Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully written Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his parents, all but rejected by his wife, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It's only when America enters the First World War that Claude finds...

A scholarly professor in a Middle Western university is reluctant to move into a new, more comfortable house, despite the protestations of his wife and daughters. His life has changed too quickly for him to adjust.

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of O Pioneers! presents a moving study of an ambitious woman and her troubled marriage in this 1926 novella. When young Myra Driscoll is forced to choose between a large inheritance from her great-uncle and marrying the man she loves, she follows her heart. She and Oswald Henshawe leave their small Illinois town to pursue a future together in New York City. Years later, fifteen-year-old Nellie Birdseye meets Myra...

In her final novel, Willa Cather departed from her usual Great Plains settings to plumb the turbulent relationships between slaves and their owners in the antebellum South.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. Sapphira is a slave owner who feels she has come down in the world and channels her resentments into jealousy of her beautiful mulatto slave, Nancy. Sapphira’s daughter Rachel,

...

The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had...

"The Invisible Man (1897) blends comedy and tragedy in its story of a scientist who discovers a way to make himself invisible. His inability to reverse the process leads to a radical disconnection from society - and eventually from his own sanity. Arriving in a town where no one knows him, disguised in bandages and dark glasses, the invisible man is driven to violent and criminal extremes before his secret is revealed. This prescient parable of the...

Nikolai Gogol, an early 19th century Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humorist, and dramatist, created some of the most important works of world literature and is considered the father of modern Russian realism. Gogol satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire through the scrupulous and scathing realism of his writing, which would ultimately lead to his exile. Among some of his finest works are his short stories. Together in this collection...

'If a man is likely to be murdered you can't just stand by and do nothing. Or can you?' Inglewood Turrets, an expensive anachronism in the leafy outskirts of North London is a cross between St Pancreas Station and Holloway Gaol, and the house where the formidable Miss Charlotte Cambric recreates Victorian elegance for foreign culture-vultures. Vassily Kopeck, the half-Russian, half-Polish physicist and an 'attaché of sorts', disappears as effectively...

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and '30s. One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant...