Odysseus--soldier, sailor, trickster, and everyman--is one of the most recognizable characters in world literature. His arduous, ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, the subject of Homer's Odyssey, is the most accessible tale to survive from ancient Greece, and its impact is still felt today across many different cultures. This lively free verse translation, from one of today's leading Homeric scholars, preserves the clarity and simplicity...

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through eastern America. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation's evolving politics. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing its egalitarian ideals reflected the spirit of the age-even that they were...

Contains a selection of the short stories of Ivan Turgenev, a 19th century writer of tales of Russian peasants and aristocrats.

Ever since her death in 1966 Anna Akhmatova has been recognized as the greatest modern Russian poet. A rich and representative selection of Akhmatova's work-from her poignant, deeply personal love poems to her haunting laments for the martyrs of the Stalinist purges-has been newly translated by the American poet Lyn Coffin. In her finely crafted translations Coffin has been uniquely successful in reproducing the directness and striking effects characteristic...

From one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall", "Birches", and "The Road Not Taken", as well as poems less famous but equally great.