"As soon as I stepped out of my mother's womb...I realized that I had made a mistake," Quentin Crisp declares, giving a small hint of the witty and wry approach he takes toward the life he describes w
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of
"This en face annotated edition of selected writings of the Mexican poet includes the Respuesta to the Bishop of Puebla (1691) and a broad selection of her poetry and dramatic texts: nine love sonnets
‘The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy’ In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine t
In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover
Interweaving introspection with political commentaries, biography with history, The Promised Land (1912) brings to life the transformation of an East European Jewish immigrant into an American citizen
In Ruth Hall, one of the bestselling novels of the 1850s, Fanny Fern drew heavily on her own experiences: the death of her first child and her beloved husband, a bitter estrangement from her family, a
St. Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491-1556), founder of the revolutionary Jesuit Order, is one of the key figures in Christian history. These Personal Writings reveal the intense inwardness and devotional d
Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new step-sister ent
Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they conftont the merciless frozen expanses of the nort
'There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood' Wrote George Eliot of Romola, the novel which argues her most p
Appian's Civil Wars offers a masterly account of the turbulent epoch from the time of Tiberius Gracchus (133 BC) to the tremendous conflicts which followed the murder of Julius Caesar.For the events
Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on a remote island in the
One of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard (1814-55) often expressed himself through pseudonyms and disguises. Taken from his personal writings, these private reflection
Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in America. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sy
Japanese author Lady Murasaki records her life as tutor to the Japanese empress, whose service she entered in 1006, offering inside glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace.
Compiled to suggest what nineteenth-century America contributed to the history of poetry, rather than what poetry may contribute to a history of nineteenth-century America, this volume emphasizes thos
A middle-age American millionaire goes to Africa in search of a more meaningful life and receives the adoration of an African tribe that believes he has a gift for rainmaking.
In six darkly comic tales, Saul Bellow presents the human experience in all its preposterousness, poignancy, and pathos. The stories, which include "Leaving the Yellow House," "The Old System," "Looki
"I no longer love my husband – I HATE him! The word stares at me in the face like a guilty confession" Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has proved to be the most influential of French nineteenth-century poets for the way in which his writing combines strong emotion, acute aesthetic sensibility and formal
Farina evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encoun
The Country of Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, established her among the consummate stylists of nineteenth-century American fiction. Composed in a series of beautiful web-like sketche
Sketches by Boz collected a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centred on the metropolis. It was Dickens's first book, published when he was twenty-four, and in it w
The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, The Prelude takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind'.In its search for the origins of the adult personality, The Prelude takes the reader back t
George F. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts w
The central theme of the novel is the sexual jealousy of Louis Trevelyan who unjustly accuses his wife Emily of a liaison with a friend of her father's. As his suspicion deepens into madness, Trollope
Du Bois' 1903 collection of essays is a thoughtful, articulate exploration of the moral and intellectual issues surrounding the perception of blacks within American society.
Can a morally scrupulous English gentleman make an effective Prime Minister? This is one of the enduringly fascinating problems posed in The Prime Minister (1876). And as Plantaganet Palliser, Duke o
Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel in blank verse, tells the story of the making of a woman poet, exploring 'the woman question', art and its relation to politics and social
At one time the most popular of Melville's works, Typee was known as a travelogue that idealized and romanticized a mysterious South Sea island for readers in the ruthless, industrial, "civilized" wor
As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of
During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War and Peace and Anna Karenin, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, soci
Just as the 1832 Reform Act is about to change the bucolic and conservatively ordered way of life forever in Treby Magna, two native sons return home. Harold Transome, heir to Transome Court, comes to
Beowulf stands at the head of English literature; a poem of historical interest and epic scope. Although the first manuscript of Beowulf dates from around the year 1000 CE, it is thought that the poem
Conrad's aim was 'by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see' Heart of Darkness, his exploration of European colonialism in Africa and of el
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America?s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time
Founding father of the famous monastery on the island of Iona, a site of pilgrimage ever since his death in 597, St Columba was born into one of the ruling families in Ireland at a time of immense exp
