon the substantial and sterling body of nondramatic verse he left behind,

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie at the heart of politi

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The sly, subversive side of the nineteenth-century Russian literary character -- the one which represents such a contrast to the titanic exertions of Tolstoy and Dost

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Toward the end of the astonishing period of Athenian creativity that furnished Western civilization with the greater part of its intellectual, artistic, and political wea

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indi

Baum's story of Dorothy, carried by a cyclone from a Kansas farm to the land of the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion, was published in May 1900. By the following January, 100,000 copies had b

To the Lighthouse features the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests who are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly tri

In his timeless story of two pairs of mismatched lovers, The Return of the Native sets romantic idealism as a destructive counterpoint to reality and disillusionment.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The story of Hester Prynne–found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeki

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.’s consuming quest–quite possibly a self-imposed one–to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish “to get clear about ultimate things,” an unrealizable desire that provided the driving force behind all of Kafka’s dazzlingly uncanny fictions. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Aesop is said to have lived in the sixth century B.C., a slave on the Greek island of Samos. The eternally entertaining tales attributed to him–in which the fates of sly foxes, wicked wolves, industri

Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White are among the jewels we owe to the German brothers Grimm, who began in the first decade of the 19th century to seek out and listen to village storyte

The owls, hen, larks, and their nests in his beard, are among the fey fauna and peculiar persons inhabiting the uniquely inspired nonsense rhymes and drawings of Lear (20th child of a London stockbrok

First published in 1885, Stevenson's verses so truly reflect the feelings of young children--about being small, the bliss of going up in a swing so high, discovering one's shadow, happiness and sorrow

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Britain’s three-hundred-year relationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction of interest but only one indisputable masterpiece: E. M. Forster’s A Passage

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)In these two historical tales of the Scottish lowlands in the eighteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson brought to the novel of adventure a psychological sophisticat

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Anthony Trollope's celebrated Parliamentary novels, of which The Eustace Diamonds (1873) is the third and most famous, are at once unfailingly amusing social comedies

Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possi

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the ni

(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

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)In the two hundred years since its original publication, Les Liaisons Dangereuses has provoked, on the one hand, shock and censorship, and on the other, the admiratio

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)These stories (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories), told by the Princess Shahrazad under the threat of death if she ceases to amuse, fi

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)In dramatic and narrative power, Virgil’s Aeneid is the equal of its great Homeric predecessors, The Iliad and The Odyssey. It surpasses them, however, in the intense sym

The romance between Captain Wentworth and Anne, the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, seems doomed because of the young man's family connections and lack of wealth.

In a story that symbolizes Germany's fall into Nazism, a talented German musician, Adrian, sells his soul to the devil in exchange for recognition as the greatest living composer.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Rousseau's ideas have influenced almost every major political development of the last two hundred years, and are crucial to an understanding of phenomena as diverse a

?The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121—180) embodied in his person that deeply cherished, ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His Meditations are not only one of the most

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Conrad's foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest novel, Nostromo -- though nearly one

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The doppelganger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most brilliant realization

One of the most influential books in the Western tradition, Thomas More's Utopia (1516) describes an imaginary island community enjoying perfect social and political harmony. This volume is the first

Gathers selections from the "Rig-Veda," the "Atharva-Veda," the "Upanishads," and the "Bhagavad-Gita"

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an au

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, Sense and Sensibility is the answer to those critics and readers who believe that Jane Austen’s novels

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)One of Charles Dickens’s most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the young Pip’s first terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard to the splendidly morbid set pieces in Miss Havisham’s mansion to the magnificently realized boat chase down the Thames, Great Expectations is filled with the transcendent excitement that Dickens could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, it also reveals the novelist’s bittersweet understanding of the extent to which our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions. This edition includes Dickens’s original, discarded conclusion to the novel, the 1907 Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton, and twenty illustrations by F. W. Pailthorpe.

(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)The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was written during Stalin’s regime and could not be publishe