Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works,...

After the Lady Vain is shipwrecked, Edward Prendick is plucked from the waves by a passing ship and deposited on a remote island....

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his...

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his...

Coming back into town after a hunting expedition, Alexandre Dumas witnesses an incredible scene: a man has come to hand himself...

Few writers have known Italy better than Stendhal: he was only seventeen when he first rode south across the Alps in the wake of...

What is the nature, essence and definition of a fart? What are the consequences and disadvantages of suppressing one? Why is...

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d’Urbervilles, as...

Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic...

Inspired by Boileau's Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the "Ancients", who argued...

Although he is best known to the public as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and other pioneering works of detective...

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude Morel begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a...

Meet Miss Charlotte… a modern Mary Poppins who wears a large hat and a crumpled dress that maker her look like a scarecrow, and...

After her parents die of cholera in India, Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in his gloomy house in Yorkshire, where she...

Have you ever looked up into the sky and wondered about space, astronomy and the universe? Perhaps you have. But you've probably...

Life of Dante brings together the earliest accounts of Dante available, putting the celebratory essay of literary genius Giovanni...

A mysterious murder near Esher, a gruesome delivery of two human ears packed in coarse salt, the disappearance of secret...

Dark forces are at work in the House of the Double Axe. Stephan, the thirteen-year-old son of King Minos of Crete, stumbles...

The shop owner Adolf Verloc, member of an anarchist group and secret agent for a foreign government, is summoned to meet Mr...

When Francis Raven is roused from his sleep on the eve of his birthday and confronted by the sight of a woman trying to stab him,...

Frank Aldersley becomes engaged to Clara Burnham on the eve of his departure on a journey to discover the Northwest Passage....

An English aristocrat, Lord Montbarry, abandons his fiancee for an enigmatic countess with a dark past, before moving with her...

Monroe Stahr is a film producer at the height of his career, revered by the industry and in control of every aspect of his...

This volume, first published in 1856, includes three of the tales widely considered to be among Melville’s masterpieces. In...

A carriage transporting ten passengers fleeing from Rouen is stopped at a village inn by Prussian soldiers, who decide to detain...

When Richard Hannay finds the corpse of freelance spy Franklin P. Scudder in his London flat, he goes on the run, fearing that...

After one of their own people repeatedly fails to live up to a pact with the Devil, a petty and morally bankrupt village...

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of...

The Good Soldier tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the start of...

This major critical work by the great French novelist reveals Stendhal’s decisive role in the literary renaissance called...