"Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and to be loved." "Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is coloured by her sadness and isolation after the deaths...

Writing in 1904, Conrad invented a complex Central American country with a turbulent history and a potentially explosive population, ranging from the wealthy gringo running the Sulaco silver mine to the poorest worker loading cargo on the docks. Although the story teems with lively characters, the dazzling figure of Nostromo eclipses them all. A natural leader--brave, handsome, and incorruptible--he naturally becomes the epicenter of the revolution...

Essayist, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817—62) ranks among America's foremost nature writers. The Concord, Massachusetts, native spent most of his life observing the natural world of New England. His thoughts on leading a simple, independent life remain a foundation of modern environmentalism, as captured in Walden, his best-known work. Canoeing in the Wilderness, the 1857 diary of a two-week sojourn in Maine, chronicles the author's...

Like few novels before it, The Woman in White thrilled readers across England when it debuted in 1860. It famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit road. Engaged as a drawing-master to beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his charming friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the...

"Robin Hood is the best-loved outlaw of all time. In this beautifully illustrated edition, Henry Gilbert tells of the adventures of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest -- Robin himself, Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet and Alan-a-Dale, as well as Maid Marian, good King Richard, and Robin's deadly enemies Guy og Gisborne and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham."--Page 4 of cover

After being transported by a cyclone to the land of Oz, Dorothy and her dog are befriended by a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion, who accompany her to the Emerald City to look for a wizard who can help Dorothy return home to Kansas.

In this daring and insightful work, Nietzsche lays bare the hypocrisies at the foundations of our ideas of morality. Considering ideas of good and evil, guilt and conscience, and law and violence along the way, On the Genealogy of Morals takes the reader on a journey through the history of value systems in three masterful essays.

Through the eyes of Miss Toklas, Gertrude Stein reviews both of their lives before their meeting and during their years of companionship.

"Written by a palace insider and published at the height of the Roman Empire, this title gives an individual portrait of each emperor. It is an account of the emperors that brings the mundane, tragic, and scandalous activities of Rome's elite - the emperors, their families, friends, enemies, successes, failures, loves, and ambitions - to life." --

Ranging from a few words to a few pages, the aphorisms in Human, All Too Human present Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on a variety of subjects, including the nature of reality [metaphysics]; moral feelings, especially the concepts of good and evil; the argument that great art is the product of hard work as opposed to 'genius' and inspiration; free-thinking; the evolution of men, women, and children; and the limitations that people put on their own...