From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century-two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913--1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning.

The Plague-written in 1947 and still profoundly relevant-is a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall...

Chilean writer Isabel Allende's classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history.

In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family's passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against...

Nikolai Gogol s "Dead Souls" is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.
Gogol hoped to show the world the untold riches of the Russian soul in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs, conniving petty officials all of them both utterly lifelike and alarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is the wily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in dead souls deceased serfs who still represent profit to those...

"The Double," written in Dostoevsky s youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, "Poor Folk. "The first real expression of his genius, "The Double" is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of...