Classics

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate & Eric Rasmussen

"The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of Romeo and Juliet is more than justified," writes eminent scholar Harold Bloom, "since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic...

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Perhaps the greatest of all adventure stories for boys and girls, Treasure Island began, a brave boy who finds himself among pirates, and of the sinister pirate-cook Long John Silver holds children as entranced...

Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories

by Herman Melville

If Melville had never written Moby Dick, his place in world literature would be assured by his short tales. "Billy Budd, Sailor," his last work, is the masterpiece in which he delivers the final summation in...

Journey to the Center of the Earth

by Jules Verne & Kim Stanley Robinson

The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth’s very core. In his quest to penetrate the planet’s...

The Outlaws of the Marsh

by Luo Guanzhong & Sidney Shapiro

The legendary account of 108 "Stars from Heaven" who, faced with a corrupt bureaucracy, flee to Liangshan Marsh, from a fortress there thwarting minions of the evil regime while continuing to serve the emperor....

The Bostonians

by Henry James

First published in 1886, The Bostonians is one of James' wittiest social satires. It begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, in search of a career. The book turns on the relationship between Ransom,...

Anna Karenina

by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," writes Tolstoy in his literary masterpiece Anna Karenina. Commonly regarded as one of the greatest realist novels ever written,...

Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D. H. Lawrence

When her unemotional husband returns from war impotent and paralysed, Lady Chatterley finds herself in an unsatisfying marriage and starts a passionate affair with her husband's gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. Initially...

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's early tragedies. The two young title characters fall madly in love, but are the children of feuding houses whose hatred for each other works to a devastating end. The...

Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist is born an orphan and grows up handed from bad position to worse. Eventually he ends up in the London street gang run by Fagin, who attempts to blacken the boy's pure soul in his service. Through...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

by L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz chronicles the adventure of Dorothea in the land of Oz. A cyclone picks her up from her Kansas home, where she lives with her aunt and uncle, and deposits her in the fantastical land....

Othello

by William Shakespeare

Othello, The Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603. The work revolves around four central characters: Othello, his wife Desdemona, his lieutenant...

The Black Tulip

by Alexandre Dumas

Craving some first-rate historical fiction? Slip into this tale of intrigue and romance from Alexandre Dumas (pere), who is regarded by critics as one of the masters of the genre. In The Black Tulip, turmoil...

Castle Richmond

by Anthony Trollope

Castle Richmond is about the fortunes and relationships of two families of the Irish aristocracy, set against the harrowing background of the Great Famine. Sir Thomas Fitzgerald is being blackmailed by two disreputable...

Inferno

by Dante

"As poetry, Mr. Zappulla's English Dante is successful--. The power of Dante's descriptive poetry should be apparent, and that is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a translator."--Washington Times

In...

Siddhartha: An Indian Tale

by Hermann Hesse

Hesse's famous and influential novel, Siddartha, is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis...

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

First published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular and beloved British novels of all-time, maintaining its allure for contemporary readers everywhere and selling millions of copies worldwide!...

Leaves of Grass: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Walt Whitman

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has...

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson & Patrick Scott

The timeless adventure

From young Jim Hawkins's first encounter with the sinister Blind Pew to the climactic battle with the most memorable villain in literature, Long John Silver, Treasure Island continues to...

The Odyssey of Homer

by Homer

Homer's epic chronicle of the Greek hero Odysseus' journey home from the Trojan War has inspired  writers from Virgil to James Joyce. Odysseus  survives storm and shipwreck, the cave of the Cyclops  and...