"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...

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...

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. It was written during 1870-71 and published in 1872 as a prequel to his first book Innocents Abroad. This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad. Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861-1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate cavalry militiaman...

Indiana, a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage, is seduced by a charming neighbor who is not as polished and pure as he appears. She embarks on a journey to find real love, leading to an unexpected discovery about the object of her affection. Indiana is a young woman from French Louisiana who's married to the much older Colonel Delmare. Their union is strict and often oppressive, leaving her unfulfilled. Indiana shares their home with her cousin...

Tolstoy based "Resurrection", the last of his novels, on a true story of a philanderer whose misuse of a beautiful young orphan girl leads to her ruin. Fate brings the two together many years later and the meeting awakens the man's moral conscience. Anger, intimacy, forgiveness, and grace result. While the situation of Tolstoy's plot is alien to most people, his nuanced treatment of mortal life is familiar to all. Late in his life Tolstoy confessed...

A beautiful hardcover repackaging of this timeless classic from the publishers of the Autobiography of Mark Twain and in partnership with the Mark Twain Project. This definitive edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the only version of Mark Twain's masterpiece based on his complete manuscript, including the 663 pages found in a Los Angeles attic in 1990. Prepared by the Mark Twain Papers, the official archive of Sam Clemens's papers at the...

"Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman...

The Ambassadors, by Henry James, 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 todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

"Of Human Bondage" is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly...

Sense and Sensibility is one of the best loved of Jane Austen's novels, populated by great comic creations like Mrs. Jennings, the unscrupulous cad Willoughby, and guileless and artful women. As ever, Austen suffuses her work with great ironic observation and tremendous wit, producing a masterpiece of romantic entanglement that time and a very different set of mores cannot diminish. Sense and Sensibility was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be...