CLASSICS

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first...

When an army of invading Martians lands in England, panic and terror seize the population. As the aliens traverse the country in huge three-legged machines, incinerating all in their path...

First published in 1921, this volume collects some of the most comical stories Kipling published throughout his writing career. These tales derive their humour from absurd situations - a drunken...

In contrast with the epic scope of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola's short stories are concerned with the everyday aspects of human existence and the interests of ordinary people.From the cruel...

Most famous for his twenty-volume dissection of nineteenth-century French mores and society, the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola was also an extremely accomplished short-story writer, as exemplified by the tales included in...

The heir to his grandfather's considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the temptations of the 1920s Jazz Age. His descent into dissolution...

True Story, Lucian's best-known and most entertaining work, is a parody of the tall stories of fantastic journeys narrated by famous poets and historians. With his trademark wit and humour,...

A carriage transporting ten passengers fleeing from Rouen is stopped at a village inn by Prussian soldiers, who decide to detain them until one of their party, the prostitute Boule...

Jane Tressider has never been afraid of speaking her mind, even if she admits that she may have occasionally given offence by doing so. But as a busy mother of...

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of...

"In 'The Wave', a young man falls dangerously in love with the tenant downstairs, who is engaged to be married; in 'The Signorina', a flirtatious young woman is caught between...

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host,...

On the eve of the Crimean War, the young, headstrong Yelena, the daughter of aristocratic Russian parents, falls in love with a revolutionary from Bulgaria named Insarov. Facing the wrath...

The orphan girl Pollyanna moves in with her strict aunt in New England. Despite a difficult start, Pollyanna's exuberance and positivity affect everyone who meets her, and she spreads joy...

After the Lady Vain is shipwrecked, Edward Prendick is plucked from the waves by a passing ship and deposited on a remote island. Here he is the guest of Dr...

Compiled and published after Fitzgerald's death by his friend, the prominent critic and editor Edmund Wilson, The Crack-Up is a collection of writings that chronicle the author's state of mind...

Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and...

The notorious adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova tells of his travels - on the run from the authorities of his native Venice - around northern Europe, poking fun at the...

London's criminal underworld has risen once again, and a dangerous individual with an air gun is prowling the streets. The capital is in greater need of its protector Sherlock Holmes...

'Do you see your son, standing over there, in the antechamber? Well, I am going to shoot him.'The story of the great and mad Cambyses, King of Persia, told by...

Three men trek to the remote African interior in search of a lost friend - and reach, at the end of a perilous journey, an unknown land cut off from...

'The most popular novel of the nineteenth century, and still one of the best plots in English literature' Sarah WatersThe original 'sensation novel', The Woman in White opens with Walter...

'Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else'Dickens's novel honouring the value of the human heart...

In the last two days of his own life, Peter Carson completed these new translations of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession before he succumbed to cancer in January...

Alongside his monumental Zibaldone (Notebooks) and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly...

These five stories were collected and published as Tales of Unrest in 1898, shortly before Heart of Darkness, the first of Conrad's major novels. Ranging from the faraway and unfamiliar,...

Described by Herman Melville as being "as deep as Dante", 'Young Goodman Brown' is set during the Salem witch trials and features the sort of narrative ambiguities and troubling uncertainties...

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey's innovative, idio syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work strewn...

First published in 1797, The Italian, with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance and its sublime depiction of landscape, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction.Enlisted by the Marchesa di...

When her wealthy family prepares to host a lavish summer party, the young, hitherto sheltered Laura Sheridan suddenly feels a kinship with the staff and the helpers hired to set...

Gilbert's libretti of the comic operas composed by Arthur Sullivan are hugely well known, and lines such as "let the punishment fit the crime" have entered the English lexicon -...

On a visit to a provincial town to see his sister Nina who is suffering from cancer, Alexei Laptev, who works for his father's Moscow haberdashery business, falls in love...

Published in 1880, one year before Verga's influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collection's centrepiece,...

"In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator, after an attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally finds himself in what appears to be the Garden of...

"Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy's fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study,...

Born in Newgate Prison to an incarcerated mother, Moll Flanders is compelled from earliest childhood to make her own way in the world and to live off her wit and...

When the peaceful atmosphere of Barchester is destroyed by a scandal concerning the financial affairs of an almshouse, Septimus Harding, the kindly warden who devotes his life to the care...

'Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence' George Steiner. It is impossible to overstate the influence world literatures have had in defining each other. No culture...

A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi....

'Tobermory' - the title story of this collection - is widely considered one of Saki's finest pieces, in which a short-sighted dinner-party guest introduces a talking cat to the diners,...

Stephen Glennard is in desperate need of money. So when he becomes aware of the potential value of a series of passionate love letters written to him by the recently...

To the French Riviera come Dick and Nicole Diver. Handsome, rich and glamorous, their dinners are legendary, their atmosphere magnetic. But something is wrong - Nicole has a secret and...

One of Tolstoy's last published works of fiction, The Devil revolves around the young landowner Yevgeny's irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to...

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL As an orphan, Jane's childhood is full of trouble, but her stubborn independence and sense...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of...

The House of Mirth follows the tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the...