Cat and Mouse was the book Günter Grass wrote immediately after The Tin Drum, and it shares its setting with that earlier novel: Danzig during World War II. But while The Tin Drum achieves its extraordinary cumulative effect through the...
At the novel's center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais – child murderer, sadist, necrophile and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed...
Herman Melville’s classic masterpiece tells the story of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby Dick, a white sperm whale of...
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-1914) was an American editorialist, journalist, short-story writer and satirist, today best known for his The Devil's Dictionary (1911). He wrote some of his books under the pseudonyms Dod Grile and J. Milton...
One of the supreme masterpieces of Romantic fiction and Scottish literature, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a terrifying tale of murder and amorality, and of one man's descent into madness and despair. James Hogg's...
A mysterious attack on Margaret Trelawney's father brings young lawyer Malcolm Ross into the Egyptologist's bizarre home, and the couple soon find they are battling ancient forces greater than they previously could have imagined. The Egyptian...
Claudius has survived the murderous intrigues of his predecessors to become, reluctantly, Emperor of Rome. Here he recounts his surprisingly successful reign: how he cultivates the loyalty of the army and the common people to repair the damage...
Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus lived form 10 B.C. to 54 A.D. Despised as a weakling and considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the...