The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judean desert between 1947 and 1956 was one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. Hidden in the caves at Qumran by the Essenes, a Jewish sect
Dead Souls is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy. Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succ
Tired of the glitter and glamour of St Petersburg society, aristocratic dandy Eugene Onegin retreats to the country estate he has recently inherited. With the arrival of the idealistic young poet Vla
A vivid new translation of the jewel of Hindu spiritualityONE OF THE GLORIES of Sanskrit poetry, The Bhagavad Gita is the ancient spiritual text that forms a sublime synthesis of the many strands of H
‘Why else does slippery Fortune change So much, and punishment more fit For crime oppress the innocent?’ Written in prison before his brutal execution in AD 524, Boethius’s The Consolation of Phil
Venus in Furs describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dun
Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectua
The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source for Norse mythology. Written in Iceland a century after the close of the Viking Age, it tells
Taking the form of a dialogue among Socrates, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, the Gorgias debates crucial questions about the nature of government. While the aspiring politician Callicles propounds the
Jules Verne’s career as a novelist began in 1863, when he struck a new vein in fiction—stories that combined popular science and exploration. In Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg rashly be
First published in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist
Chevalier d'Albert fantasizes about his ideal lover, yet every woman he meets falls short of his exacting standards of female perfection. Embarking on an affair with the lovely Rosette to ease his bo
Writing at the time of political and social crisis in Athens, Aristophanes was an eloquent yet bawdy challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. The Achanians is a plea for peace set against the back
To Paul Dombey, business is everything. He runs his domestic affairs as he runs his firm: coldly, calculatingly and commercially, neglecting his daughter Florence. In Dombey's mercantile terms, she is
The Small House at Allington is the fifth book in Anthony Trollope's Barchester series. As with all of Trollope, it is beautifully written and draws the reader into its many interwoven tales.Former Pr
So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories. Hardy'
In 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work that defined him as one of America’s most influential voices and that he added to throughout his life. A collection of astonishing originality
Byron’s exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a drama
Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and gene
A symbol of the strength of African-American women, and a champion of the rights of all women, Sojourner Truth was an illiterate former slave in New York State who transformed herself into a vastly po