Marco Polo's account of his journey throughout the East in the thirteenth century was one of the earliest European travel narratives, and it remains the most important. The merchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entire continent of Asia, provided us with accurate descriptions of life in China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recorded customs, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, and much more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilous deserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvels than the Travels.
This edition,...

The final masterpiece from the celebrated author of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot...

This extraordinary novel, Dostoyevsky's last and greatest work, tells the dramatic story of four brothers--Dmitri, pleasure-seeking, impatient, unruly . . . Ivan, brilliant and morose . . . Alyosha, gentle, loving, honest . . . and the illegitimate Smerdyakov, sly, silent, cruel. Driven by intense passion, they become involved in the brutal murder of their own father, one of the most loathsome characters in all literature. Featuring the famous chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor,"...

Chronicling the thirteenth-century world from Venice, his birthplace, to the far reaches of Asia, Marco Polo tells of the foreign peoples he meets as he travels by foot, horse, and boat through places including Persia, Tibet, India, and, finally, China. There he serves in the court of Kublai Khan, then the leader of the most advanced and powerful country in the world. Polo also ventures to Shangtu, made immortal in Coleridge's poem "Xanadu."

When Marco Polo arrived at the court of the Great Khan Pekin had just been rebuilt. Kublai Khan was at the height of his glory. Polo rose rapidly in favour and became governor of an important district. In this way he gained first-hand knowledge of a great civilisation and described it with astounding accuracy and detail.

The accounts left by these travelers are important, not only for their corroboration of Marco Polo s tales of wonder, but because they throw light upon the early history, customs and religion of one of the great peoples of the modern world the Chinese. In these account we see the roots of Chinese pride, patience, endurance and heroism. Through them we learn to understand that the greatness of the Chinese people today is not an accident, but the result, the fruit of an anciently founded and mature culture, a culture that could live side-by-side with the ravishing, destructive, brutal culture...

When Marco Polo arrived at the court of the Great Khan Pekin had just been rebuilt. Kublai Khan was at the height of his glory. Polo rose rapidly in favour and became governor of an important district. In this way he gained first-hand knowledge of a great civilisation and described it with astounding accuracy and detail.