Here is Edward Rutherfurd's classic novel of London, a glorious pageant spanning 2,000 years. He brings this vibrant city's long and noble history alive through the ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of half-a-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the 20th century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the greatest city in the world.

From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace: a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.

In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom — who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic — gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, remarkable scholarship, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on 48 essential works spanning the Western canon.

Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.

Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court-men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer's People, we meet, again, the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are unquestionably two of the greatest epic masterpieces in Western literature. Though more than 2,700 years old, their stories of brave heroics, capricious gods, and towering human emotions are vividly timeless. The Iliad can justly be called the world’s greatest war epic. The terrible and long-drawn-out siege of Troy remains one of the classic campaigns. The Odyssey chronicles the many trials and adventures Odysseus must pass through on his long journey home from the Trojan wars to his beloved wife.

After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where he witnesses famine, riots, and plague - all evoked through meticulous description and with stunning immediacy.

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct the life of Rome’s greatest poet.

Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

Trust. Betrayal. Revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo is the quintessential masterpiece of Alexandre Dumas. In Edmond Dantes we find an early materialization of the modern superhero. He is a dashing young sailor imprisoned unjustly for treason. While in prison he meets a holy man who imparts to him all his wisdom. The "abbe" also divulges the profound secret of a hidden treasure. Dantes realizes that with such immense wealth, one could wreak a hateful vengeance on one's enemies.

This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.

Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge. Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last minute.

A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women". A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, scheming to own property. A corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify taking a mistress. All live in the Yacoubian Building....

Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, is looking more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Will she turn out like her despised Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father have spent their whole lives avoiding and deriding? There must be a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where he witnesses famine, riots, and plague - all evoked through meticulous description and with stunning immediacy.

Trust. Betrayal. Revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo is the quintessential masterpiece of Alexandre Dumas. In Edmond Dantes we find an early materialization of the modern superhero. He is a dashing young sailor imprisoned unjustly for treason. While in prison he meets a holy man who imparts to him all his wisdom. The "abbe" also divulges the profound secret of a hidden treasure. Dantes realizes that with such immense wealth, one could wreak a hateful vengeance on one's enemies.

It is 1644, and Parliament’s armies have risen against the King and laid siege to the city of York. Even as the city suffers at the rebels’ hands, midwife Bridget Hodgson becomes embroiled in a different sort of rebellion. One of Bridget’s friends, Esther Cooper, has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to be burnt alive. Convinced that her friend is innocent, Bridget sets out to find the real killer.

This dark story, set in medieval Austria, hinges on unearthly and hidden mental powers. It also gives an insight to the author's psyche during his final days.

The other stories in this edition include "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg", "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", "The Story of the Bad Little Boy", "The Diary of Adam and Eve", "Edward Mills and George Benton", "The Joke That Made Ed's Fortune", and "A Fable".

Exiled to four years in Siberia, but hailed by the end of his life as a saint, prophet, and genius, Fyodor Dostoevsky holds an exalted place among the best of the great Russian authors. One of Dostoevsky’s five major novels, Devils follows the travails of a small provincial town beset by a band of modish radicals - and in so doing presents a devastating depiction of life and politics in late 19th-century Imperial Russia.

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-stricken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means? Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov makes his decision and then has to live with it.

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others.

For those looking for the real story behind the fictionalized movie account of the 47 Ronin story, this is the definitive, fascinating account of this unforgettable tale of a band of samurai who defied the Emperor to avenge the disgrace and death of their master, and faced certain death as a result. It led to one of the bloodiest episodes in Japanese history, and in the process, created a new set of heroes in Japan.

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the 18th century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires.

A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.'s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves.

Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.

In the coming-of-age story, we follow a young Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, on many adventures, including his experiences at the Battle of Waterloo, and romantic intrigues.

Lisbon, 1755: A distinguished-looking gentleman emerges from the bowels of a ship freshly arrived from London, and sets into the city with a singular purpose. This is Sebastian Foxx, born SebastiAo Raposa, and his parents were abducted by the Inquisition when Sebastian was just 13 years old.

After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where he witnesses famine, riots, and plague - all evoked through meticulous description and with stunning immediacy.

Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of 40 men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty - a gripping and visceral story, impossible to pause.

Twelfth-century Europe. Newly crowned King Philip of France is determined to restore his nation to its former empire and bring glory to his name. But when his greatest enemy, King Henry of England, threatens to end his reign before it can even begin, Philip is forced to make a precarious alliance with Henry’s volatile son—risking both his throne, and his heart.

Once in a great while a writer comes along who can truly capture the drama and passion of the life of a family. David James Duncan, author of the novel The River Why and the collection River Teeth, is just such a writer. And in The Brothers K he tells a story both striking and in its originality and poignant in its universality.

Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked when he sees a friend from his seminary days named Runner Malloy at the altar of his humble parish in upper Manhattan - a friend who was forced to leave under scandalous circumstances. Compelled to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette.

Rome, 77 B.B. The corrupt Senator Dolabella is about to go on trial for his crimes. But Dolabella owns the jury. He’s hired the best lawyers in the city. And he’s very willing to use violence against those who oppose him. In all of Rome, no man dares accept the role of prosecutor—until, against all odds, an unknown twenty-three-year-old steps out to lead the case, defend the people of the city, and defy the power of the ruling elite. That lawyer’s name is Gaius Julius Caesar.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents - an odd brother and sister - extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late....

Scotland, the 11th Century. Born in a noble household and granddaughter of a forgotten Scottish king, a young girl carries the guilt of her mother’s death and the weight of an unknowable prophecy. When she is married, at fifteen, to the Mormaer of Moray, she experiences firsthand the violence of a sadistic husband and a kingdom constantly at war. To survive with her young son in a superstitious realm, she must rely on her own cunning and wit, especially when her husband’s downfall inadvertently sets them free.

In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses audiences in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally’s award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty.