This book, one of Mark Twain's first, is a hilarious, sometimes biting account of the author's travels through France, Italy, Greece, Russia, Palestine, Turkey, and Egypt. His wry observations pepper the narrative with humor, while at the same time making pertinent comments on the human condition.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

"If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person," wrote Mark Twain, and now you can share in that experience. The beloved American humorist spent seven years on a "pleasure trip" through the untamed wilderness of Nevada. Twain intended to spend three months touring silver mines, but the lure of rough terrain and comfortable clothes proved irresistible - as will this vibrant travelogue.

"Life on the Mississippi" (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the War.

Very few people know that Mark Twain wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important, but also his best work. He spent 12 years in research and many months in France doing archival work, and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell.

This book is part memoir, part philosophical text, part study in human behavior, from one of America's greatest literary treasures. Narrated masterfully by Bronson Pinchot, this audiobook also includes Twain’s popular short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".

Bound on a lecture trip around the world, Mark Twain turns his keen satiric eye to foreign lands in Following the Equator. This vivid chronicle of a sea voyage on the Pacific Ocean displays Twain's eye for the unusual, his wide-ranging curiosity, and his delight in embellishing the facts. Following the Equator is an evocative and highly unique American portrait of 19-century travel and customs.

A Tale of Two Cities is one of Charles Dickens's most exciting novels. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, it tells the story of a family threatened by the terrible events of the past. Doctor Manette was wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years without trial by the aristocratic authorities.

Neal Stephenson, "the hottest science fiction writer in America", takes science fiction to dazzling new levels. The Diamond Age is a stunning tale; set in 21st-century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens what a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life, and the entire future of humanity, is about to be decoded and reprogrammed.

One evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside. In exchange for a bed and a warm meal, he invites his hosts and their neighbors to join him by the wintry fireside and begins to tell formative stories of Ireland's history. Ronan, a nine-year-old boy, grows so entranced by the storytelling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again.

Tess Durbeyfield has become one of the most famous female protagonists in 19th-century British literature. Betrayed by the two men in her life - Alec D’Urberville, her seducer/rapist and father of her fated child; and Angel, her intellectual and pious husband - Tess takes justice, and her own destiny, into her delicate hands. In telling her desperate and passionate story, Hardy brings Tess to life with an extraordinary vividness that makes her live in the heart of the reader long after the novel is concluded.

Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, Les Miserables follows Jean Valjean, originally an honest peasant, who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family. A hardened criminal upon his release, he eventually reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and town mayor. Despite this, he is haunted by an impulsive former crime and is pursued relentlessly by the police inspector Javert.

Burning Daylight begins as many of London's finest works begin: with the depiction of a man blessed with physical prowess and keen perception who takes on the natural forces of the 19th century Yukon. Supreme gold miner, risk-all gambler, and unbeatable fighter, Burning Daylight is his name. Daylight moves from the Yukon to San Francisco, and plays "the bigger game of finance and wealth," until he is reminded of something he lost, something pure and good....

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.

In June 1867, Mark Twain set sail for Europe and the Holy Land. Twain recorded this adventurous trip and later turned it into The Innocents Abroad. This book became so popular overseas that it would propel him into an international star. The Innocents Abroad is Twain’s account of his thoughts of the Old World, including Paris, Venice, Pompeii, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem, as well as many other noteworthy cities. His disbelief and wonder are told with humor that endeared Twain to American audiences.

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being downandout in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.

Burning Daylight begins as many of London's finest works begin: with the depiction of a man blessed with physical prowess and keen perception who takes on the natural forces of the 19th century Yukon. Supreme gold miner, risk-all gambler, and unbeatable fighter, Burning Daylight is his name. Daylight moves from the Yukon to San Francisco, and plays "the bigger game of finance and wealth," until he is reminded of something he lost, something pure and good....

In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay struggles to thwart an assassination plot designed to hasten war between Britain and Germany. Later he is plucked from the trenches first, in Greenmantle, to frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world; and then, in Mr. Standfast, to undertake a vital secret mission against a German spy ring operating among pacifist elements in England. After the war, his adventures continue in The Three Hostages; and then in The Island of Sheep, when an old oath to protect the son of a friend from his days in Africa draws him into new danger.

In a remote corner of early Victorian England, where traditional practices remain untouched by time, Bathsheba Everdene stands out as a beacon of female independence and self-reliance. However, when confronted with three suitors, among them the dashing Sergeant Troy, she shows a reckless capriciousness that threatens the stability of the whole community. Published in 1874, and an immediate best seller, Far From the Madding Crowd established Thomas Hardy as one of Britain's foremost novelists.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.

This classic novel by the brilliant G. K. Chesterton tells the rollicking tale of Innocent Smith, a man who may be crazy - or possibly the most sane man of all. Arriving at a dreary London boarding house accompanied by a windstorm, Smith is an exuberant, eccentric, and sweet-natured man. Smith has a positive effect on the house - he creates his own court, brings a few couples together, and falls in love with a paid companion next door. All seems to be well with the world.

In this romantic and raw adventure set in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming of 1886, an anonymous college graduate ventures out west where he encounters gun fights, lynching, cattle rustlers, high-stake poker games, Indian attacks, and a brave, honest and imposing cowboy known simply as the Virginian. Presented as the archetypal, ideal hero of the "western" genre (which was novelized for the very first time in this same book), the Virginian, a foreman at Shiloh Ranch, carries a strong sense of justice.

Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and celebrated citizen of the world, came to love as his own. Iberia is Michener’s enduring nonfiction tribute to his cherished second home. In the fresh and vivid prose that is his trademark, he not only reveals the celebrated history of bullfighters and warrior kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards, he also shares the intimate, often hidden country he came to know, where the congeniality of living souls is thrust against the dark weight of history.

A big, brilliant, spooky collection of classic and contemporary ghost stories that will make you hesitate before turning off that light.

The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.