Joseph Andrews refuses Lady Booby's advances, she discharges him, and Joseph — in the company of his old tutor, Parson Adams (one of the great comic figures of literature) — sets out from London to visit his sweetheart, Fanny. Along the way, the two travelers meet with a series of adventures — some hilarious, some heartstopping — in which through their own innocence and honesty they expose the hypocri ...
An ardent activist, champion of political reform, novelist, and progressive journalist, Upton Sinclair is perhaps best known today for The Jungle — his devastating exposé of the meat-packing industry. A protest novel he privately published in 1906, the book was a shocking revelation of intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards. It quickly became a bestseller, arousing public sentim ...
"The reason Verne is still read by millions today is simply that he was one of the best storytellers who ever lived." — Arthur C. ClarkeAn adventurous geology professor chances upon a manuscript in which a 16th-century explorer claims to have found a route to the earth's core. Professor Lidenbrock can't resist the opportunity to investigate, and with his nephew Axel, he sets off across Iceland in the company of Hans Bjel ...
A charismatic politician's assassination leads to a civil war in Shakespeare's drama of ancient Rome. Written in 1599 about an event from more than 2,000 years ago, this historical play continues to captivate modern audiences with its memorable characters, poetic speeches, and profound examination of the conflicting claims of ambition, ethics, and loyalty. With its compelling insights into history and human nature, Julius Caesar often ...
Considered one of the fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) brought enormous inventiveness and an underlying social vision and moral concern to his strange tales and bizarre imaginings. A student of Darwinian biology, he formed his romantic conceptions of the scientific world at an early age.This novel, one of his first forays into the science fiction genre, concerns a mad surgeon-turned-vivisectionist who, in his laborat ...
The haunting cry of «Bring out your dead!» by a bell-ringing collector of 17th-century plague victims has filled readers across the centuries with cold terror. The chilling cry survives in historical consciousness largely as a result of this classic 1722 account of the epidemic of bubonic plague — known as the Black Death — that ravaged England in 1664–1665.Actually written nearly 60 years later by Daniel Defoe, the ...
Beautiful, flirtatious, and recently widowed, Lady Susan Vernon seeks a new and advantageous marriage for herself, and at the same time attempts to push her daughter into marriage with a man she detests. Through a series of crafty maneuvers, she fills her calendar with invitations for extended visits with unsuspecting relatives and acquaintances in pursuit of her grand plan.As the plot unfolds, characters are revealed and the suspense builds &am ...
One of the world's greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) also wrote numerous excellent short stories, three of which are contained in this volume. «The Kreutzer Sonata» (1891) is a penetrating study of jealousy as well as a splenetic complaint about the way in which society educates young men and women in matters of sex. In «The Death of Ivan Ilych» (1886), a symbolic Everyman discovers the inner light of faith and love only ...
Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling set his final and most famous novel in the complex, mystery-shrouded India of the mid-nineteenth century where an exotic landscape teems with natives living under British colonial rule. Kim, the poor orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in Lahore, straddles both worlds. Neither wholly British nor completely Indian, the young boy searches for his identity in the country where he was born; but at th ...
