Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is arguably the greatest writer of modern China, and is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese...

A trusted member of the Byzantine establishment, Procopius was the Empire's official chronicler, and his History of the Wars of...

Written between 1143 and 1153 by the daughter of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, The Alexiad is one of the most popular and...

As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and used them (along with...

Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to...

A superb new translation by Judson Rosengrant of Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical trilogy

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy,...

Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a member of Russia's dying aristocracy - a man so lazy that he has given up his job in the Civil Service,...

Set on a Bengali noble's estate in 1908, this is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character,...

In the Laws, Plato describes in fascinating detail a comprehensive system of legislation in a small agricultural utopia he named...

Mencius was one of the great philosophers of ancient China, second only in influence to Confucius, whose teachings he defended...

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly...

Headstrong and naive, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father...

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is...

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which...

This volume includes Family Happiness; The Kreutzer Sonata; The Devil and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love,...

In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years...

Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning...

Previously published as L'assommoir (The Dram Shop), Emile Zola's The Drinking Den is an unflinching study of a desperate young...

A profound examination of the nature of happiness by one of the giants of ancient Greek philosophy

In The Nicomachean Ethics,...

Perhaps his most famous work, Emile Zola's Therese Raquin is a dark and gripping story of lust, violence and guilt, set in the...

Plutarch's vivid and engaging portraits of the Spartans and their customs are a major source of our knowledge about the rise and...

Dramatic artist, natural scientist and philosopher, Plutarch is widely regarded as the most significant historian of his era,...

'Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death'

The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and...

In the course of a lively drinking party, a group of Athenian intellectuals exchange views on eros, or desire. From their...

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically...

The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but...

Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its...

The prize-winning translation of Miguel de Cervantes's mock-epic masterwork

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading...

Nikolai Gogol's short fiction, collected here as The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, deeply...

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking...