Long considered the author's strangest novel, this work is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-18th-century America. A mysterious shape-changing confidence-man approaches passengers on a Mississippi steamboat and,...
In a brilliant illumination of the Renaissance mind, acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and...
Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature,...
Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu...
Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights,...
Journey To the West was written by Wu Chen-en, and is considered to be one of the four great classic novels written during the Ming Dynasty (c. 1500-1582). Wu Chen-en was an elder statesman who witnessed a lot in his life, both good and bad, yet...
FROM THE PUBLISHERMartin Eden, Jack London's semiautobiographical novel about a struggling young writer, is considered by many to be the author's most mature work. Personifying London's own dreams of education and literary fame as a young...