CLASSICS

The Everyman Signet Shakespeare series continues with the second volume of Histories, containing HENRY IV, parts I and II, HENRY V and HENRY VIII. As before, there is an extended...

Juvenal, writing between AD 110 and 130, was one of the greatest satirists of Imperial Rome. His powerful and witty attacks on the vices, abuses, and follies of the big...

This unflinching portrayal of the squalor and brutality of New York life produced a scandal when it was published in 1893. Crane's novel tells the story of Maggie Johnson, a...

Vidal writes with ease and grace, and roams through many subjects and genres. He is a master of the historical novel, in which he has explored American history, ancient history,...

"Emma", originally published in 1816, was the last novel which Jane Austen lived to see through the press, and combines all the qualities for which she is most admired -...

A witty and reflective study of the bourgeoisie after the French Revolution, and the two great human obsessions - love and money - Honore de Balzac's "Old Goriot" is part...

The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings.This volume, with its erudite introduction by Mario Praz,...

This book offers a fascinating picture of eighteenth-century society. Tough, splenetic, and widely experienced, of all the great novelists of his time Tobias Smollett is the one who registered best...

'Such a strange book! Imagine a novel with a little swarthy governess for heroine, and a middle-aged ruffian for hero.' Sharpe's London Magazine (June 1855) Jane Eyre is an orphan...

Smurov, a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress' husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing...

It was in 1887 that the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock...

Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken...

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear,...