A masterwork of science fiction that imagines the world not just how it could be, but how it should be. In Boston in the year 1887, Julian West is hypnotized and falls into a deep sleep. He awakens at the dawn of a new millennium in an America where war, crime, and inequality no longer exist. In this brave new world, goods are delivered in the blink of an eye, public kitchens ensure that no one goes hungry, and the retirement age is forty-five. It...

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.

First published in 1921, "Alice Adams" is a novel by American dramatist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Newton Booth Tarkington (1869–1946). Among only three other novelists to have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once, Tarkington was one of the greatest authors of the 1910s and 1920s who helped usher in Indiana's Golden Age of literature. One of his most famous and successful novels, "Alice Adams" follows the eponymous character and her struggle...

Jude the Obscure, the semi-autobiographical final novel from Thomas Hardy explores notions of surprising candor; within the eponymous protagonist lies the tragic truth of failed ambitions and relationships. In a fierce exploration of the darkness of love and the intellect, this is one of the great tragic novels of English literature. Jude Fawley, an earnest boy from a rural English village, dreams of a life of academia despite his working-class background....

This early work by Edith Wharton was originally published in 1929 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Hudson River Bracketed' is a novel about a brilliant woman, Halo Spear, and an uneducated man, Vance Weston, who form a deep bond through literature. Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862. Wharton's first poems were published in Scribner's Magazine. In 1891, the same publication printed the first of her...

During the Second Empire, Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, experiences the miserable life of the coal miners in northern France and enters the struggle between capital and labor.