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...

This charming comedy is an artful send-up of the literary conventions of Goldsmith's time--the pastoral scene, the artificial romance, the stoic bravery of the hero--culminating in a highly improbable denouement.

"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...

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. • "Scintillating … One finds here amazing glimpses into the life of a world that has vanished forever." —The New York Times

Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. Nabokov's memoir is a moving account...

In an effort to hide his southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black businessman tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman"--a name he earned after his mother nursed him well past the proper age--onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped. Milkman is driven into the arms of a violent, lower-class...

Dante's epic, allegorical poem describes Dante's travels through the 3 realms of the dead: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

Based on a analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, this book is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book are constantly and comically frustrated.

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. His delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. The body of one monk is found in a cask of pigs' blood, another is floating in a bathhouse, still another is crushed at the foot of a cliff.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose...