Classics

Joris-Karl Huysmans' shocking novel of an innocent's descent into a world of depraved, blasphemous rituals.Durtal, a shy, censorious man, is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous fifteenth-century child-murderer thought to be the original...

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his...

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters...

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror.A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once...

Most people are familiar, at least by repute, with Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but few are aware that other poems survive that were attributed to Homer in ancient times. The Homeric Hymns are now known to be the work of various...

Crossley-Holland—the widely acclaimed translator of Old English texts—introduces the Anglo-Saxons through their chronicles, laws, letters, charters, and poetry, with many of the greatest surviving poems printed in their entirety.About the...

Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism is arguably the greatest of all literary dystopias, contriving to look back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst simultaneously predicting with uncanny accuracy the worst excesses...

In the present state of society, it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions,...

Xenophon was acknowledged in Antiquity as a philosopher, a historian (third in the triad of great Classical historians, alongside Herodotus and Thucydides), and a literary artist. His narrative was appreciated for its literary qualities including its...

"...the more honourable animals have been allotted a more honourable soul..."What is the nature of the soul? It is this question that Aristotle sought to answer in De Anima(On the Soul). In doing so he offers a psychological theory that encompasses not...

This is a new verse translation of Lucretius's only known work, a didactic poem written in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor is especially helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or...

'That was how things stood in the city at the time. With no one in charge, murders were taking place almost every day and the elections could not be held.'Books 36-40 of the Roman History by Cassius Dio (born ca. 163 CE), covers 69-50 BCE, the last...

I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother...

Joseph - a 22-year-old self-styled nihilist in search of meaning, found releasing a badger from a zoo, seducing his best friend's mother, dancing at a Dionysic revel and spending his days in a mortuary - is the anti-hero at the heart of this novel.

This edition of Jane Austen's classic novel features a suede-like custom cover with beautiful metallic foiling and a ribbon marker.  A brilliant novel describing two parallel love stories, Sense and Sensibility remains a time-honored classic in...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead...

George Orwell is a difficult author to summarize. He was a would-be revolutionary who went to Eton, a political writer who abhorred dogma, a socialist who thrived on his image as a loner, and a member of the Imperial Indian Police who chronicled the...

Cicero lived through some of the most turbulent years in the history of Rome and witnessed first-hand the overthrow of the republic and its replacement by the tyranny of Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian. One of Rome's most memorable and keenly...

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), Rome's greatest orator, had a career of intense activity in politics, the law courts and the administration, mostly in Rome. His fortunes, however, followed those of Rome, and he found himself driven into exile in 58...

"The fates ordained the founding of this great city and the beginning of the world's mightiest empire, second only to the power of the gods"Romulus and Remus, the rape of Lucretia, Horatius at the bridge, the saga of Coriolanus, Cincinnatus called from...