"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...

This nineteenth-century tale of an electric submarine, its eccentric captain, and the undersea world, anticipated many of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. The adventures of a French scientist and his companions who travel the seven seas as prisoners in the submarine of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

Jane Eyre is the story of the life of its titular protagonist, Jane Eyre, starting with her abusive childhood in Gateshead Hall, and continuing with her challenging education at Lowood School, her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Mr. Rochester, her time in the Moor House, where she is courted by her earnest but cold cousin, St. John Rivers, and finally with her reunion with Rochester. Jane...

For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there:...

"The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress, marries and moves to New York, and when her husband loses his job, returns to the stage." ***"A powerful account of a young working girl's rise to the 'tinsel and shine' of worldly success, and of the slow decline of her lover and protector Hurstwood." Oxford Companion to Engl Lit. ***"Plain, unaffected, and unconventional story of the actual life of the lower middle-classes...

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a China that was -- now in a Contemporary Classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In The Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when...

A casual wager hastens the elegant and exacting Phileas Fogg on a rollicking ride around the world with his entertaining sidekick Passepartout in tow and the dogged Detective Fix hot on their heels. By cab, rail, steamer, and ingenious means improvised en route, they cobble together a global adventure in which they overcome all manner of unanticipated and sometimes uproarious obstacles while still managing to rescue the demure princess Aouda. Full...

Elnora Comstock's first day at high school is a disaster. The other students laugh at her clothes, and then -- to make matters worse -- she learns she has to pay for her books and tuition. --- [Excerpt from back cover.]

After being cracked on the head with a crowbar at the Colt factory in Hartford, Connecticut, Hank Morgan awakens to find himself in sixth-century England. Captured by a knight and sentenced to death by King Arthur, the cagey Yankee instead becomes the king's right-hand wizard. Though homesick for the nineteenth century, Morgan makes the best of his surroundings, setting up factories and phone lines, as well as introducing such strange customs as advertising...

"In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial,...