This volume collects Dickens's three most renowned "Christmas Books", including The Chimes, a New Year's tale and The Cricket on the Hearth, whose eponymous insect chirps amid happiness.
Classic fiction. "The Collector's Colour Library" takes the favourite illustrated titles of "The Collector's Library" and presents them in full colour. Original colour illustrations are faithfully reproduced, and where illustrations and decorations were originally black and white they have been sensitively coloured by Barbara Frith, one of Britain's most accomplished colourists. When Alice tumbles down a rabbit hole one hot summer's afternoon in pursuit...
"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...
Lucy Honeychurch, a young middle-class girl, travels with her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, to Florence where they are on holiday at an Italian pension set up specifically for vacationers from Great Britain. There Lucy meets Mr. Emerson and his son, George, whom she encounters quite unexpectedly on walks and carriage rides. George and Lucy have unsuspected, intimate talks which happen without any intention of hypothetical conclusion. George...
A complex and profound book, The Tale of Two Cities explores the consequences of tyranny, fate and self-sacrifice. With much of the narrative played out in Paris, during the French Revolution Dickens examines the interplay between personal action, and the flow of history. Dr Manette, having travelled to Paris finds himself imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 brutal years, unable to see his kind and loving daughter Lucy. On his eventual return to London...
Prosperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything a man could wish. But when a personal crisis forces the middle-aged real estate agent to reexamine his life, Babbitt mounts a rebellion that jeopardizes everything he values. Widely considered Sinclair Lewis' greatest novel, this satire of the American social landscape created a sensation upon its 1922 publication. Babbitt's name became an instant and enduring synonym for...
Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...
Translates the classic French story of the master swordsman whose unpleasant appearance prevents him from courting the beautiful woman with whom he has fallen in love. This acclaimed adaptation for the stage by Anthony Burgess has garnered such reviews as: "Emotional depth Rostand himself would surely have envied...Burgess' extravagant verse keeps its contours, yet trips off the tongue almost as though it were contemporary speech."--London Times.
From the Publisher: When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives...
In a gripping and sensational work of classic Gothic fiction we discover the infamous Count Dracula. When English lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to an obscure town called Transylvania, the goal of his visit was most certainly not to do business with a vampire. As he makes his way through the village square, Harker is overcome with an eerie sensation that the Count is not who he says he is. Strewn with various charms and trinkets thrown at him from...
"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. Beautiful, clever, rich-- and single-- Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts...
This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...
"Few works by comic book artists have earned the universal acclaim and reverence that Bernie Wrightson's illustrated version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein was met with upon its original release in 1983. A generation later, this magnificent pairing of art and literature is still considered to be one of the greatest achievements made by any artist in the field. This book includes the complete text of the original groundbreaking novel,...
"Great Expectations is among the most masterful of Charles Dickens's novels. Displaying extraordinary tragicomic range, Dickens blends an atmosphere of brooding violence and guilt with sharp and often disturbing humor to create a drama charged with the thrilling intensity of a detective story and the poignancy of a spiritual autobiography. Much of the novel's power comes from Dickens's unequaled skill at making even the most wildly eccentric of characters...
Gulliver's Travels tells of the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman and ship's surgeon, who travels to the "several remote nations of the world." In the beginning, he becomes shipwrecked in the land of Lilliput, where the distressed inhabitants are only six inches tall. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where lives a race of giants. At Glubdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers, he speaks with great men of the past and learns from...