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Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. A brilliant Polish writer and patriot, he is possibly best known abroad for his monumental historical epic Quo Vadis that portrays the vibrant and dissonant combination of cruel excesses and decadence of Rome during the reign of the corrupt Emperor Nero and the high faith of the emerging era of early Christianity. Quo Vadis: A Narrative of... (more)
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Dangerous Liaisons
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
A new translation of one of the most notorious novels of all time Published just years before the French Revolution, Laclos’s great novel of moral and emotional depravity is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. Aristocrats and ex-lovers Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded... (more)
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
"Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray that satirizes society in early 19th-century England. The term "vanity fair" originates from the allegorical story The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678 by John Bunyan where there is a town fair held in a village called Vanity. The novel has inspired several film adaptations. The story opens at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young... (more)
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Thérèse Raquin
by Émile Zola
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent, but their animal passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever. Thérèse Raquin caused... (more)
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Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy. Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them and to use these "souls" as collateral to... (more)
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The House of the Dead and Poor Folk (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics)
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead and Poor Folk , by Fyodor Dostoevsky , 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 pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics : New introductions commissioned from today's top... (more)
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Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
by Machado de Assis
"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. By turns flippant and profound, The... (more)
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The Story of San Michele
by Axel Munthe
This 'dream-laden and spooked' (Marina Warner, London Review of Books) story is to many one of the best-loved books of the twentieth century. Munthe spent many years working as a doctor in Southern Italy, labouring unstintingly during typhus, cholera and earthquake disasters. It was during this period that he came across the ruined Tiberian villa of San Michele, perched high above the glittering Bay of Naples on... (more)
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, described by G. K. Chesterton as a “study in human weakness and the slow human surrender,” may be called Charles Dickens' finest moment in a remarkably illustrious literary career. Written in the last decade of his life, Great Expectations reveals Dickens’ dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its inherent class structure and its materialism. Yet this novel persists as one of Dickens’ most... (more)
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Pre-reform Russian: «Война и миръ») is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is considered one of the most celebrated works of fiction. It is regarded as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other famous work Anna Karenina (1873–1877).War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to... (more)
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The proud and wealthy Mr. Darcy and spirited Elizabeth Bennet dislike each other at first sight. While Elizabeth's mother schemes for suitable husbands for her five daughters, his pride and her prejudice just might keep them apart.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world... (more)
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1984
by George Orwell
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, 1984 is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life — the ubiquity of television, the... (more)
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The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.
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The Winter of Our Discontent
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family's past fortune, and his father's loss of the family wealth, the protagonist, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterizes success in every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of combat, operating under 'the laws of controlled savagery'.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented
by Thomas Hardy
Violated by one man, forsaken by another, Tess Durbeyfield is the magnificent and spirited heroine of Thomas Hardy's immortal work. Of all the great English novelists, no one writes more eloquently of tragic destiny than Hardy. With the innocent and powerless victim, Tess, he creates profound sympathy for human frailty, while passionately indicting the injustices of Victorian society. Scorned upon its publication... (more)
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East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of... (more)
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Resurrection
by Leo Tolstoy
Resurrection (Russian: Воскресение, Voskreseniye), first published in 1899, was the last novel written by Leo Tolstoy. The book is the last of his major long fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as an exposition of injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of institutionalized church. It was first published serially in the popular weekly magazine Niva in an effort to raise funds... (more)
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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the... (more)

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