"Written deliberately to increase the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, Hard Times was a huge and instantaneous success upon publication in 1854. Yet this novel is not the cheerful celebration of Victorian life one might have expected from the beloved author of The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop. Compressed, stark, allegorical, it is a bitter exposé of capitalist exploitation during the industrial revolution-and...

The direct and unadorned narrative describes four remarkable journeys of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, among them one to the land of Lilliput, where six-inch-high inhabitants bicker over trivialities; and another to Brobdingnag, a land where giants reduce man to insignificance. Written with disarming simplicity and careful attention to detail, this classic is diverse in its appeal: for children, it remains an enchanting fantasy. For adults, it is...

A war hero and the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Sergeant Raymond Shaw is keeping a deadly secret-even from himself. During his time as a prisoner of war in North Korea, he was brainwashed by his Communist captors and transformed into a deadly weapon-a sleeper assassin, programmed to kill without question or mercy at his captors' signal. Now he's been returned to the United States with a covert mission: to kill a candidate for US...