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...

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...

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.

Raised in the idyllic setting of Dorlcote Mill, the wild and wilful Maggie Tulliver adores her elder brother Tom and is forever trying to gain the approbation of her parents. Yet, as she grows older and the family struggle under the weight of severe pecuniary difficulties, she becomes increasingly caught between the divergent expectations of the four men in her life: a doting father, an obdurate and vengeful brother, a good-looking and frivolous suitor...

Harvey Cheyne is the over-indulged son of a millionaire. When he falls overboard from an ocean liner he is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and, initially against his will, joins the crew of the We're Here for a summer. Through the medium of an exciting adventure story, Captains Courageous (1897) deals with a boy who, like Mowgli in The Jungle Book , is thrown into an entirely alien environment. The supersitious, magical world of the sea and the...

"At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon?s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes--conflict...

"1906 bestseller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page." --Amazon.com

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

Carol, a college-bred girl, marries a small town doctor. She tries to uplift the natives of the small town.

Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...