Chaucer's work begins at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, England, where a group of pilgrims have assembled on their way to Canterbury. Harry Bailly, the innkeeper, suggests a contest: whoever tells the best tale will win a supper when they reach Canterbury.

When Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relations at Mansfield Park she seems shy and withdrawn beside her witty and vivacious cousins. But Fanny's steadfast and purposeful character makes her an indispensable part of the household. As the others become entangled in a maze of flirtation and intrigue, it is only Fanny whose deep but secret love for Edmund Bertram remains true despite his fascination with her brilliant but frivolous cousin...

'Can't you see that I don't care what anybody says?' Charity Royall lives in the small New England village of North Dormer. Born among outcasts from the Mountain beyond, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward. Never allowed to forget her disreputable origins Charity despises North Dormer and rebels against the stifling dullness of the tight-knit community surrounding her. Her boring job in the local library is interrupted one...

The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published work were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six...

The greatest English version of the stories of King Arthur, Le Morte D'Arthur was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, "knight prisoner." This edition is the first designed for the general reader based on the "Winchester manuscript," which represents what Malory wrote more closely than the version printed by William Caxton. Extensively annotated, this edition is highly user-friendly. - Publisher.

A classic of early modernism, Capital combines vivid historical detail with economic analysis to produce a bitter denunciation of mid-Victorian capitalist society. It has also proved to be the most influential work in social science in the twentieth century; Marx did for social science what Darwin had done for biology. Millions of readers this century have treated Capital as a sacred text, subjecting it to as many different interpretations as the...

The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. The father of the picaresque genre, it recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through southern Mediterranean cities.

"The fragility - and the durability - of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the 'Marble Faun', Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy." "Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World...