"A masterful mix of horror and absurdity, Metamorphosis tells the story of travelling salesman Samsa, who wakes up one day to find out he has turned into a giant insect. Samsa has been a model of virtue for years, single-handedly supporting his parents and young sister. Suddenly he finds himself outcast in his own home, facing a world in which he no longer has a place. Simultaneously harrowing and humorous, Metamorphosis is a strange, subtle and moving...

Dorothy and her dog, Toto, are swept away in a cyclone to the strange and magical land of Oz. There she meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. Join Dorothy as she and her friends travel down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to visit the Wonderful Wizard of Oz who can help Dorothy return home to Kansas.

Why is it that men, and not women, have always had power, wealth, and fame? Woolf cites the two keys to freedom: fixed income and one's own room. Foreword by Mary Gordon.

Originally published serially in 1912, "The Lost World" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of discovery and adventure. The story begins with the narrator, the curious and intrepid reporter Edward Malone, meeting Professor Challenger, a strange and brilliant paleontologist who insists that he has found dinosaurs still alive deep in the Amazon. Malone agrees to accompany Challenger, as well as Challenger's unconvinced colleague Professor Summerlee,...

"The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays" brings together Oscar Wilde's most popular plays which first appeared between 1891 and 1895. Despite his relatively short theatrical career, Wilde's plays have enjoyed a sustained popularity. A classic satire of Victorian society, "The Importance of Being Earnest" is one of the author's most frequently performed works. The play trivializes its characters, who through a series of deceptions pretend...

"Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard" is set in the South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera. Charles Gould is a native...

'The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more good - this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim, old, powerful, and "human, all-too-human".' In this daring and insightful work, Nietzsche lays bare the hypocrisies at the foundations of our ideas of morality. Considering ideas of good and evil, guilt and conscience, and law and violence along the way, On the Genealogy of Morals takes the reader on...

I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace full of horrors. In the Histories, Tacitus brings to life the events of one of the most tumultuous periods of the Roman empire. After the suicide of the Emperor Nero in AD69, Rome entered into a period of extreme civil unrest. Four emperors, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian, successively ruled the empire as each one rose...

John Stuart Mill's resolute dedication to the cause of freedom inspired this 1859 treatise. Discussed and debated from time immemorial, the concept of personal liberty went without codification until the publication of this enduring work which applies an ethical system of utilitarianism to society and the state which to this day remains well known and studied. Mills (1806-1873), a British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist whose argument...

Ranging from a few words to a few pages, the aphorisms in Human, All Too Human present Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on a variety of subjects, including the nature of reality (metaphysics); moral feelings, especially the concepts of good and evil; the argument that great art is the product of hard work as opposed to 'genius' and inspiration; free-thinking; the evolution of men, women and children; and the limitations that people put on their own...