Vanity Fair is a story of two heroines---one humble, the other a scheming social climber---who meet in boarding school and embark on markedly different lives. Amid the swirl of London's posh ballrooms and affairs of love and war, their fortunes rise and fall. Through it all, Thackeray lampoons the shallow values of his society, reserving the most pointed barbs for the upper crust. What results is a prescient look at the dogged pursuit of wealth and...

What a stunning discovery: an old, coded note that actually contains directions for reaching the Earth's very core! And once he finds it, renowned geologist Professor Liedenbrock can't resist setting out with his 16-year-old nephew to go where only one man has gone before. Jules Verne takes young readers on one of the most incredible journeys ever imagined, from Iceland's frozen tundra far down into fantastic underground prehistoric worlds and back...

A remarkably handsome youth, Dorian Gray, meets Lord Henry Wotton and is corrupted into a life of terrible evil. Granted eternal youth, Dorian Gray lives a wild, dissipated life while his portrait grows old and haggard. Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works... full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused...

"Dorothy and her little dog Toto are swept away from their home in Kansas by a powerful tornado and dropped into an enchanting new land called Oz. To get home, the Witch of the North tells her she must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and ask the mysterious Wizard of Oz for help. Along the way, she meets the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, and together they embark on a strange and magical adventure"--

A young woman has difficulty adjusting to life in a small town.

"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...

After being transported by a cyclone to the land of Oz, Dorothy and her dog are befriended by a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion, who accompany her to the Emerald City to look for a wizard who can help Dorothy return home to Kansas.

A London physician leads a double life when he discovers a drug that alters his appearance and disposition.

Written in just fifty-two days in the year 1839, "The Charterhouse of Parma" has since become known as Stendhal's finest work. Evidence of haste is infrequently apparent in this remarkable story, which follows the eventful life of the young Italian nobleman Fabrizio del Dongo. From his childhood in the family castle by Lake Como to the battlefields of Waterloo, Fabrizio proves himself charmingly headstrong and painfully naïve. Upon returning injured...

"Dante's Inferno. An epic and searing poem, that takes the reader on an intense journey through the darkest pits of hell. As important and classic as the day it was written over 600 years ago. Dante's Inferno is one of the best and enduring works of Western Civilization. The immortal drama of a journey through Hell. Belonging in the immortal company of Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece is a moving human drama,...