This timeless Christian allegory has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery fo its own identity. In the Inferno, the first of the Comedy's three parts, Dante is conducted by the spirit of the classical poet Virgil through the nine circles of Hell on the initial stage of his arduous journey toward God.

This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary.
"Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgement." - Henry James

Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and...

In the marshy mists of a village churchyard, a tiny orphan boy named Pip is suddenly terrified by a shivering, limping convict on the run. Years later, a supremely arrogant young Pip boards the coach to London where, by the grace of a mysterious benefactor, he will join the ranks of the idle rich and "become a gentleman." Finally, in the luminous mists of the village at evening, Pip the man meets Estella, his dazzingly beautiful tormentor, in a ruined garden--and lays to rest all the heartaches and illusions that his "great expectations" have brought upon him. Dickens's biographer, Edgar H....

In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps the most popular heroine in English literature. Countless scholars have tried to define the charm of the Alice books-with those wonderfully eccentric characters the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter et al.-by proclaiming that they really comprise a satire on language, a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's...

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonicera, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure storyis one of the most widely read romantic novels ofall time. In it the dashing young hero, EdmondDantes, is betrayed by his enemies and throwninto a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If -- doomedto spend his life in a dank prison cell. The storyof his long, intolerable years in captivity, hismiraculous escape, and his carefully wroughtrevenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigueand paints a vision of France -- a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France -- that has become immortal."

When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything has changed.In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony.The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings--unearth their secret and then retum to his own time--until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen.H.G. Well's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895.It won him immediate recognition,...

Spine-tingling and entertaining, The Invisible Man is a science fiction classic-and a penetrating, unflinching look into the heart of human nature. To its author, H. G. Wells, the novel was as compelling as "a good gripping dream." But to generations of readers, the terrible and evil experiment of the demented scientist, Griffin, has conveyed a chilling nightmare of believable horror. An atmosphere of ever-increasing suspense begins with the arrival of a mysterious stranger at an English village inn and builds relentlessly to the stark terror of a victim pursued by a maniacal invisible...

One of America's greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel--the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America's Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather's novel is a uniquely American epic.

Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of...

This is Edmond Rostand's immortal play in which chivalry and wit, bravery and love are forever captured in the timeless spirit of romance. Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage. This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the...

The Bhagavad-Gita has been an essential text of Hindu culture in India since the time of its composition in the first century A.D. One of the great classics of world literature, it has inspired such diverse thinkers as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot; most recently, it formed the core of Peter Brook's celebrated production of the Mahabharata.