First published in 1948, The Ides of March is a brilliant epistolary novel of the Rome of Julius Caesar. Through imaginary letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of its magnetic personalities. In this novel, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being as he appeared to his family, his legions, his Rome, and his empire in the months just before his death.

Meet George Marvin Brush, one of Thornton Wilder's most memorable characters. Brush, a traveling textbook salesman, is a fervent religious convert who is determined to lead a good life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois - and into the soul of America itself.

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent 20 months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in Southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim’s wife and children.

The last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder’s twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade.

Having submitted himself to Freudian psychoanalysis, the narrator keeps a diary with the aim of conquering his addiction to smoking. He describes his marriage to the woman he didn't want to marry, how he drives his business partner to despair, and how his "last cigarette" turns out to be one of many. Zeno is the classic "schlemiel"; his erratic foibles, his questionable logic, and his curious inclination to self sabotage help shine a light on human behavior in general, and reveal the many subtle half-truths people may tell themselves in order to defend their own actions and egos.

Father Brown is an eccentric priest with his own particular ways of dealing with crime. David Timson, having completed the whole of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, a remarkable achievement, turns his hand to the genial but certainly not innocent priest! This collection contains a group of stories from the Innocence of Father Brown, told unabridged.

The last years of King Charles IX's reign in France were dominated by religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Queen Margot begins in 1572 with the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to Henri de Navarre. Marguerite is King Charles' sister and the daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, all firm Catholics. Henri de Navarre is a Protestant who later will become the beloved King Henri IV. Several important political events have led up to this marriage including the mysterious murder of Henri de Navarre's mother, cleverly plotted by Catherine de Medici. The wedding brings noblemen from all over the world to Paris resulting in the notorious Saint Bartholomew Massacre, where thousands of Protestants are killed. In this inventive and compelling novel, Dumas brings an extraordinary period of history vividly to life with much excitement and romance. The lively prose and wonderfully constructed plot tell of court intrigues and forbidden love, of beautiful queens, duchesses, and noblemen, suspense, conspiracies, betrayals, assassinations, superstitions, poisonings, and sumptuous feasts. With well-known historical figures as main characters in a dangerous and breathtaking game for power, Queen Margot tells of conspiracies, clandestine trysts, and daring escapes. There is the infamous Catherine de Medici, deliciously evil, constantly plotting and poisoning; Le Mole, a dashing and irresistable young Protestant who becomes Marguerite's lover; the noble Coconnos who provides a great source of comic relief; and at the center of all this intrigue are the good-hearted Marguerite and Henri who are perfect political allies with complicated and fascinating love lives.

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, king of Persia. Here are not only the great battles - Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis - but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of epic destiny at work.

Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues is Murdoch’s philosophical masterpiece featuring fictionalized discussions between the intellectual giants of the classical world, including Socrates and Plato. Described by Acastos, a friend of Plato’s, the riveting debates center on the nature of goodness and faith, told through the voices of history’s most celebrated thinkers.

Witty and profound, these debates apply the timeless wisdom of history’s renowned philosophers to the most contentious issues of the modern day.

Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.

Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.

In the Summer of 1943, the Allies were poised to invade Sicily. Yet the price would be high in blood and time – unless the island people rose in revolt against their Nazi oppressors. But only the Mafia could command an uprising, and Mafia supremo Antonia Luca hated everything American. Someone very persuasive indeed was needed to change his mind. And they didn’t come any more persuasive than the man known as Lucky Luciano.

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture - from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of nine novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

An undeniable masterpiece of Western Civilization, The Metamorphoses is a continuous narrative that covers all the Olympian legends, seamlessly moving from one story to another in a splendid panorama of savage beauty, charm, and wit. All of the gods and heroes familiar to us are represented. Such familiar legends as Hercules, Perseus and Medusa, Daedelus and Icarus, Diana and Actaeon, and many others, are breathtakingly recreated.

A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.