Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea-if you gazed intently, enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About...

Immerse yourself in the evocative world of Proust's masterpiece, Swann's Way. In quaint Combray, a tapestry of childhood memories unfurls for young Marcel. Fragrances like madeleine cakes ignite a kaleidoscope of the past, transporting him to sun-drenched landscapes and the comforting rituals of his grandmother's embrace. Amidst this idyllic haven, Swann, a family friend, falls prey to an all-consuming love for Odette, a woman shrouded in enigmatic...

The history of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes dates back to the 1500s, when most of Florida as well as much of the United States was uninhabited. During the early 19th century, the tribes moved into the South Florida interior, living on remote tree islands throughout the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp. These self-reliant people kept mostly to themselves. Their struggles have included disease, poverty, relocation, and three wars with the U.S....

Charles Dickens's classic story of orphan David Copperfield growing up in nineteenth-century England.

Described as humorous, this wonderful novel that interweaves power, love, greed, and deceit in Barchester.

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is considered Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise.

The novel tells the story of Madame Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery

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The tragic story of Tess, who is victimized by lust, poverty, and Victorian hypocrisy. A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialized version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891 and in book form in 1892. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's fictional masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed...

The classic tale of romance and betrayal from a distinguished master of English satire. The fifth novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire epitomizes the wit, attention to detail, and thoughtful analysis of class and gender issues that made Anthony Trollope one of Victorian England's most beloved novelists. The Small House at Allington moves away from the earlier books' overt ecclesiastical concerns to focus on a small dower house on the edge of Christopher...

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a China that was -- now in a Contemporary Classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In The Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when...