"The story opens when an unemployed farmhand, Michael Henchard, sells his wife, Susan, and daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, while in a drunken stupor at a fair, for five guineas to a sailor called Newson. On sobering up the following day, Henchard is filled with remorse, swears a twenty year abstinence from alcohol and begins a search for his family. Eighteen years later the reformed Henchard has become the mayor of Casterbridge, but his past is set to...

This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

This gripping saga of the sea demonstrates Jack London's gift for expressing complex ideas with compelling action. A clash of two opposing views of morality is brought to life in the ruthless Wolf Larsen, a strong believer in the survival of the fittest, and Humphrey Van Weyden, a civilized man who is shocked by the cruelty of Larsen's nature.

One ill-fated evening at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg rashly bets his companions that he can travel around the entire globe in just eighty days -- and he is determined not to lose. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, the reserved Englishman immediately sets off for Dover, accompaned by his hot-blooded manservant Passepartout. Traveling by train, steamship, sailboat, sledge, and even elephant, they must overcome storms, kidnappings,...

The Horace Gregory translation of one the great works of classical mythology.

The Ambassadors, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

Rudyard Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Born in India and growing into early manhood, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier born under British Imperial rule in 19th century India. Left in the care of a half-caste woman, Kim is free to explore the back allies and bazaars of Lahore. But when he meets with his father's old regiment he trades his native clothes for European suits and abandons his...

"On an autumn day, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, two boys were born in England, one to a poor family by the name of Canty who lived in Offal Court, not far from London Bridge, and the other to a wealthy and high-placed family by the name of Tudor. Young Tom Canty, unwanted, unloved, began his day-dreaming early in order to forget the petty stealing to which he was forced by his cruel rogue of a father--and the royal Court and young...

"Frankenstein was Mary Shelley's immensely powerful contribution to the ghost stories which she, Percy Shelley, and Byron devised one wet summer in Switzerland. Its protagonist is a young student of natural philosophy, who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from relics of the dead, with horrific consequences." "Frankenstein confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism: topics such as degeneracy, hereditary...

A ninteenth-century novel which tells the humorous story of embittered old bachelor Squire Dale and his impoverished nieces who live in the cathedral town of Barchester.