The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary...

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d'If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible...

A rich and pompous merchant is plagued by loneliness and misfortune.

Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...

Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) is a historical novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although her career peaked with the publication of abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe continued to work as a professional writer throughout her life. A tale of greed, betrayal, and rebellion, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp displays her impressive imaginative range and admirable moral outlook while illuminating aspects of early American...

Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in the mid-nineteenth century, these philosophical essays were written by one of America's most celebrated thinkers. Poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes drew upon his youthful experiences at a Boston boarding house to add color and humor to his reflections. As the autocrat, or ruler, of the communal table, Holmes converses with his fellow boarders, including the Landlady, the Professor, the Divinity...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

Wealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has its sunny side . . .” It's Christmas time . . . The March family has fallen on bad times after the father lost their money. The four March sisters-the nearly perfect ‘little woman' Meg, the tomboyish Jo, the shy but wise Beth, and the artist of the family Amy-are planning to brighten up their Christmas by buying presents while their father is away, fighting the Civil War. Featuring...

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

John Ridd, an unsophisticated farmer, falls in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone, kidnapped as a child by the outlaw Doones on Exmoor. Ridd's rivalry with the villainous Carver Doone reaches a dramatic climax that will determine Lorna's future happiness. First published in 1869, Lorna Doone was praised by R. L. Stevenson and Thomas Hardy and has remained constantly in print. The novel has many aspects: it is a romance; a historical...