In The Road, Jack London embraces the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism through his autobiographical account of his time riding the rails of Canada and the United States. The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and Sea Wolf, relays the time leading up to turning point in his life - a perfunctory trial and a 30-day imprisonment in the Erie County Penitentiary for the crime of vagrancy - an experience so degrading that he turned to a career in writing.

"To Build a Fire," the best-known of Jack London's many short stories, tells the tale of a solitary traveler on the Yukon Trail accompanied only by his dog as they endure the extreme cold. A classic narrative of a battle for survival against the forces of nature, "To Build a Fire" is London at his best. Also included here are "The Red One," "All Gold Canyon," "A Piece of Steak," "The Love of Life," "Flush of Gold," "The Story of Keesh," and "The Wisdom of the Trail."

"He travels fastest who travels alone...but not after the frost has dropped below zero 50 degrees or more." (Yukon Code) Jack London’s best short story.

Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, is about a struggling young writer. It is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome his bleak circumstances makes him one of the most memorable and poignant characters Jack London ever created.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of George and Lennie on stage and film, including James Earl Jones, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

In the desolate, frozen northwest of Canada, a lone wolf fights a heroic daily fight for life in the wild. But after he is captured and cruelly abused by men, he becomes a force of pure rage. Only one man sees inside the killer to his intelligence and nobility. But can his kindness touch White Fang?

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Sixteenth-century Spanish gentleman Don Quixote, fed by his own delusional fantasies, takes to the road in search of chivalrous adventures. But his quest leads to more trouble than triumph. At once humorous, romantic, and sad, Don Quixote is a literary landmark. This fresh edition, by award-winning translator Edith Grossman, brings the tale to life as never before.

One of the most revered works in English literature, Great Expectations traces the coming of age of a young orphan, Pip, from a boy of shallow aspirations into a man of maturity. From the chilling opening confrontation with an escaped convict to the grand but eerily disheveled estate of bitter old Miss Havisham, all is not what it seems in Dickens’ dark tale of false illusions and thwarted desire.

Rediscover one of literature’s most beloved classics, richly reissued in a pivotal new audio recording. Emmy and Tony Award-nominated actor Pablo Schreiber (The Wire, Orange Is the New Black) delivers a stirring performance of Jack London’s fierce yet tender tale of loyalty between man and beast, told from the point of view of a dog.

Ordered to hold an abandoned army post, John Dunbar found himself alone, beyond the edge of civilization. Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. Set in 1863, the novel follows Lieutenant John Dunbar on a magical journey from the ravages of the Civil War to the far reaches of the imperiled American frontier, a frontier he naively wants to see "before it is gone".

The ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical.

Keith Stewart, a retiring and ingenious engineer, could not have been happier in his little house in the shabby London suburb of Ealing. There he invented the mini-motor, the six-volt generator, and the tiny Congreve clock. Then a chain of events sweeps him into deep waters and leads him to his happiest discovery yet.

First published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway's death, this is the story of an artist and adventurer, a man much like Hemingway himself. Beginning in the 1930s, Islands in the Stream follows the fortunes of Thomas Hudson, from his experiences as a painter on the Gulf Stream island of Bimini through his antisubmarine activities off the coast of Cuba during World War II. Hemingway is at his mature best in this beguiling tale.

The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers - a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis. A Penguin Classic In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American". Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned.

Jack London worshiped strong and virtuous heroes, and his stories give great weight to the inevitable triumph of good over evil. His telling of the adventures of Humphrey van Weydon in The Sea Wolf is in keeping with this theme of moral man. His powerful and gripping saga of van Weydon's capture by a seal-hunting ship and the ensuing tangles with its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen, makes this a classic American tale of peril and victory.

Melville’s epic tale of one man versus a great white whale will delight Melville devotees as well as those who have yet to sail on this adventure in this mesmerizing new recording read by Jonathan Epstein. The mountain whose whale-like shape first gave Melville the idea of writing Moby Dick rests in the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts, a short drive away from The Alison Larkin Presents recording studio. At the end of the recording, Larkin interviews Jonathan Epstein and recording engineer Galen Wade about the experience recording the great novel.

Listen to Blue Lagoon with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Two shipwrecked children grow up on a South Pacific island. This beautiful story of adventure and innocent love was H.D. Stacpoole’s most popular work.

A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.

Perhaps the greatest story of piracy and the search for a fabulous buried treasure ever penned. Meet this cast of extraordinary characters brought vividly to life by the voice and interpretive skill of Benjamin Luxon: once one of Britain's leading international singers, now turning his considerable talents to the spoken word.

Conor and Grace are twins, recently orphaned after their widowed father's death. They decide to set sail for new pastures in their father's last possession, his sailboat. But a vicious storm capsizes their boat, and the twins are separated. Two mysterious ships sail to their rescue, each picking up one twin before disappearing into the mist. Conor wakes to find himself on a pirate ship; Grace finds herself locked in a darkened room, as the vampirates wait for night to fall and their feasting to begin.

October 1772, Portsmouth. Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho waits to join the Gorgon, ordered to sail to the west coast of Africa and to destroy those who challenge the King's Navy. For Bolitho, and for many of the crew, it is a severe and testing initiation into the game of seamanship.

The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated. But who was the real James Cook? This Yorkshire farm boy would go on to become the foremost mariner, scientist, navigator and cartographer of his era, and to personally map a third of the globe. His great voyages of discovery were incredible feats of seamanship and navigation.

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece of his final period relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him with a ship becalmed in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever.

It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Traveling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent. But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage. A twice-dead leper stalks the decks. Strange symbols appear on the sails. Livestock is slaughtered. And then three passengers are marked for death, including Samuel. Could a demon be responsible for their misfortunes?

As a well-paid war correspondent, Stephen Crane was shipwrecked en route to Cuba in early 1897. He and a small party of passengers spent 30 hours adrift off the coast of Florida, an experience that Crane would later transform into this, his most famous short story, in 1898.

After her family is killed by corrupt warlord Aric Athair and his bloodthirsty army of Bullets, Caledonia Styx is left to chart her own course on the dangerous and deadly seas. She captains her ship, the Mors Navis, with a crew of girls and women just like her, who have lost their families and homes because of Aric and his men. The crew has one mission: stay alive, and take down Aric's armed and armored fleet.

Set in the 19th century against a backdrop of island life and the vast surrounding seas, A High Wind in Jamaica is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them back to England following a hurricane in the postcolonial Caribbean they call home. Having set sail, the children quickly fall into the hands of pirates. As their voyage continues, things take an awful turn

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

Merle Johnson has here gathered together in one volume all of the nineteenth-century author-artist's classic pirate stories that had been scattered through many magazines and books. Well researched and with richly drawn characters, Pyle's work will appeal to students of history and adventure lovers alike.