Jane Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion is a delightful social satire of England's landed gentry and a moving tale of lovers separated by class distinctions. After years apart, unmarried Anne Elliot, the heroine Jane Austen called "almost too good for me," encounters the dashing naval officer others persuaded her to reject, as he now courts the rash and younger Louisa Musgrove. Superbly drawn, these characters and those of Anne's prideful father, Sir Walter, the scheming Mrs. Clay, and the duplicitous William Elliot, heir to Kellynch Hall, become luminously alive--so much so...

No American masterpiece casts quite as awesome a shadow as Melville's monumental Moby Dick. Mad Captain Ahab's quest for the White Whale is a timeless epic--a stirring tragedy of vengeance and obsession, a searing parable about humanity lost in a universe of moral ambiguity. It is the greatest sea story ever told. Far ahead of its own time, Moby Dick was largely misunderstood and unappreciated by Melville's contemporaries. Today, however, it is indisputably a classic. As D.H. Lawrence wrote, Moby Dick -commands a stillness in the soul, an awe . . . It is] one of the...

"My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul." -- Dostoevsky

Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life -- object poverty, incessant gambling, the death of his firstborn child -- Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and Punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl...

The Qur'an, a masterpiece of immense religious and literary value, is presented in a convenient, affordable edition for a new generation of readers. The earliest known work in Arabic prose, the Qur'an is divided into 114 "suras," or chapters, containing the religious, social, civil, commercial, military, and legal codes of Islam.