When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first...

Deals with the adventures of a young orphan boy trying to survive amid greed and poverty in 19th-century London.

Young Pip, an orphan, is working as a blacksmith when he learns that an unknown person has willed him a fortune. He is sent to London to be educated as a rich gentleman.

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...

Relationships within the Pontifex family reflect the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Victorian England. A semi-autobiographical novel written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. It represents a relaxation from the religious outlook from a Calvinistic approach, which is presented as harsh. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published it was accepted as part of the general reaction...

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) produced a huge collection of novels, novellas and short stories, earning him recognition as a great master of the novel, as well as one of the creators of literary realism. He collected and arranged his works under the name "La Comédie humaine", which he then divided into eight major topics. "Eugénie Grandet" was placed in the section titled, "Scenes from Provincial Life". The story takes place in the French town of...

This is an exciting, atmospheric work that works on several levels: partly a story of tropical adventures, partly a melodramatic novel, partly a psychological thriller, partly a criticism of the empire. Axel Heist lives on an island in present-day Indonesia with a Chinese aide Wang. Heist visits a nearby island when a women's group plays in a hotel owned by Mr. Schomberg. Schomberg tries to impose himself sexually on one of the band members, Alma,...

In 1849, renowned Russian thinker and novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to execution for his subversive political beliefs. As he awaited his turn in front of the firing squad, Tsar Nicholas I sent a message commuting the writer's sentence to a period of exile in Siberia. He spent the next four years there engaged in hard labor. Dostoyevsky's gripping novel The House of the Dead is based largely on his own experiences in a Siberian

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A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"Boris Pasternak's Widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhnosky, the award-winning translators of war and Peace and Anna karenina, and to whom. The New York Review of Books declared. "the English-speaking world is indebted."" "First published in Italy in 1957 amid internatrional controversy---the novel was banned in the Soviet Union Until 1988. and Pasternak declined the...