Classics World Literature

This is the story of Kitty Fane, the adulterous wife of a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. When her husband discovers her deception, he exacts a terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic in China.

"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man", a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest anti-heroes in all literature.

The best of cult author Bruno Schulz's captivatingly strange and beautiful short stories. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.

In the opening scene of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked, and makes his way to the apartment of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships, reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world.

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch were the leading lights in a century that is considered the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. The Decameron, or Ten Days' Entertainment, is his most famous work, a collection of stories considered representative of the Middle Ages, as well as a product of the Renaissance.

The best collection of Russian short stories includes: Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from the Underground, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree. Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Kholstomer, the Story of a Horse, Alyosha the Pot, A Letter to a Hindu, A Confession, God Sees the Truth, but Waits, A Russian Christmas Party. Anton Chekhov: Kashtanka, Gusev, The Darling, The Lady with the Dog, A Slander, The Horse-Stealers, The Petchenyeg, A Dead Body, A Happy Ending, The Looking-GlassOld Age, Darkness, The Beggar, In Trouble, Frost, Minds in Ferment, Gone Astray.

The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parallel with their lives. Balls and soirées alternate with councils of war and the machinations of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles with everyday human passions in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed. The prodigious cast of characters, both great and small, seem to act and move as if connected by threads of destiny as the novel relentlessly questions ideas of free will, fate, and providence.

Cornwall, Midsummer 1947. Pendizack Manor Hotel is buried in the rubble of a collapsed cliff. Seven guests have perished, but is it murder, and what brought this strange assembly together for a moonlit feast before this Act of God - or Man? Over the week before the landslide, we meet the hotel guests in all their eccentric glory: and as friendships form and romances blossom, sins are revealed, and the cliff cracks widen....

In what many refer to as one of the first and greatest science fiction thrillers, a mysterious stranger wanders into an inn, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. What lies beneath the bandages is something even more mysterious. As Wells tackles issues of identity, deception, and the deterioration of the human mind, listeners will be drawn into the story of the mysterious man, whose own mistakes end up whisking him into a whirlwind of deceit, terror, and even murder. In the end, the question will be asked: when your sense of self and identity vanish, who will you become?

The Man of Property, the first novel in Galsworthy's epic social satire The Forsyte Saga, introduces us to Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and prominent man of his important family. Accustomed to getting whatever he wants, he sets his sights with absolute determination on the beautiful Irene in spite of her pennilessness and her indifference to him.

The Book of the Courtier remains the definitive account of Renaissance court life. Because of this, it is considered one of the most important Renaissance works. The book is organized as a series of fictional conversations that occur between the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino in 1507 (when Baldassare was in fact part of the Duke's Court). In the book, the courtier is described as having a cool mind, a good voice (with beautiful, elegant and brave words) along with proper bearing and gestures.

All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess... and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, and observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.

Н.В. Гоголь начал работу над своим главным трудом - "Мертвые души" в 1835 году. Ни над одним из своих произведений ранее писатель не работал так кропотливо и тщательно, так вдумчиво и напряженно.

Trolls haunt the snowy forests, and terrifying monsters roam the open sea. A young woman journeys to the end of the world, and a boy proves he knows no fear. This collection of 16 traditional tales transports readers to the enchanting world of Nordic folklore. Translated and transcribed by folklorists in the 19th century, and presented here unabridged, the stories are by turns magical, hilarious, cozy, and chilling. They offer a fascinating view into Nordic culture and a comforting wintertime listen.

This gripping tale follows Paul and his mates as they navigate the horror, boredom, and stupidity of the First World War. We see the pain of one comrade, who loses a leg, while his friends covet the pair of boots he can no longer wear. We follow Paul’s company as it is whittled down in combat from 150 men to 32. Paul, wounded, goes home on leave, but he feels alienated from his family, who do not understand what he has gone through and to whom he cannot explain it.

Étienne de la Boétie écrit le Discours sur la servitude volontaire en 1549 alors qu'il n'a que 18 ans. Si la question est politique, l'auteur ne se contente pas de critiquer les régimes tyranniques, il questionne aussi l'agent politique, celui qui est gouverné : comment peut-il se faire que "tant d'hommes, tant de bourgs, tant de villes, tant de nations endurent quelquefois un tyran seul, qui n'a de puissance que celle qu'ils lui donnent ?"

In this searing novel, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor brings vividly to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler is coming to power. A powerful and eloquent tale about the consequences of a friendship - and society - poisoned by extremism, Address Unknown remains hauntingly and painfully relevant today.

Compiled from magazine articles published in the 1850s after his death, Cape Cod details several short trips Thoreau made to "the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts" between 1849 and 1855. "He went to the Cape out of curiosity," explains Paul Theroux, "but in the course of his travel a great thing happened: Thoreau, the woodsman and landlubber, discovered the sea."

On New York City's Washington Square lives Catherine Sloper, a shy and plain-looking young woman who is tyrannized by her wealthy, overbearing father. When young Morris Townsend begins to court her, Dr. Sloper, distrusting his motives, threatens to disinherit Catherine. In accordance with her father's suspicions, young Townsend disappears, leaving Catherine to humiliation, heartache, and lonely spinsterhood.