A gripping tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion, set amid the mist-shrouded mountains of a fictional South American republic, employs flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men. Conrad's deeply moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in this, one of his finest works.

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character...

Midnight in the North Atlantic. The largest steamship ever built ploughs into an iceberg at full speed. Her watertight compartments flood and she begins to founder. Her complement of lifeboats is hopelessly inadequate, and thousands of people are pitched into the freezing water...

Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him

...

This Nobel Prize–winning author's satirical Southern novel is "full of the kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen" (Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune). If ever there was a William Faulkner novel that could be called a portrait of the artist as a young man, Mosquitoes is that book. Set on a yacht excursion on Lake Pontchartrain, Faulkner's second novel introduces his readers to the artistic community of...

As the "Titanic" and her passengers sank slowly into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912, a nearby ship looked on. Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the "SS Californian" sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the "Titanic" fired. The next morning, the "Titanic" was at the bottom of the sea and more than 1,500 people were dead. When they learned the...

"No better introduction to William Shakespeare's dramatic masterpieces exists than the delightful prose adaptations of Charles and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb, perhaps the preeminent essayist in English lierature, and his gifted sister selected twenty of Shakespeare's best-known plays and set out to make them accessible to children and to pay enthusiastic homage to the original works." -- Book jacket.

Rumors fly of Napoleon's planned invasion of England, and British naval commander Thomas Kydd is sent to liaise with American inventor, Robert Fulton, who has created "infernal machines" that can wreak mass destruction from a distance. Fulton believes that his inventions, namely the submarine and torpedo, will win the day for the power that possesses them, and Kydd must help him develop the devices. Despite his own scruples, believing that standing...

Who will steal the greatest prize of Empire? South America's Spanish colonies are in a ferment of popular unrest. Rumors of a treasure hoard of Spanish silver spur Thomas Kydd's commander-in-chief, Commodore Popham, to assemble a makeshift invasion fleet and launch a bold attack on Buenos Aires. The British invasion force wins a battle against improbable odds, but soon finds itself surrounded by a hostile population. Now Kydd's men must face resistance...

A fearless Spanish crew embarks on a search for a lost ship, swallowed by the Indian Ocean centuries ago, in a novel by "a master of the literary thriller" (Booklist, starred review). Manuel Coy is a suspended sailor with time on his hands, a mariner without a ship. While attending a maritime auction in Barcelona, he meets Tánger Soto, a captivating beauty who works for the Naval Museum in Madrid. A woman obsessed with the Dei Gloria, a famed Jesuit...