When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claime... View details
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the w...
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. To... View details
Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the in...
For nineteen-year-old Edmond Dantes, life is sweet. Soon to be captain of his own sip, he is also about to be married to his true love, Mercedes. But suddenly everything turns sour. On the joyous day of his wedding he is arrested and-without a fair t... View details
On February 24, 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples. As usual, a coastal pilot immediately left the po...
Les Misérables is a magnificent, sweeping story of revolution, love and the will to survive set amidst the poverty stricken streets of nineteeth-century Paris.
Escaped convict Jean Valjean turns his back on his criminal past to build his fortunes as ... View details
If only for the sake of being accurate in every particular, although this circumstance in no way impinges on the basic substance of what we are about to relate, it may be worth mentioning here the rum...
The sweeping love story of two people who defy the conventions of their age to follow the dictates of their hearts. Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna Karenina is swept off her feet by the dashing Count Vronsky. When the truth about their passionat... View details
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living ...
The complete Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) in one volume from Vintage Classics. The greatest poem of the Middle Ages, in the standard Carlyle-Okey-Wickstead translation, with full notes.
Dante's Divine Comedy relates the allegorical t... View details
For each canto in these notes, the reader will find broadly factual information and cross-references to texts cited by Dante that are worth reading alongside Dante’s own. The asterisks in the poem tex...
The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia. ... View details
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor PavlovitchKaramazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, andstill remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death...
One of the greatest adventures of all time comes to the screen this fall-shot entirely in 3D!... View details
As perhaps our readers are not familiar with the slang of the Rue de Jerusalem, and as it is fifteen years since we applied this word for the first time to this thing, allow us to explain to them what...
"When a true genius appears in the world,
You may know him by this sign, that the dunces
Are all in confederacy against him."
-Jonathan Swift, "Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting"... View details
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either ...
A desperate young man plans the perfect crime - the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law - if it will ultim... View details
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the stairs. His closet of a room was under the roof of a high, five-floor house and was more like a cupboard than a place in which to live. The land...