Classics

Impeccably crafted in flawless prose, the delightfully witty courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy is brimming with Austen's characteristic playfulness and comic irony.  "He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention...

Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history—these are just some of the themes embraced by the anonymous authors of the eleven tales that make up the Welsh medieval masterpiece known as the Mabinogion. They...

Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history--these are just some of the themes embraced by the anonymous authors of the eleven tales that make up the Welsh medieval masterpiece known as the Mabinogion. They...

'There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life.'In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting...

Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story 'The Final Problem', but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes. While the outcry that...

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are overshadowed by the event with which they close - the meeting of the great detective and Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes,...

'The old woman opened the door, and the next moment I was in the presence of Uncle Silas.' In Victorian Derbyshire, 17 year old orphan and heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to live at the claustrophobic Bartram-Haugh house with her mysterious Uncle Silas...

'Can we doubt ... that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind?'In the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the...

Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called "the Koran in Persian." The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better...

(Available after 3-20 days)Previously adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola starring Kirsten Dunst, this is the story of the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood. The boys...

An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, and a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried. These are the ingredients of one of the most famous and well-loved of children's classics, an...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last House Guest—a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection—comes a riveting, “suspenseful” (BookPage, starred review) novel about a mysterious murder in an idyllic and close-knit neighborhood.Welcome to...

First published in 1894, Arthur Machen’s harrowing tale woven around a terrible mistake made by a doctor encompasses sinister rites, death and devastation and remains one of the most revered and influential classic horror stories. I will not read it;...

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth...

"Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen." -- H. P. LovecraftArthur Machen (1863-1947), Welsh novelist and essayist, is considered one of the most important and influential writers of his time...

"Salty, frank, and realistic." — San Francisco Chronicle   In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those...

"One of the most acute and thoughtful achievements of French fiction at mid-century." — New York Times   Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a...

For the first time in English, Osamu Dazai’s hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel to No Longer Human   The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept...

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty.Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to...

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality in The Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by the police and banned almost as soon as it was published. Today it is...