The Toilers of the Sea tells of the reclusive Guernsey fisherman Gilliatt, who salvages the engines of a wrecked ship by performing great feats of engineering, matching wits with sea and storm, and doing battle with a great sea monster - all to win the hand of a shipowner's daughter.

First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it...

"Peer Gynt," written by Henrik Johan Ibsen, is a five-act play, and one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays of all time. It is presented here, alongside the truly impressive illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Ibsen believed Per Gynt, the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modeled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was...

Tolstoy's first novel, originally published in three successive volumes, tells of the journey of an aristocratic Russian boy from childhood through young adulthood, detailing his emotional growing pains, inner conflicts, sensitivities, and relationships with adults, and focusing on the conflict between natural truth and social conventions.

This abridged edition makes the great German scholar's multi-volume work accessible to a larger audience. Rivaling Gibbon, Macaulay, and Burckhardt in its scope and power, it chronicles Roman society and government from the second century BC to the end of the Republic and rise of Julius Caesar - and helped earn Mommsen the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his timeless biography-written long before the significance of Mozart's work was fully realized-author Edward Holmes reveals the musician's character and genius, his struggles, his influence on art, and the brilliant reputation that surrounded him. Published in 1845 as the first authentic narrative of the life of Mozart to appear in English, it was also the first biography after the composer's death in 1791 to be based upon his letters. Holmes's...

The unfettered exuberance of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the storms of phenomenal life it offers for our inspection, the honor it gives to the deformed, the cloacal, and the profane aspects of existence are at the very heart of Rabelais' genius. But the author of this fantasia on the lives of a father-and-son pair of giants was one of the most magnificent and magnificently learned products of the Renaissance; and he also represents, as well as any of...

During the 1800s in America, the rise of industrialization reduced the cost of goods allowing people to have more possessions than ever before. However, a group known as the Transcendentalists believed that possessions created vanity. Instead, they valued the individual's relationship with divinity. One of the movement's most famous members, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote prolifically about his beliefs and experiences. A representative selection of his...

The Genius of the Bard of Avon, in Lyric Form. Besides his notorious plays, William Shakespeare wrote many poems throughout his life, including 154 sonnets plus many lyric descriptions from the Greek and Roman mythology like Venus and Adonis or The Rape of Lucrece. In all of them, the Bard of Avon twisted and bent the rules of the Old English language creating a unique and stupendous lyric masterpiece that awe us to this day.

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's...