Library

“After ten years of war and ten more of wandering, Odysseus fights his way home to a wife, a son and a house overrun by suitors.”

“Over one long night in the Piraeus, Socrates and his friends build an ideal city in words to discover what justice is, and why the just life is the happiest.”

“The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written in Greek on campaign and at court: twelve books of reminders to himself about duty, death, anger, change, and how to stay good in a world that will not cooperate.”

“A stingy old Dubrovnik merchant chases his spendthrift son to carnival-time Rome, where a clever servant named Pomet runs rings around them both.”

“Shipwrecked alone on an island for twenty-eight years, a restless young Englishman learns to build, farm, pray and finally to live with another human being.”

“Kicked out of a Westphalian castle for kissing the baron's daughter, a young man raised to believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is flung across Europe and the Americas through war, earthquake, Inquisition and shipwreck, to find out whether his tutor was right.”

“In letters to each other, two brilliant aristocratic libertines plot the seduction of a convent girl and a virtuous wife, until their game destroys everyone, themselves included.”

“A gentleman officer calmly recounts how he rode a cannonball, climbed to the moon on a bean stalk and pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.”

“Lively Elizabeth Bennet and proud Mr. Darcy misjudge each other from their first meeting, and must each overcome their own failings before they can see each other clearly.”

“A young scientist gives life to a creature assembled from the dead, abandons it in horror, and is pursued to the ends of the earth by its loneliness and revenge.”

“The world we see is only a picture in our minds; behind it lies a blind, endless will that causes all suffering, and from which art, compassion and renunciation offer the only escape.”

“On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner and three Spirits, who show him his past, his present and his future.”

“Schopenhauer's fifty supplementary chapters to his main work, including his famous essays on the primacy of the will, genius, music, death, sexual love and the suffering of life.”

“Guided by an angel, a poet's soul flies through the universe to learn why man was exiled from heaven, and discovers the story of Satan's rebellion and Adam's fall.”

“In a verse drama set in 18th-century Montenegro, a tormented prince-bishop decides to turn against his own people who have converted to Islam, in one of the most celebrated and most controversial works of Balkan literature.”

“A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy, raised on romantic novels, seeks in love affairs and luxury the life she dreamed of, and is ruined by it.”

“An orphan boy from the Kentish marshes is suddenly made a gentleman by a secret benefactor, and learns too late who it is, and what he has lost.”

“A poor student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker to prove he is above ordinary morality, and finds he cannot live with what he has done.”

“A mischievous boy in a Mississippi River town tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence, runs away to be a pirate, witnesses a murder in a graveyard, and hunts for buried treasure.”

“A jobless mechanic walks into a northern French coalfield in the dead of winter, goes down the Voreux pit beside the Maheu family, and becomes the leader of a strike that hunger, troops and the mine itself will try to crush.”

“A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait would grow old instead of him, and lives a life of pleasure and crime while the painting records every sin.”

“A young governess receives a pearl every year from an unknown sender, and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson follow the trail to a stolen Indian treasure, a locked-room murder and a chase down the Thames.”

“A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701, where humanity has split into the gentle Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks, and then on to the dying earth.”

“Martians land in the English countryside in great metal cylinders, and a narrator struggles to survive as their fighting machines and Black Smoke lay waste to London.”

“A traveling salesman wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family slowly learns to live without him.”