Moby-Dick
Ishmael ships aboard the Pequod under a captain who has turned his whole life toward one whale.
Fiction
Commonplace EditionsA dependable digital library
Carefully prepared public-domain editions, made for reading inside Commonplace.
The catalogue
Complete Works
Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, sonnets, and narrative poems in one complete Commonplace collection.
Drama and poetry
King James Bible with Apocrypha
The 1611 translation entire, the Apocrypha in the place its translators gave it.
Religious texts
Two Stories
Two futures have defeated aging without making room for life. In one, a father of triplets confronts a population law that demands a death…
Science fiction
Beyond Lies the Wub and Other Stories
Twenty-six stories from 1952 to 1955—the years before Philip K. Dick’s first novel, Solar Lottery, of 1955. Robots, weapons, mutants…
Science fiction
Gadsby
John Gadsby rallies the young people of a stagnant town to build schools, parks, hospitals, civic life, and a future of their own. Wright…
American modernism
The Hour of the Dragon; or, Conan the Conqueror
Four conspirators wake a sorcerer three thousand years dead, and by his arts the king of Aquilonia is struck down in his own tent on the…
Fantasy
Ash-Wednesday
A speaker tries to relinquish the life he still loves. Through six movements of desert, stairway, garden and sea, Eliot’s poem tests…
Poetry
As I Lay Dying
Fifteen voices follow the Bundrens through flood, fire, betrayal, and stubborn endurance as they carry Addie’s coffin across Mississippi to…
Essential novels
Collected Poems of Robert Frost
A pasture spring, a stone wall, an abandoned house and a dark wood become places where people test what they owe one another. Frost’s short…
American poetry
Work in Progress
Before Finnegans Wake had its name, Joyce published pieces of it as Work in Progress, and these are the three little books that carried it…
Modernism
Vile Bodies
Adam Symes needs enough money to marry Nina Blount. Around them, a restless London society moves from parties and gossip columns to motor…
Satire
The Sound and the Fury
Four radically different perspectives circle the Compson family’s decline, making time, memory, Caddy’s absence, Jason’s fury, and Dilsey’s…
Essential novels
A Farewell to Arms
An American ambulance lieutenant and an English nurse try to make a private life amid the Italian front, military retreat, escape across a…
Essential novels
Passing
A chance meeting brings Irene Redfield back into the orbit of Clare Kendry, a childhood friend who now lives as a white woman. Irene has…
American modernism
Cthulhu Mythos Tales
Three early tales open Lovecraft’s cycle of cosmic inheritance: a colour falls beyond the spectrum, a drowned cult points toward an older…
Horror
Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up
A boy arrives at a nursery window looking for his shadow and hears about the stories Wendy Darling can tell. He invites her and her…
Fantasy
Fourteen Stories
These stories turn walks, family visits, professional duties and public performances into encounters with demands their narrators cannot…
Short fiction
Quicksand
Larsen’s modernist novel of Helga Crane’s migrations through race, class, desire, art, religion, and gender.
Fiction
Orlando
Orlando lives from Elizabeth’s court to 1928, changing sex while pursuing love, property, poetry, and a self no age or convention can…
Modernism
The Tower
An aging poet looks from a tower onto a country troubled by violence, and from the body toward forms that might outlast it. Golden birds…
Modern poetry
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
An anxious visitor, a discarded hat, a few scratches on a watch: for Sherlock Holmes, the smallest detail can open into another person’s…
Mystery and detection
Men Without Women
Fourteen stories move through bullrings, hospitals, railway stations, lunchrooms, boxing camps, mountain posts, and sleepless rooms…
Fiction
Collected Poems
Joyce’s two lifetime poetry collections move from the songs, harps, winds, and shifting courtship of Chamber Music to the compressed city…
Poetry
Oil!
J. Arnold Ross’s son Bunny grows up beside the Southern California oil fields, watching his father turn wells, land and political influence…
American realism
To the Lighthouse
Woolf’s modernist novel of the Ramsay family, artistic vision, domestic life, loss, time, and return.
Fiction
Red Cavalry
Thirty-four despatches from a Cossack regiment in the Polish campaign, written by the Jewish intellectual riding with it, each a few pages…
Short fiction
The Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes moves from Paris cafés to fishing country and the Pamplona fiesta with Brett Ashley and a circle whose journeys, debts…
American modernism
The Weary Blues
A piano in a Harlem room sets the rhythm for a book that moves through cabarets, waterfronts, quiet rooms and remembered rivers. Hughes…
American poetry
The Castle
The land surveyor K. enters a village governed by an inaccessible castle and becomes trapped in its opaque, multiplying bureaucracy.
Modernism
Winnie-the-Pooh
Christopher Robin asks for a story about his bear, and Pooh’s search for honey opens a forest of visits, hums and expeditions. Piglet…
Fantasy
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway observes Jay Gatsby's glittering pursuit of a lost love and the ruin hidden beneath Long Island wealth.
Modernism
In Our Time
Brief scenes of war and public violence alternate with stories of fishing, work, love and returning home. Nick Adams and the collection’s…
Short fiction
The Trial
Josef K. wakes under arrest by an unnamed authority and enters a judicial labyrinth whose procedures are everywhere and whose law remains…
Modernism
Mrs Dalloway
Across one June day in London, Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party while private memory and public life converge around her.
Modernism
A Passage to India
Adela Quested comes to Chandrapore hoping to see India beyond its British club. A meeting between the young doctor Aziz and Mrs. Moore…
Modernist fiction
The Magic Mountain
Mann's complete sanatorium novel in the first authorized English translation.
Fiction
Billy Budd, Sailor
Melville's complete posthumous novella in a clean chapter-by-chapter edition.
Fiction
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Twenty poems trace desire through body, landscape, distance, silence, memory, and night before the closing song turns love’s sea-voyage…
Poetry
The Short Stories
At a garden party, a dinner table or a country house, polite conversation can become a weapon. Reginald and Clovis find amusement in the…
Short fiction
Saint Joan
Shaw’s chronicle play treats Joan of Arc as military visionary, religious individualist, political threat, and saint.
Drama
We
D-503 builds a spacecraft for a state that has made happiness a matter of calculation. His records praise glass houses, numbered lives and…
Science fiction
The Prophet
Before leaving Orphalese after twelve years, Almustafa answers its people on love, work, freedom, knowledge, beauty, death, and the other…
Poetry
Bambi
A young roe deer discovers a forest crowded with voices, friendships and dangers. As the seasons change, Bambi learns to read its sounds…
Fantasy
Harmonium
An ordinary jar orders the wilderness around it; a blackbird changes with each way of seeing; a winter listener tests the limits of…
Modern poetry
Confessions of Zeno
Svevo’s comic modernist confession of illness, appetite, marriage, business, psychoanalysis, and self-deception.
Fiction
Cane
Toomer’s modernist mosaic of Black life in the rural South and urban North, joining story, song, poem, and play.
Fiction
The Waste Land
Across five fractured movements, voices from a spiritually exhausted postwar world mingle private memory, urban desolation, myth, ritual…
Poetry
Siddhartha
Siddhartha has learned the prayers and disciplines of his father’s house, but cannot find in them the peace they promise. With his friend…
Fiction
Ulysses
Across one day in Dublin, Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom move through a city rendered in radically changing styles.
Modernism
Kristin Lavransdatter
Undset’s monumental trilogy follows Kristin through desire, marriage, motherhood, political catastrophe, and faith in medieval Norway.
Modernist fiction
Early Work
Ten works trace Hurston’s early movement between Eatonville and Harlem: river stories and porch tales, comic folklore, urban courtship, a…
Short fiction
Short Fiction
A day on the river, an invitation to dinner, a bargain struck in a Norman village: Maupassant begins with the ordinary arrangements of life…
Fiction
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six abandoned characters invade a company’s rehearsal and demand that their unfinished family catastrophe be staged, only to find that…
Drama
American Indian Stories
Zitkala-Ša’s stories of Dakota childhood, coercive schooling, cultural conflict, memory, and Indigenous rights.
Fiction
R.U.R.
Čapek’s drama of artificial workers, industrial utopia, revolt, extinction, and an unexpected renewal of life.
Drama
A Voyage to Arcturus
Maskull crosses space to the planet Tormance, where every new landscape, sense, and encounter tests another vision of reality in David…
Gothic and strange
Three Exemplary Novels
Three stark novellas of inheritance, maternity, possession, pride, love, and destructive will.
Fiction
The Age of Innocence
Newland Archer’s engagement to May Welland seems to secure his place in old New York until Ellen Olenska exposes the cost of its beautiful…
Essential novels
Winesburg, Ohio
Twenty-two linked tales reveal the inward lives, thwarted desires, loneliness, and moments of illumination in an Ohio small town as young…
Short stories
The Moon and Sixpence
Charles Strickland abandons family, money, and ordinary decency to paint, pursuing an absolute artistic vision from London and Paris to…
Essential novels
Heartbreak House
Shaw’s fantasia on an English ruling class adrift on the eve of catastrophe.
Drama
My Man Jeeves
Bertie Wooster and Reggie Pepper repeatedly set out to rescue friends, placate formidable relations, and manage the hazards of clothes…
Short fiction
The Dybbuk
In a wooden synagogue, scholars trade stories of wonder-working rabbis while a young man pursues forbidden knowledge. Outside, a wealthy…
Drama
My Ántonia
Jim Burden recalls Ántonia Shimerda, whose strength, hardship, and vitality become inseparable from his memory of the Nebraska prairie and…
Essential novels
Poems
A shipwreck, a falcon, a felled tree and a child grieving for autumn become occasions for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s intensely attentive…
Modern poetry
Exiles
Joyce’s only surviving play, a drama of freedom, fidelity, jealousy, and uncertainty among two couples in Dublin.
Drama
35 Sonnets
Thirty-five formally intricate English sonnets on divided identity, the distance between souls, dream and consciousness, time, fate, and…
Poetry
Growth of the Soil
Isak and Inger make Sellanraa from unclaimed forest while family, law, mining, commerce, and a new settlement gather around their farm.
Fiction
The Wild Swans at Coole
Swans gather on an autumn lake while the watcher measures the years that have changed him. Elegies for friends stand beside love poems…
Modern poetry
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus grows through sensation, shame, faith, language, and revolt toward the vocation of art, while Joyce’s prose grows with the…
Modernism
The Good Soldier
Two couples share the hotels, excursions and easy intimacies of a European spa. Looking back, John Dowell tries to understand the people he…
Modernist fiction
Herland
Gilman’s feminist utopia of three male explorers confronting a self-sufficient society composed entirely of women.
Fiction
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes in an impossible body and finds that work, debt, family obligation, appetite, and the rooms of an ordinary apartment…
Modernism
A Drama in People: The Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis
Fernando Pessoa gives three poets distinct voices and ways of seeing. Alberto Caeiro attends to fields, animals and the things before his…
Modern poetry
Dubliners
Fifteen stories trace Dublin lives from childhood through maturity, culminating in Joyce's great winter meditation, “The Dead.”
Modernism
The Wanderer
A schoolboy’s encounter with a lost fête becomes a lifelong pursuit of vanished wonder and impossible fidelity.
Fiction
Petersburg
Bely's complete modernist city-novel of revolution, bureaucracy, fathers and sons, and a bomb ticking through the fog of 1905.
European modernism
Sons and Lovers
In a Nottinghamshire mining household, Gertrude Morel puts her hopes into her sons while work, money and disappointment divide her from her…
Modernist fiction
In Search of Lost Time
A taste of a madeleine opens a search through memory, society, and love that runs from a childhood bedroom to the whole of a vanished…
Essential novels
Pygmalion
A professor of phonetics wagers that he can remake a flower seller’s social identity through speech.
Drama
The Custom of the Country
Undine Spragg arrives in New York from Apex City and begins converting beauty, marriage, divorce and other people into motion, through…
Essential novels
Gitanjali
Tagore’s self-translated song offerings move through devotion, nature, labour, separation, death, and the soul’s longing for union in 103…
Poetry
Hadji Murád
Tolstoy’s late novella of a Caucasian commander trapped between Russian empire, local resistance, loyalty, and survival.
Fiction
The Secret Garden
An orphan sent from India to a Yorkshire manor finds a locked garden that no one will discuss. A talkative housemaid, a gardener and a boy…
Realism
The Ballad of the White Horse
Chesterton's complete epic poem about King Alfred and the Battle of Ethandune.
Poetry
Ethan Frome
A winter in Starkfield, a farm that will not pay, a wife who will not be left, and the hired girl who makes Ethan Frome imagine, once, that…
Essential novels
Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria
A historical collection of Efik and neighboring narrative traditions recorded in colonial-era Southern Nigeria.
Myth and folklore
Martin Eden
A working sailor educates himself to win Ruth Morse and become a writer, only to discover what literary success, class aspiration, and…
Fiction
The Man Who Was Thursday
Gabriel Syme infiltrates a council of anarchists and finds that every new disguise leads deeper into a comic, metaphysical nightmare of…
Philosophical fiction
Penguin Island
France’s satirical history of a civilization founded when a near-blind saint baptizes a colony of penguins.
Fiction
The Iron Heel
A scholar in a distant future introduces a manuscript written by Avis Everhard during the rise of an American oligarchy. Her memories of…
Fiction
Anne of Green Gables
A talkative orphan arrives at a Prince Edward Island farm where the brother and sister who sent for a child expected a boy. Anne gives new…
Realism
The Secret Agent
Conrad’s London novel of espionage, anarchism, domestic loyalty, and a plot against Greenwich Observatory.
Fiction
White Fang
In the northern wilderness, a young wolfdog learns what hunger, teeth and human hands can do. London follows his changing understanding of…
Fiction
The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
A severed curl becomes the cause of a battle among fashionable beaux, belles and invisible spirits. Alexander Pope brings the scale and…
Narrative poetry
The Jungle
Jurgis Rudkus and his family arrive in Chicago believing hard work will secure a future, only to encounter a stockyard economy that…
American realism
The Diaries of Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve keep separate records of the first days: he is wary of the energetic new creature naming everything in sight; she is entranced…
Satire
Japanese Ghost Stories
Faceless visitants, hungry spirits, revenants, enchanted portraits, remembering animals, broken promises, strange rebirths, and the dead…
Folk and fairy tales
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart’s beauty and social intelligence seem made for old New York, yet the same world turns money, marriage, reputation, and friendship…
Essential novels
Four Plays
At a lakeside estate, a young writer attempts a new kind of theatre. On another estate, a professor’s visit unsettles the lives of those…
Drama
Nostromo
In Costaguana, a silver mine, a revolution, and the legend of an incorruptible capataz bind private desire to political power and turn…
Essential novels
The Golden Bowl
A father and daughter, a prince and a friend, and a flawed crystal bowl: four people arrange their lives so that nothing need ever be said…
Essential novels
The Sea-Wolf
After a ferry collision, a literary critic is taken aboard a sealing schooner whose captain refuses to let him go. Forced into unfamiliar…
Fiction
The Way of All Flesh
Four generations of the Pontifex family bring inherited habits and convictions to bear on the life of Ernest, a clergyman’s son. His…
The Victorian novel
Chekhov: Short Fiction
192 stories and novellas translated by Constance Garnett, drawn from her thirteen-volume Tales of Chekhov series (1916–1922). This is a…
Short fiction
The Ambassadors
Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to retrieve a young man from a woman his mother disapproves of, and finds that the errand has put him, at…
Essential novels
The Call of the Wild
Stolen from a comfortable California home, Buck is sold into the dog teams of the Klondike gold rush. In a country of snow, hunger and…
Adventure and sea stories
The Immoralist
A scholar’s recovery from illness becomes an unsettling pursuit of freedom beyond convention and obligation.
Fiction
The Wings of the Dove
Kate Croy and Merton Densher’s private bargain gathers around the wealthy, gravely ill Milly Theale in London and Venice, where love…
Essential novels
Kim
An orphan of Lahore joins a Tibetan lama’s search for the River of the Arrow while his gift for disguise and observation draws him into the…
Adventure and sea stories
The Octopus
California wheat growers meet the railroad monopoly as land, rates, courts, politics, and armed force close around them—the first great…
Fiction
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Dorothy and Toto follow the yellow-brick road through Baum’s American fairyland, accompanied by the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly…
Fantasy
Lord Jim
A young seaman’s single act of cowardice drives him eastward in search of a life that can redeem it, until Patusan gives him one last test…
Essential novels
The Awakening
Chopin’s novel of Edna Pontellier’s artistic awakening, erotic autonomy, marriage, motherhood, and isolation.
Fiction
Heart of Darkness
Marlow’s voyage into the colonial Congo becomes an inquiry into exploitation, self-deception, storytelling, and the darkness he finds…
Essential novels
McTeague
A hulking San Francisco dentist, a lottery win, and a marriage tightened by avarice until money, sex, and brute appetite turn a domestic…
Fiction
Resurrection
Tolstoy’s final novel of guilt, judgment, prisons, institutional violence, and an attempted moral awakening.
Fiction
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Two young men invent convenient identities; a fan becomes dangerous evidence; a mother faces the man whose advancement her son desires; a…
Drama
The Turn of the Screw
James’s ghost story of a governess, two children, and the apparitions—or delusions—that haunt a country estate.
Fiction
The War of the Worlds
Wells’s invasion novel of Martian technology, imperial reversal, social collapse, and biological contingency.
Fiction
Dracula
Journals, letters, and records recount Count Dracula's journey to England and the desperate pursuit that follows.
Gothic and strange
The Invisible Man
A stranger arrives at an English village inn in a snowstorm, his face wrapped in bandages and his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He…
Science fiction
Poems
The complete three-series nineteenth-century collection of Dickinson's compressed, startling poems of nature, death, faith, love, and the…
Poetry
The Damnation of Theron Ware
A young Methodist minister's encounter with art, science, and worldly ambition unsettles his faith and his sense of himself.
Essential novels
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Shipwrecked Edward Prendick discovers Moreau’s island laboratory, where vivisection, imposed law, and unstable human form turn a scientific…
Gothic and strange
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
A village girl tells the men governing France that she has been sent to lead their armies. An elderly companion recalls her childhood…
Historical fiction
The Time Machine
Wells’s foundational voyage into deep time, where class division has hardened into evolutionary difference.
Fiction
Pan
Lieutenant Glahn recalls a summer of solitude, erotic obsession, jealousy, and estrangement in Nordland.
Fiction
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley works as a stonemason while dreaming of study in the university city of Christminster. His cousin Sue Bridehead questions the…
Fiction
The Jungle Books
A child raised among wolves learns laws whose protection has limits. Beyond Mowgli’s jungle, a young seal, a mongoose and an elephant’s…
Adventure and sea stories
The Yellow Wallpaper
Gilman’s first-person story of medical confinement, forbidden work, and an obsession with the pattern of a room’s wallpaper.
Fiction
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield’s attempt to repair her family’s fortunes binds her to two men and to a rural economy whose claims about purity, class…
The Victorian novel
Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse
Melville’s last collection moves from the classical burden of Timoleon through thwarted desire, faith, art, political memory, and the…
Poetry
Hunger
A starving writer wanders Christiania in a fever of pride, invention, humiliation, generosity, and self-sabotage.
Fiction
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait might age in his place, and discovers the cost of a life without restraint.
Gothic and strange
Three Men in a Boat
Three friends and a dog plan a boating holiday on the Thames. Packing, rowing, finding beds and sharing the work supply occasions for comic…
Satire
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A nineteenth-century engineer wakes in Camelot and sets about industrialising it, in a comedy that turns steadily darker until it ends in a…
Essential novels
The Aspern Papers
A nameless editor takes rooms in a decaying Venetian palace to obtain the private papers of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern, making an elderly…
Fiction
John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces
Melville’s privately printed late collection of sailors’ voices, sea elegies, maritime emblems, isolation, memory, and counsel.
Poetry
A Study in Scarlet
The first Sherlock Holmes novel, in which Holmes and Watson meet and investigate a baffling murder in London.
Fiction
Kidnapped
After his father’s death, David Balfour travels to the House of Shaws to claim his place in the family. His encounter with a secretive…
Adventure and sea stories
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A London lawyer follows the connection between his old friend, the respected doctor Henry Jekyll, and the violent, elusive Edward Hyde…
Gothic and horror
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s novella of terminal illness, social falsity, terror, memory, and a final moral awakening.
Fiction
King Solomon’s Mines
Allan Quatermain joins Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good in a search for a missing man and a legendary source of diamonds. His wary account…
Adventure and sea stories
The Rise of Silas Lapham
Howells's complete realist novel of business, society, family, and moral choice.
Fiction
Bel-Ami
A young former soldier arrives in Paris with a handsome face and very little money. An old comrade introduces him to a newspaper and the…
Realism
Germinal
Zola’s mining novel makes a whole industrial society visible through hunger, labor, solidarity, sexual life, strike, repression…
Fiction
Flatland
Abbott's complete geometric romance and satire of a two-dimensional society confronted by the possibility of higher dimensions.
Science and nature
Against Nature
Huysmans's complete novel of Des Esseintes's retreat into artifice, sensory experiment, rare books, art, perfume, and spiritual crisis.
Fiction
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn and Jim flee down the Mississippi on a raft, meeting fraud, cruelty, friendship, and the moral demands that respectable society…
Essential novels
The Adventures of Pinocchio
A talking block of wood becomes an unruly marionette whose flight from work and school carries him through puppet theatres, robbers, the…
Fantasy
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s prophet descends from solitude to proclaim the death of God, the overcoming of humanity, eternal recurrence, and the creative…
Fiction
Treasure Island
Jim Hawkins finds a dead buccaneer’s map and sails for a hidden fortune, only to discover that Long John Silver and a crew of mutineers…
Adventure and sea stories
Ghosts
On the eve of a memorial orphanage’s dedication, Helen Alving’s carefully maintained account of her marriage collides with her son’s…
Drama
The Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer crosses from America into an older European world, where freedom, wealth, courtship, and aesthetic cultivation become the…
Essential novels
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Machado de Assis's complete 160-chapter novel, translated directly from Portuguese.
Fiction
The Brothers Karamazov
A father's murder draws three brothers into a drama of faith, doubt, desire, responsibility, and judgment.
Essential novels
Washington Square
Catherine Sloper is quiet, plain, wealthy, and accustomed to her father’s contempt; when Morris Townsend courts her, three people try to…
Essential novels
A Doll’s House
Nora Helmer’s concealed loan and Krogstad’s threat expose the terms of her marriage, forcing a reckoning with law, duty, motherhood, and…
Drama
Anna Karenina
Anna’s catastrophic love for Vronsky unfolds beside Levin and Kitty’s search for a sustaining life, as Tolstoy examines family, desire…
Essential novels
Three Tales
A servant’s devotion gathers around a stuffed parrot, a hunter must live through the curse foretold at his birth, and Herod’s court turns…
Fiction
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A boy in a Mississippi river town whitewashes a fence, witnesses a murder, attends his own funeral, and is loose in a cave with a killer…
Essential novels
The Way We Live Now
A financier arrives in London with a fortune whose extent nobody can quite establish, and society competes to welcome him. A railway…
The Victorian novel
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Flaubert's complete dramatic prose-poem of visions, heresies, gods, and desire.
Fiction
Fairy Tales and Other Stories
The tin soldier, the sea maid, the match girl and the emperor's new clothes, in the plain and unsoftened English of the Craigies' 1914…
Short fiction
The Possessed; or, The Devils
Dostoevsky’s political novel of conspiracy, nihilism, charismatic corruption, and provincial catastrophe.
Fiction
Middlemarch
Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, and the people around them pursue vocation, love, reform, money, and reputation through the densely…
Essential novels
Around the World in Eighty Days
Phileas Fogg wagers that the new railways and steamship routes can carry him around the world in eighty days. With Passepartout at his side…
Adventure and sea stories
Alice in Wonderland
Alice follows a White Rabbit into Wonderland, then passes through a looking-glass into a living chessboard: two adventures of logic…
Essential novels
Jabberwocky
A warning sends a boy with a vorpal sword into a wood. Carroll’s sounds and sentences make a world before its strange words are explained…
Narrative poetry
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Professor Aronnax joins an expedition in pursuit of a mysterious creature and discovers Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus. Carried…
Adventure and sea stories
The Ring and the Book
Browning’s polyphonic verse novel revisits a Roman murder trial through competing voices, motives, distortions, acts of imagination, and…
Poetry
The Idiot
Dostoevsky’s novel of Prince Myshkin, whose radical openness and compassion enter a society ruled by money, pride, and desire.
Fiction
Sentimental Education
Frédéric Moreau’s romantic fixation and political drift unfold across friendship, money, revolution, fashion, compromise, and the education…
Fiction
War and Peace
Families, soldiers, and rulers are swept through the Napoleonic wars in Tolstoy's vast inquiry into history and private life.
Essential novels
Little Women
With their father away in the Civil War, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March make a world of plays, stories and rival ambitions in a household…
American realism
The Moonstone
A stolen Indian diamond passes through an English country house in Collins’s many-voiced mystery of empire, memory, evidence, class, and…
Fiction
Peer Gynt
Ibsen’s dramatic poem sends its boastful antihero through folklore, seduction, exile, fantasy, age, and judgment in search of an authentic…
Drama
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches
A chance inquiry in a California tavern gives Simon Wheeler an opening to tell of Jim Smiley, a tireless gambler with a remarkable frog…
Satire
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student commits murder in pursuit of an idea and enters a fevered struggle with guilt, pride, love, and confession.
Essential novels
Our Mutual Friend
Dickens’s last completed novel, joining inheritance, disguise, marriage, money, and the refuse of Victorian London.
Fiction
Drum-Taps
Whitman hears the American Civil War first as drums, bugles, marching crowds, and a nation abruptly armed, then attends its wounded bodies…
Poetry
Notes from Underground
A retired Petersburg civil servant argues against reason, progress, and his imagined readers before recounting the humiliations and…
Essential novels
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
A scrap of runic writing hidden in an old Icelandic book sends Professor Liedenbrock and his reluctant nephew Axel towards a volcanic…
Science fiction
The House of the Dead
Dostoevsky’s fictionalized record of Siberian imprisonment, punishment, labor, cruelty, fellowship, and survival.
Fiction
Salammbô
After Carthage withholds the pay of the army that fought its war, the mercenaries revolt; Matho’s desire for Hamilcar’s daughter Salammbô…
Fiction
Les Misérables
A man released after nineteen years in prison finds that his sentence follows him into the world. Around his struggle to live differently…
Fiction
Goblin Market
Rossetti’s narrative poem of enchanted fruit, temptation, sisterhood, sacrifice, and recovery.
Poetry
Fathers and Sons
Arkady returns from university to his father’s country estate with Bazarov, a brilliant young nihilist who rejects every inherited…
Russian and Eastern European literature
Great Expectations
Pip's unexpected fortune draws him away from the marshes and into a painful education in love, loyalty, and gentility.
Essential novels
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
Driven from the community he trusted, a solitary linen-weaver settles in Raveloe and pours his affection into the gold he earns. A theft…
The Victorian novel
The Mill on the Floss
Maggie Tulliver grows up beside the Floss, hungry for books, affection and a life beyond the limits set for her. Her bond with her brother…
The Victorian novel
A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens’s historical novel of London and Paris, private resurrection, revolutionary violence, and sacrifice.
Fiction
The Poems
Love songs turn suddenly into jokes, dreams into waking sorrow, and journeys into sharp encounters with the world. Heine’s poems range from…
Romantic poetry
Idylls of the King
Arthur binds his knights to a vision of justice, courage and faithful service. Across twelve connected poems, private longing and public…
Epic poetry
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
Melville’s final novel, a shifting procession of trust, fraud, charity, disguise, and doubt aboard a Mississippi steamboat.
Fiction
Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary tries to escape provincial marriage through romance, luxury, and debt, while Flaubert’s exacting realism measures the distance…
Essential novels
The Piazza Tales
Six tales of appearances, conscience, authority, isolation, and human inscrutability—from a mountain piazza and a Wall Street office to a…
Short stories
The Song of Hiawatha
On the shores of Lake Superior, Hiawatha learns the languages of birds and beasts and asks what his strength can do for his people…
Narrative poetry
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile
Melville’s revolutionary-era novel of an American wanderer, spy, sailor, prisoner, laborer, and long exile.
Fiction
Leaves of Grass
Whitman's continually revised lifetime collection of expansive American poetry, presented in its definitive 1892 form.
Poetry
Tempest and Sunshine
Holmes's complete Kentucky novel of the contrasting sisters Julia and Fanny Middleton, love, deception, and reconciliation.
Fiction
Villette
Lucy Snowe leaves England with little money and no promise of work, then finds a place in a girls’ school in Villette. Teaching gives her a…
The Victorian novel
Bleak House
The endless suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce spreads fog, secrecy, and ruin through London, while Esther Summerson’s search for her origins…
Essential novels
The Ring of the Niblung
Wagner’s four-part mythic cycle joins gold, law, labor, love, kinship, betrayal, revolution, and apocalypse around the struggle for a…
Drama
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
When an indebted Kentucky planter sells Tom and the child Harry, two journeys begin: Tom is carried south through households that test the…
American realism
Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
Whitman's complete rediscovered New York novel.
Fiction
The House of the Seven Gables
A house built on a stolen acre and a curse spoken from a scaffold, still working on the four people living under its roof a hundred and…
Fiction
David Copperfield
Dickens’s first-person novel of childhood, work, friendship, marriage, and the making of a writer.
Fiction
The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter becomes a public sentence, a private language, and a test of what guilt, love, vengeance, and mercy do to…
Fiction
In Memoriam A.H.H.
After the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a poet returns to familiar doors, seasons and conversations, finding that none can mean quite what…
Devotional and metaphysical poetry
The Prelude
What makes a poet’s mind? Wordsworth follows that question through childhood games, books, friendship, crowded streets and a Europe caught…
Poetry
The Complete Tales and Poems
Poe’s complete tales and poems: Gothic terror, ratiocinative mysteries, satire, speculative voyages, dream visions, and the haunted lyric…
Gothic and strange
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë’s novel of Helen Graham’s flight from an abusive marriage and her struggle for independence and dignity.
Fiction
Vanity Fair
Thackeray’s panoramic novel without a hero, following Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley through ambition, war, marriage, and ruin.
Fiction
Agnes Grey
Brontë’s austere first-person novel of governess work, class power, moral education, and self-command.
Fiction
Jane Eyre
An orphaned girl survives Gateshead, Lowood, and the mysteries of Thornfield to claim moral independence, chosen love, and a life narrated…
Essential novels
Wuthering Heights
Lockwood’s arrival on the Yorkshire moors opens Nelly Dean’s history of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff: a love so absolute that cruelty…
Essential novels
Omoo
The sequel to Typee: a mutiny nobody quite commits, a Tahitian jail nobody troubles to lock, and a beachcomber’s tour of what the…
Adventure and sea stories
Typee
Melville’s first book, and the one that made him famous: two sailors desert a whaler in the Marquesas and fall in among a people their own…
Adventure and sea stories
The Three Musketeers
Dumas’s adventure of d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis amid duels, court intrigue, friendship, and betrayal.
Fiction
A Christmas Carol
Ebenezer Scrooge meets Christmas with a locked cash-box, a cold office and a refusal to help his neighbours. On Christmas Eve, his dead…
Short fiction
Dead Souls
A courteous stranger travels through provincial Russia offering to buy serfs who have died since the last census and still exist on the tax…
Russian fiction
The Overcoat
A copying clerk in St. Petersburg finds that his threadbare coat can no longer keep out the cold. Saving for a replacement draws him into…
Russian fiction
The Charterhouse of Parma
Fabrice del Dongo’s pursuit of glory and love moves from Waterloo into the glittering intrigues, prisons, theaters, and passions of an…
Fiction
Oliver Twist
Dickens’s novel of an orphan confronting the workhouse, London crime, exploitation, and concealed origins.
Fiction
Tales
Everything Hawthorne collected of his own short fiction: Young Goodman Brown in the forest at night, the minister who will not take off his…
Stories and collections
The Nose
A St. Petersburg official wakes without his nose and discovers that it has acquired a uniform, a carriage, and a rank above his own. Gogol…
Fiction
Père Goriot
In Restoration Paris, the law student Eugène de Rastignac learns the machinery of society while an old tradesman exhausts himself for the…
Fiction
Eugene Onegin
Pushkin’s novel in verse moves through boredom, friendship, love refused, fatal pride, and belated desire with unmatched speed and tonal…
Poetry
Louis Lambert
A schoolfriend reconstructs the life, speculative system, love, collapse, and surviving fragments of a metaphysical prodigy.
Fiction
Notre-Dame de Paris
Hugo’s panoramic medieval novel binds Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Frollo, Gringoire, monarchy, crowds, and architecture into a tragedy of desire…
Fiction
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, a carpenter’s son possessed by ambition and the memory of Napoleon, passes from a provincial household to a seminary and then…
French realism
Novelle
Goethe's late novella in Thomas Carlyle's historical English translation.
Fiction
The Betrothed
Renzo and Lucia are ready to marry in a village beside Lake Como when a powerful neighbour orders their priest to stop the wedding. Their…
Regency and Romantic fiction
Don Juan
Byron turns the legendary seducer into an ingenuous traveler borne through shipwreck, slavery, war, courts, and English high society by an…
Poetry
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
The complete Sketch Book, including Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Stories and collections
The Complete Poems of John Keats
Keats’s poetry in chronological order, from the early Spenserian imitation and verse epistles through Endymion, the great odes, the…
Poetry
Prometheus Unbound
Bound to a mountain, Prometheus withdraws a curse he once hurled at Jupiter. Around his suffering, voices of earth, memory and hope open a…
Drama
The Serapion Brethren
A circle of friends meets to tell stories and test one another’s judgment. Violin-makers, painters, clerks, children and troubled lovers…
Gothic and horror
The Flying Doctor
Lucile pretends to be ill to escape the marriage her father has arranged. Her cousin Sabine devises a plan: a sympathetic doctor will…
Drama
The Jealousy of Le Barbouillé
Le Barbouillé wants a learned doctor to tell him how to manage his wife, Angélique. The doctor would rather explain how many times a doctor…
Drama
Ivanhoe
In an England divided by Norman power and Saxon memory, a returning crusader enters a world of tournaments, disguises and contested…
Regency and Romantic fiction
Frankenstein
Victor Frankenstein gives life to a being he immediately rejects, setting creator and creation on a path toward ruin.
Gothic and strange
Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland arrives in Bath with an eager appetite for Gothic novels and little experience of the people around her. New friendships…
Regency and Romantic fiction
Persuasion
Austen’s mature novel of Anne Elliot, lost time, constancy, and a second chance at love.
Fiction
Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep
Three visionary poems of enchantment, interrupted creation, terror, dream, and spiritual anguish in their original collected form.
Poetry
Emma
Austen’s comedy of matchmaking, self-deception, class, and moral discovery in Highbury.
Fiction
Mansfield Park
Fanny Price’s life among the Bertrams becomes Austen’s searching comedy of dependence, performance, money, moral perception, and belonging.
Fiction
Waverley
A young English officer, educated by romances and divided family loyalties, enters Scotland on the eve of the Jacobite rising. Hospitality…
Regency and Romantic fiction
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy confront error, vanity, money, and attraction in Austen's exacting comedy of judgment.
Essential novels
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Brothers Grimm’s own last edition of 1857, complete in Margaret Hunt’s translation: two hundred fairy tales and ten Children’s Legends…
Myth and legend
Sense and Sensibility
Austen’s novel of the contrasting temperaments, loves, and reversals of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.
Fiction
Elective Affinities
Goethe’s novel of marriage, attraction, renunciation, and tragic choice, framed through the chemical metaphor of elective affinity.
Fiction
Faust, Parts I & II
The scholar Faust wagers his soul against a moment of perfect satisfaction, passing from the intimate tragedy of Gretchen into the vast…
Drama
Rameau’s Nephew
A chance meeting in a Parisian chess café becomes a contest of talk, mimicry and unsettling arguments. A philosopher and a musician’s…
Early novels
Hymns to the Night
A movement from the visible splendour of daylight into the inward world of night, love and remembrance. Six hymns pass between intimate…
Romantic poetry
Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s transformative collection: rural encounters, ballads, supernatural voyages, meditations on memory and nature…
Poetry
The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
Goethe's symbolic fairy tale in Thomas Carlyle's English translation.
Fiction
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Blake’s paired songs of childhood and its shadow — the lamb and the tiger, the chimney-sweeper twice over, London, the sick rose — each…
Poetry
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Radcliffe's complete Gothic romance in four volumes and fifty-seven chapters.
Fiction
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
A traveller walks among the fires of Hell and finds not punishment but the pleasures of genius. Prophets answer questions over dinner…
Romantic poetry
Egmont
Goethe's complete historical tragedy of liberty, trust, love, and Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
Drama
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Baron Munchausen rides a cannonball, visits the Moon, escapes from whales and volcanoes, commands impossible hunters and horses, and turns…
Satire
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Goethe’s epistolary novel of artistic sensibility, impossible love, social constraint, and self-destruction.
Fiction
The Poems of Ossian
The most successful literary forgery in English. James Macpherson wrote these poems himself in the 1760s and published them as his…
Poetry
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
Fox spirits, painted worlds, revenants, immortals, magistrates, scholars, enchanted objects, and animals with long memories move through Pu…
Folk and fairy tales
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Johnson’s philosophical tale of a prince who leaves the Happy Valley to discover how human happiness might be attained.
Fiction
Tristram Shandy
Tristram sets out to tell his life and immediately finds that a life will not fit inside a straight account. His father has a theory for…
Fiction
Candide
Voltaire’s rapid philosophical satire of optimism, catastrophe, war, wealth, and the hard practice of cultivating one’s garden.
Fiction
Micromegas
Voltaire’s philosophical tale of two extraterrestrial giants who visit Earth and interrogate human pretensions.
Fiction
Tom Jones
A child left in Squire Allworthy’s bed grows up with a generous heart, a quick temper and no claim to a family name. Around Tom…
Fiction
Clarissa
Richardson’s immense epistolary tragedy places moral autonomy, family coercion, desire, persuasion, violence, and testimony under…
Fiction
Zadig; or, The Book of Fate
Voltaire’s Oriental philosophical tale of a virtuous Babylonian repeatedly overturned by injustice, accident, and fate.
Fiction
Gulliver’s Travels
Swift’s complete satirical voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms.
Fiction
A Journal of the Plague Year
A London saddler stays in the city as plague spreads through its parishes in 1665. He follows mortality bills, watches households shut…
Historical fiction
Robinson Crusoe
Cast alone on an island after shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe turns fear, labour, solitude, faith, and practical invention into a…
Adventure and voyages
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
A woodcutter overhears the words that open a hidden store of treasure. What he brings home sets his household in danger, and makes a…
Fantasy
Alaeddin; or, The Wonderful Lamp
A stranger offers a tailor’s son a fortune and leads him to a hidden chamber. A ring and an old lamp draw Alaeddin into bargains whose…
Fantasy
Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman
A weary porter pauses outside a wealthy merchant’s house and is invited to hear how its owner came by his fortune. Seven voyages carry…
Fantasy
A Tale of a Tub
Swift’s early satire of religious controversy, modern learning, criticism, authorship, madness, and the appetite for digression.
Essays and criticism
The Countess of Escarbagnas
Back in Angoulême after a visit to Paris, the Countess expects her household and visitors to observe the manners of the court. A Viscount…
Drama
Phèdre
Phaedra’s forbidden love for her stepson Hippolytus turns silence, confession, and accusation into instruments of catastrophe. Racine…
Drama
Paradise Regained
Milton’s austere sequel locates the recovery of paradise in Christ’s refusal of appetite, spectacle, wealth, empire, and false wisdom in…
Poetry
The Citizen Who Apes the Nobleman
Mr Jourdain buys lessons in music, dancing, fencing and philosophy to acquire the manners of a nobleman. His teachers, tailor and would-be…
Drama
Tartuffe
Orgon welcomes the pious-seeming Tartuffe into his home and hands him trust, property, and power, while the family struggles to expose the…
Drama
The Miser
Harpagon measures love, supper and his children’s marriages in money. When his buried strong-box disappears, every person in the house…
Drama
Paradise Lost
The rebellion of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve become an epic inquiry into freedom, obedience, temptation, and providence.
Poetry
The Misanthrope
Alceste demands absolute honesty from a society sustained by flattery, accommodation, and performance, while loving Célimène, the most…
Drama
Life Is a Dream
Prince Sigismund, imprisoned from birth to thwart a prophecy, is briefly raised to Poland’s throne and returned to chains, forcing him to…
Drama
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Poems of John Donne
Donne’s complete authenticated poetry: songs, sonnets, elegies, satires, verse letters, anniversaries, sacred poems, and Latin verse.
Poetry
The Temple
A church porch opens onto poems in which prayer becomes argument, song, doubt and renewed attention. George Herbert finds forms for the…
Devotional and metaphysical poetry
All’s Well That Ends Well
All’s Well That Ends Well, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
As You Like It
As You Like It, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Coriolanus
Coriolanus, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Cymbeline
Cymbeline, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part I, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry VIII
Henry VIII, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
King John
King John, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Macbeth
Macbeth, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Tempest
The Tempest, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale
The Winter’s Tale, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Timon of Athens
Timon of Athens, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Othello
Othello, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Alchemist
With his master away from London, a servant turns the house into a laboratory of promises. An alchemist and their resourceful partner offer…
Drama
Pericles
Pericles, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Sonnets
The Sonnets, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
King Lear
King Lear, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Volpone
A rich Venetian pretends to be dying, while his servant encourages competing visitors to purchase his favour with gifts. The prospect of an…
Drama
Don Quixote
An aging reader of romances becomes a knight-errant, drawing the practical Sancho Panza into adventures comic, cruel, and profound.
Essential novels
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Marlowe's tragedy of knowledge, appetite, damnation, and the scholar who bargains his soul for power.
Drama
Hamlet
Hamlet, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part II
Henry IV, Part II, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry V
Henry V, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part I, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Love’s Labour’s Lost, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Richard II
Richard II, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Richard III
Richard III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Edward III
Edward III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VI, Part III, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
The Unfortunate Traveller
Jack Wilton, page, trickster, soldier, and involuntary witness, crosses a violent sixteenth-century Europe in Thomas Nashe’s restless…
Essential novels
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part II, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Poetry
Poetry, prepared as a polished Commonplace Shakespeare edition for reading, quotation, and close study.
Shakespeare
Tamburlaine the Great: Parts I and II
Marlowe's complete two-part tragedy of the Scythian shepherd whose conquests make him the terror of kingdoms.
Drama
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Two princes enter Arcadia in disguise and become entangled with the daughters of a duke who has tried to outwit an oracle. Pastoral retreat…
Fantasy
The Faerie Queene
Knights set out to practise holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy in a country of enchanted houses and deceptive…
Epic poetry
The Lusiads
Camões’s national epic follows Vasco da Gama toward India through classical machinery, maritime danger, imperial ambition, memory, desire…
Epics and classics
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Two giants eat, drink, learn, wage war, and travel through a world swollen with verbal invention. Gargantua’s education and Pantagruel’s…
Classical fiction
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
The complete foundational Spanish picaresque in Clements R. Markham's translation.
Fiction
The Mandrake
Callimaco returns to Florence consumed by desire for the married Lucrezia. With a parasite, a credulous husband, and a friar willing to…
Drama
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
As the Han empire fractures, three men swear brotherhood in a peach garden and enter a struggle in which loyalty to a friend can conflict…
Classical fiction
Orlando Furioso
Knights, lovers, sorcerers, and rival armies cross a perpetually interrupted world of pursuit, enchantment, madness, flight, and war before…
Epic poetry
The Praise of Folly
Folly steps forward to praise herself and claims that nobody can live without her. Lovers, scholars, princes and churchmen become witnesses…
Satire
Le Morte d’Arthur
Malory gathers the rise of Arthur, the fellowship and fractures of the Round Table, the Grail quest, the love of Lancelot and Guinevere…
Myth and legend
The Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid
Maffeo Vegio's Renaissance continuation of the Aeneid, carrying Aeneas from the death of Turnus through marriage, kingship, and apotheosis.
Poetry
One Thousand and One Nights
Scheherazade’s inexhaustible night-world of framed stories, voyages, jinn, merchants, lovers, rulers, rogues, and marvels, presented in the…
Myth and legend
The Canterbury Tales
A company of pilgrims traveling from Southwark to Canterbury turn their journey into a storytelling contest encompassing romance, fabliau…
Epics and classics
Troilus and Criseyde
Chaucer’s tragic Trojan love poem follows courtship, exchange, betrayal, inward freedom, and the collision of private desire with public…
Poetry
Piers Plowman
A wanderer falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees a field full of folk between the tower of Truth and a dark dungeon. His search for…
Poetry
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
A green rider interrupts Arthur’s New Year feast with a bargain: one blow now, another in a year. Gawain accepts and must seek the…
Myth, legend and folklore
The Poetry of Petrarch
Across a lifetime of sonnets, songs, sestine, ballads, and triumphal visions, Petrarch turns the sight and memory of Laura into a poetry of…
Poetry
The Decameron
Ten young Florentines leave the plague-struck city for a villa in the hills and agree to pass the time telling stories: a hundred of them…
Fiction
The Book of Taliesin
Praise poems, battle songs, Christian riddles, transformations, prophecies, elegies, and journeys to the Otherworld gather around the…
Poetry
The Divine Comedy
Dante journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise toward a vision of justice, love, and the divine order.
Epics and classics
The Poetic Edda
The foundational Old Norse poems of gods, giants, prophecy, wisdom contests, heroic catastrophe, vengeance, and the destruction and renewal…
Myth, legend and folklore
The Prose Edda
Snorri’s guide to the old Norse stories and the craft of skaldic poetry begins with Gylfi’s questions about the gods and the shape and fate…
Myth, legend and folklore
The Nibelungenlied
The Middle High German epic of Siegfried, Kriemhild, treasure, murder, dynastic honor, and a vengeance that destroys two courts.
Epics and classics
The Poem of the Cid
Spain’s medieval epic follows the exiled Cid through dispossession, campaigning, restored honor, dynastic outrage, legal redress, and…
Epics and classics
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
A philosophical tale of a child raised alone who discovers nature, reason, metaphysics, and the divine through observation.
Classical fiction
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
A speaker greets the dawn, questions the sages and turns to wine, bread and companionship in the face of passing time. Speaking clay pots…
Ancient and medieval poetry
The Song of Roland
The chanson de geste of Roland’s last stand at Roncevaux turns feudal loyalty, pride, treachery, grief, and holy war into severe heroic…
Epics and classics
The Tale of Genji
At the Heian court, the beautiful prince Genji passes from a motherless childhood through desire, exile, restoration, power, family, and…
Fiction
Beowulf
A Geatish warrior crosses the whale-road to free Hrothgar’s hall from Grendel and his mother, then returns decades later as an old king to…
Poetry
The Exeter Book Riddles
Everyday things speak in voices that conceal what they are: a creature describes its journeys, a tool recounts its work, and a body names…
Ancient and medieval poetry
Heliand
The Gospel story unfolds among lords, retainers, halls and gift-givers in this Old Saxon poem. Christ journeys with companions who must…
Ancient and medieval poetry
The History of Alexander the Great
Alexander is conceived through sorcery, masters Bucephalus, takes the world by battle and stratagem, searches for the water of life, meets…
Classical fiction
The Golden Ass
Lucius pursues Thessalian magic and wakes in the body of an ass, passing through robbers, millers, priests, spectacles, and inset tales…
Picaresque
Daphnis and Chloe
Two foundlings raised by shepherds on Lesbos grow together among flocks, music, seasons, pirates, festivals, and the bewildering first…
Classical fiction
True History
Lucian's complete satirical voyage through the moon, the belly of a whale, the Isles of the Blessed, and stranger countries.
Fiction
The Satires
Sixteen Roman satires turn an exacting and often furious eye on status, wealth, literary ambition and the uses of power. Evans’s prose…
Ancient and medieval poetry
The Satyricon
Encolpius wanders through schools, inns, brothels, villas, ships, and the feast of Trimalchio in Rome’s fragmentary comic novel of…
Classical fiction
Metamorphoses
From the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Caesar, Ovid’s interlocking myths make transformation the governing principle of…
Epics and classics
The Art of Love
Ovid’s glittering, subversive didactic poem offers strategy for pursuit, seduction, and keeping love, then reverses perspective in its…
Poetry
The Aeneid
Aeneas escapes ruined Troy and follows a divine mandate toward Italy, bearing the losses and violence of an empire's imagined beginning.
Epics and classics
The Georgics
Virgil’s great didactic poem on fields, vines, animals, bees, labor, loss, rural knowledge, and the human struggle to make order from…
Poetry
Jason and the Argonauts
The complete Hellenistic epic of Jason, Medea, the voyage of the Argo, and the quest for the Golden Fleece.
Epics and classics
The Ramayana
A prince’s exile draws his family, allies and enemies across forests and kingdoms in a verse epic of loyalty, duty, separation and war.
Myth and folklore
The Mahabharata
India’s vast epic of dynastic conflict, exile, war, dharma, devotion, political judgment, and the ruinous victory of the Pandavas.
Epics and classics
The Frogs
Athens needs a poet, and Dionysus is prepared to fetch one from the dead. Disguised as Heracles, with his long-suffering slave Xanthias…
Drama
The Bacchae
Dionysus returns to Thebes to vindicate his mother and his godhead. King Pentheus tries to imprison the new worship, then becomes its…
Drama
Lysistrata
While the men wage war, Lysistrata calls the women of Greece to a different campaign: refuse their husbands and seize the money that keeps…
Drama
The Clouds
Strepsiades cannot sleep: his son’s passion for horses has left him deep in debt. Across the street, Socrates runs a school where an…
Drama
The Theban Plays
Three tragedies of Thebes follow a royal house through prophecy, exile, civic law, family duty, and the terrible limits of human knowledge.
Drama
The Oresteia
The murder of Agamemnon drives a royal house through vengeance, blood guilt, divine pursuit, and Athens’ first trial by jury.
Drama
Aesop’s Fables
Brief animal tales of appetite, vanity, ingenuity, folly, power, and consequence whose morals have circulated for more than two millennia.
Myth and folklore
Poems
Seventy-six lyrics and fragments move through invocation, desire, friendship, bridal song, grief, nature, memory, and the presence of…
Poetry
Theogony and Works and Days
Two foundational Greek poems move between divine genealogy and mortal work: the birth and succession of gods, Prometheus and Pandora, the…
Epic poetry
The Iliad
Achilles' wrath, Hector's courage, and the human cost of the Trojan War unfold in the foundational Greek epic.
Epics and classics
The Odyssey
Odysseus struggles home through monsters, enchantments, and divine opposition while Penelope and Telemachus endure in Ithaca.
Epics and classics
Enuma Elish
The Babylonian creation epic in its complete seven-tablet structure.
Classics and mythology
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The complete surviving epic in R. Campbell Thompson's twelve-tablet translation.
Epics and classics
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein arranges propositions and their descendants into a severe inquiry into facts, pictures, language, logic, value, and the…
Philosophy and ideas
The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library
The ancient lives, symbols, verses, treatises, and surviving Pythagorean fragments collected and translated by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie.
Philosophy and religion
The Book of Tea
Okakura’s meditation on tea, Taoism, Zen, art, architecture, flowers, and Japanese aesthetics.
Essays and criticism
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber traces how disciplined Protestant ideas of vocation, proof, and worldly asceticism helped form the rational conduct and moral temper…
Philosophy and ideas
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Veblen’s analysis of conspicuous consumption, status, ownership, taste, institutions, and the pecuniary culture.
History and politics
On the Genealogy of Morals
Across three linked essays, Nietzsche traces the histories of ‘good and evil,’ guilt and bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal, asking how…
Philosophy
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche’s critique of philosophical dogmatism, morality, religion, scholarship, nationality, and modernity.
Philosophy and religion
The Gay Science
Nietzsche’s aphoristic book of experiment, recurrence, art, knowledge, mortality, and intellectual freedom.
Philosophy and religion
The Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche’s first book interprets Greek tragedy through Apollonian form and Dionysian rapture, then turns its diagnosis toward modern…
Philosophy and ideas
Democratic Vistas
Whitman's complete meditation on democracy, culture, literature, and American character.
Essays and criticism
The Subjection of Women
Mill’s application of liberal principles to legal, social, educational, economic, and marital equality between the sexes.
History and politics
Utilitarianism
Mill’s defense of utility as a moral standard, addressing happiness, justice, sanctions, proof, and qualitative pleasures.
Philosophy and religion
On Liberty
Mill's foundational argument for liberty of thought, expression, and individual action within society.
Philosophy and ideas
The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
Seven books gather Schopenhauer’s essays on authorship and style, practical wisdom, argument, suffering, ethics, character, fame, religion…
Modern philosophy
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels trace the growth of industrial society through conflicts between classes. They ask how capital transforms…
Politics and the state
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Fuller argues that women must be free to develop every human capacity, testing marriage, education, work, law, myth, and spiritual equality…
Politics and government
Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard's complete meditation on Abraham, sacrifice, ethics, and faith.
Philosophy and religion
Democracy in America
American democracy leads Tocqueville from town meetings and juries to family life, religion and literature. He asks how equality changes…
Politics and the state
The World as Will and Idea
What do we know when we see a world, and what do we know when we want something? Schopenhauer begins with the perceiving subject and the…
Philosophy and ideas
Phenomenology of Spirit
Consciousness begins by trusting what lies immediately before it, then finds that its certainties depend on how it knows. Hegel follows…
Modern philosophy
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft’s foundational argument for women’s rational education, independence, citizenship, and equality.
History and politics
Critique of Judgement
How can a judgement of beauty ask for the agreement of others, and what do we mean when we see purpose in nature? Kant follows these…
Modern philosophy
The Federalist Papers
Under the shared name Publius, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay make the foundational case for the United States Constitution across eighty-five…
Politics and government
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States
The United States’ founding declaration and complete written Constitution, including the Bill of Rights and every ratified amendment…
Politics and government
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Kant asks how ordinary judgments about honesty, happiness and duty can justify a moral law that holds for everyone. He tests promises, help…
Modern philosophy
The Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s account of what the mind itself contributes to experience, and of why reason, pressed beyond experience, argues itself into…
Philosophy
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Three friends debate what human reason can discover about the cause and character of the world. Cleanthes argues from design, Demea defends…
Modern philosophy
Common Sense
Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet dismantles hereditary monarchy, distinguishes society from government, and argues with unmatched directness…
Philosophy and ideas
The Wealth of Nations
Smith’s foundational study of labor, exchange, prices, capital, trade, public revenue, and political economy.
History and politics
The Social Contract
What could make political authority legitimate without turning free people into another person’s property? Rousseau puts that question to…
Politics and the state
Émile
Rousseau’s radical thought experiment in education traces a pupil from infancy to adulthood while testing nature, society, freedom…
Philosophy and ideas
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
A moving billiard ball, an unfamiliar shade of blue, a traveller’s story of a miracle: Hume uses ordinary experiences to question what…
Modern philosophy
The Monadology
What would the world be made of if its simplest constituents had no parts and no windows? Leibniz begins with that question and builds an…
Modern philosophy
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
What do we mean when we say that a thing exists? Berkeley begins with the ideas present to the senses and asks whether matter can be…
Modern philosophy
Ethics
In a geometric sequence of definitions and proofs, Spinoza argues from God or Nature through mind, emotion, bondage, reason, and the…
Philosophy
Pensées
Pascal's complete posthumous fragments on faith, reason, human misery, and grace.
Philosophy and religion
Leviathan
Fear of violent death and the wish for peace lead Hobbes to ask what can bind people to a common power. He begins with sensation, language…
Politics and the state
Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes tests what can be known when sense, memory and even reasoning are called into question. Six meditations examine thought, God and…
Modern philosophy
Discourse on Method
Descartes recounts his search for a way to distinguish truth from inherited opinion. Education, travel, doubt and scientific experiment…
Modern philosophy
The Prince
Machiavelli’s unsent counsel to a Medici prince studies how states are won, armed, governed, feared, judged, and lost, testing political…
Philosophy and ideas
The Gulistan
Saadi’s Rose Garden of stories, verse, maxims, courtly counsel, ethical observation, love, age, education, and conduct.
Philosophy and religion
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius's complete dialogue with Philosophy, alternating prose and verse.
Philosophy and religion
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
Vatsyayana's complete classical treatise on love, marriage, intimacy, domestic life, and courtship.
Philosophy and religion
The Enneads
Fifty-four treatises ascend from the embodied soul, virtue, beauty, time, and providence toward Intellect and the ineffable One from which…
Philosophy and religion
Meditations
The Roman emperor's private reflections on reason, duty, mortality, and living in accordance with nature.
Philosophy and ideas
Discourses
A freed slave teaching in exile on what is and is not in our power: Arrian’s record of Epictetus in the lecture room, on fear, anger…
Philosophy and ideas
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca writes to Lucilius about the time he wastes, the friends he keeps, and the fears that govern him. Across 124 letters, he tests Stoic…
Ancient philosophy
On the Nature of the Gods
Cicero’s dialogue among Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic positions on divinity, providence, and religious belief.
Philosophy and religion
On the Nature of Things
Atoms swerve through the void, worlds form and perish, the soul proves mortal, and fear loosens its hold in Lucretius’s vast poem of…
Ancient philosophy
Poetics
Aristotle analyzes poetry as imitation and asks how plots, action, character, diction, recognition, reversal, pity, and fear combine to…
Philosophy
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle’s systematic inquiry into happiness, virtue, choice, justice, friendship, pleasure, and contemplation.
Philosophy and religion
Politics
Aristotle’s inquiry into citizenship, constitutions, political change, education, property, and the ends of communal life.
History and politics
The Republic
Socrates and his companions ask what justice is, constructing an ideal city to examine education, power, knowledge, and the good life.
Philosophy and ideas
Gorgias
Plato’s dialogue on rhetoric, persuasion, justice, punishment, political power, and the good life.
Philosophy and religion
Phaedo
Plato’s dialogue on Socrates’ final hours, philosophical practice, death, the soul, and immortality.
Philosophy and religion
Symposium
At Agathon’s banquet, Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and others offer rival accounts of love before Diotima’s teaching turns…
Philosophy
Apology
Before an Athenian jury, Socrates answers the old slanders and the formal charges against him, explains his philosophical mission, and…
Philosophy
Fragments
The surviving sayings of Heraclitus in Greek and Arthur Fairbanks’s English: fire and measure, rivers and change, waking and sleep, law and…
Ancient philosophy
The Art of War
The classical Chinese treatise on strategy, command, deception, terrain, intelligence, and the economy of conflict.
History and politics
In the Land of Pain
Confined by a long illness, Alphonse Daudet records pain as it enters work, friendship, family life and thought. These brief notes move…
Lives and letters
A Room of One’s Own
Woolf’s extended essay on women, fiction, education, money, intellectual freedom, and literary tradition.
Essays and criticism
Inquisiciones
The young Borges writes on Quevedo, Browne, Joyce, metaphor, Argentine poetics, idealism, Buenos Aires, and the uncertain reality of the…
Essays and criticism
The Common Reader
Woolf follows her pleasure and curiosity through books, from Chaucer and the Greeks to the novelists and essayists of her own time. Lives…
Essays and criticism
Literary Essays, 1920–1928
Eliot asks how a poet can be original while writing within a tradition. His readings of Dante, Shakespeare, Dryden and the metaphysical…
Essays and criticism
De Profundis
Written in Reading Gaol, Wilde’s letter follows suffering into self-judgment, humility, artistic conviction, forgiveness, and the hope of…
Lives and letters
The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois’s landmark fusion of history, sociology, memoir, music, and political thought on Black life after Emancipation.
History and politics
The Story of My Life
Helen Keller recounts her childhood, her education with Anne Sullivan, and the people and books that opened her world. Her letters and John…
Lives and letters
Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington traces his life from enslavement in Virginia to the establishment and growth of Tuskegee. The autobiography follows…
Lives and letters
Intentions
Four essays in which Wilde turns criticism into creation: a dialogue against realism, a study of the artist and poisoner Thomas Griffiths…
Essays and criticism
Life on the Mississippi
A young apprentice learns to read a river whose channels change overnight. Returning years later, Twain follows the Mississippi through its…
Lives and letters
Specimen Days
Whitman gathers childhood memories, Civil War hospitals, city streets, ferries, forests, rivers, western journeys, writers, weather, age…
Lives and letters
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Pater’s studies of Renaissance art, poetry, criticism, and the intensity of aesthetic experience.
Essays and criticism
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Jacobs’s autobiography of enslavement, sexual coercion, concealment, motherhood, resistance, and freedom.
Biography and memoir
The Conduct of Life
Nine essays written after the essays that made him famous, on fate, power, wealth, culture, behaviour and illusion—Emerson at sixty, asking…
Essays and criticism
My Bondage and My Freedom
Douglass expands the story of his enslavement, self-education, escape, and emergence as an abolitionist writer and public speaker.
History and civilization
Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup begins with his work, music and family life as a free man in New York, then recounts twelve years of enslavement in…
Lives and letters
Representative Men
Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe, taken not as monuments but as answers to the question of what a person is…
Essays and criticism
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth’s account of enslavement, escape, faith, abolitionist witness, and public advocacy.
Biography and memoir
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Thoreau tests conscience against government, slavery, money, and received opinion, then carries the same alert independence into walking…
Essays and criticism
Facundo
Sarmiento’s study of Facundo Quiroga, caudillo power, the pampas, and the struggle he cast as civilization against barbarism.
History and politics
Essays
Emerson's complete two-series Essays, including Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, The Poet, and Experience.
Essays and criticism
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
De Quincey turns childhood bereavement, flight from school, London poverty, scholarship, pain, intoxication, and recurring dream into an…
Lives and letters
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin recounts his formation as printer, reader, civic organizer, moral experimenter, scientist, diplomat, and public servant in one of…
History and memoir
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Equiano’s account of African childhood, the Middle Passage, enslavement, seafaring, conversion, freedom, and abolition.
Biography and memoir
Preface to Shakespeare
Johnson's complete critical preface to his edition of Shakespeare.
Essays and criticism
My Feuds and Deeds
Götz von Berlichingen recalls a life of feuds, ambushes, captures, sieges, princely service, the Peasants’ War, and the loss of the hand…
Lives and letters
Areopagitica
Milton’s celebrated argument against prepublication licensing defends intellectual trial, active virtue, books, conscience, and a nation…
Essays and criticism
The Essays
In fifty-eight compressed meditations, Bacon weighs truth, death, love, ambition, friendship, study, public office, private conduct, and…
Philosophy and ideas
The Essays
Montaigne tests his judgment against friendship, custom, mortality, education, experience, and the instability of the self.
Philosophy and ideas
Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan
Three women’s records of court life, love, travel, literature, ritual, grief, and spiritual longing in Heian Japan.
Biography and memoir
On the Sublime
The complete classical treatise on elevated language and literary power.
Essays and criticism
The Histories
Herodotus investigates the peoples, customs, ambitions, and conflicts that culminated in the wars between Greece and Persia.
Ancient history
History of the Peloponnesian War
A participant's rigorous account of the war between Athens and Sparta examines power, fear, rhetoric, plague, and political collapse.
Ancient history
Anabasis
Ten thousand Greek mercenaries, stranded deep in the Persian Empire after Cyrus’s death, fight and negotiate their way home under the…
Ancient history
Hellenica
Naval battles, assemblies and negotiations carry the struggle for supremacy from city to city. Xenophon continues the history of the…
Ancient history
Memorabilia
Socrates answers the accusations against him through the conduct and conversations Xenophon recalls. Questions about friendship, knowledge…
Ancient history
The Histories
How Rome mastered the Mediterranean in fifty-three years, told by the Greek statesman and hostage who watched its institutions, armies…
Ancient history
The Conquest of Gaul
Caesar’s account of his campaigns in Gaul, Germany, and Britain and the war against Vercingetorix.
Roman history
The Conspiracy of Catiline
Sallust’s terse account of Catiline’s attempted coup anatomizes the late Roman Republic’s moral decay, political violence, ambition, and…
Roman history
The Jugurthine War
Sallust’s history of Rome’s war against Jugurtha follows bribery, faction, military command, and the rise of Marius through a conflict that…
Roman history
The History of Rome
Rome telling itself where it came from: kings and consuls, the struggle of orders, the Samnite wars, Hannibal’s crossing and defeat, and…
Roman history
The Jewish War
Josephus’s eyewitness history of the revolt against Rome follows the war from its causes and the campaigns in Galilee to the siege and…
Ancient history
The Antiquities of the Jews
Josephus’s twenty-book history presents Jewish origins, law, and public life to a Greco-Roman readership, carrying the narrative from…
Ancient history
Agricola and Germania
At the empire’s northern edge, Tacitus sets a life of disciplined public service beside an exacting account of the peoples Rome could…
Roman history
Parallel Lives
Fifty Greek and Roman lives set beside one another to ask how character becomes action: founders and lawgivers, generals and orators…
Ancient history
The Annals and The Histories
The Roman principate without consoling illusions: Tiberius, Claudius and Nero in the Annals; Galba, Otho, Vitellius and the rise of…
Roman history
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors in close view: public acts, private habits, portents, jokes, cruelties, bodies, deaths, and the…
Roman history
The Campaigns of Alexander
Arrian’s disciplined history follows Alexander from his accession and crossing into Asia through the destruction of the Persian Empire, the…
Ancient history
The Church History
The first great history of Christianity: Eusebius gathers the documents, successions, disputes, persecutions, and remembered lives through…
History
The Roman History
The surviving books of Rome’s last great Latin historian follow the empire from Constantius II through Julian and the Persian campaign to…
Roman history
History of the Wars
Campaigns in Persia, Africa and Italy test the reach of Justinian’s rule. Procopius follows armies, cities and alliances, recording the…
Roman history
The Secret History
A concealed account of the imperial court joins accusations about private conduct to descriptions of public ruin. Procopius turns from his…
Roman history
History of the Franks
Gregory's Merovingian world is violently alive: kings murder brothers, queens pursue feuds, bishops confront rulers, saints work wonders…
History
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Bede gives England a past: from Roman Britain and the coming of the Angles and Saxons through the conversion of kingdoms, the growth of…
History
Two Lives of Charlemagne
Two sharply contrasting early medieval portraits of Charlemagne: Einhard’s court biography and Notker’s anecdotal monastic history.
History
History of the Kings of Britain
The chronicle that gave medieval Britain its legendary past: Brute the Trojan, Lear, Cymbeline, Merlin, and above all Arthur, woven into a…
History
The Alexiad
A Byzantine princess records the reign of her father, Alexius I: court intrigue, Norman and Turkish wars, heresy, diplomacy, and the First…
History
The Travels
Marco Polo’s account of the journey to Kublai Khan’s court and of the lands, cities, peoples, customs, and marvels of Asia.
History and travel
The Chronicles
Jean Froissart follows the Hundred Years’ War from the deposition of Edward II into the contests of Richard II’s reign. His courts, sieges…
History
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
From the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople, Gibbon traces the transformations, invasions, faiths, and political failures…
History and politics
The Elements
Euclid’s systematic foundation of plane and solid geometry, number theory, proportion, and incommensurables in thirteen books.
Science and nature
On the Magnet
The first great experimental treatise in English science: six books of loadstones, terrellas and iron, in which the compass is explained by…
Science and mathematics
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Burton’s vast, comic, learned investigation of melancholy—its causes, symptoms, varieties, consolations, and cures—ranges through medicine…
Philosophy and ideas
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
The book that made physiology a science of measurement. Harvey weighs what the heart holds, multiplies by the beat, and finds that in half…
Science and mathematics
The Sceptical Chymist
Chemistry cuts loose from alchemy: four men argue in a garden about whether fire really divides bodies into their elements, and Carneades…
Science and mathematics
Micrographia
Hooke’s pioneering record of microscopic observation, experimental method, instruments, insects, plants, and matter.
Science and nature
The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
The book that made the modern world: three laws, one law of gravitation, and a geometry strong enough to carry the planets — with Newton’s…
Science and mathematics
Treatise on Light
The wave theory of light, two centuries early: every point a wave reaches becomes a source of waves itself — and from that one idea come…
Science and mathematics
Opticks
Newton alone in a darkened room with a prism, taking white light apart, measuring the coloured rings between two pressed glasses, and…
Science and mathematics
Elements of Chemistry
The book that gave chemistry its language: oxygen, hydrogen and azote named, phlogiston abolished, and the balance made the final authority…
Science and mathematics
A New System of Chemical Philosophy, Part First of Vol. II
Dalton’s atomic theory put to work, substance by substance: the oxides, sulphurets, phosphurets, carburets and alloys of the metals, each…
Science and mathematics
The Voyage of the Beagle
Darwin’s account of travel, geology, natural history, peoples, and observations made during the Beagle voyage.
Science and nature
Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume I
Seven years at the bench, written down as it happened: the induction of one current by another, electricity drawn out of magnetism, the…
Science and mathematics
Walden
Thoreau's account of two years at Walden Pond examines simplicity, self-reliance, nature, labor, and the terms of a deliberate life.
Philosophy and ideas
Manly Health and Training: With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions
Whitman’s rediscovered 1858 guide to exercise, diet, hygiene, training, work, aging, health, and the nineteenth-century ideal body.
Science and nature
On the Origin of Species
Darwin assembles observation, experiment, geology, and analogy into the argument that species change through descent with modification and…
Science and nature
The Chemical History of a Candle
Faraday’s celebrated experimental lectures on combustion, gases, water, carbon, respiration, and chemical inquiry.
Science and nature
The Descent of Man
Darwin’s extension of evolutionary theory to human origins, mental powers, moral sense, and sexual selection.
Science and nature
The Principles of Psychology
William James follows mental life from the working of the nervous system to habit, attention, memory, emotion and will. Everyday…
Psychology
The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud argues that dreams are meaningful formations of unconscious wish and conflict, developing the methods and concepts—condensation…
Psychology
The Varieties of Religious Experience
James studies religion through the testimony of individual experience, comparing healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, conversion…
Philosophy and ideas
Psychology of the Unconscious
Dreams, poems and myths lead Jung toward an account of the energies that shape the inner life. Beginning with the fantasies of a young…
Psychology
The Yosemite
Granite walls, waterfalls, winter storms and forest trees fill Muir’s account of Yosemite. Walks into its high country lead to close…
Science and nature
Relativity: The Special and General Theory
Einstein's complete popular exposition of special and general relativity.
Science and mathematics
On Growth and Form
Cells shaped by surface tension; bones working as struts and ties; shells recording growth in logarithmic spirals; related animals…
Science and nature
The Uncanny
Freud investigates why something once homely and familiar can return as strange and frightening, moving through language, Hoffmann’s…
Psychology
Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud asks why civilization, built to protect and organize human life, also makes its members unhappy, tracing the conflict among desire…
Psychology
The Cloud of Unknowing
An anonymous fourteenth-century English contemplative teaches a young seeker to pass beyond concepts into a loving attention to God…
Spirituality
On the Incarnation
Athanasius' compact account of why the divine Word took flesh: creation disordered, death answered by death, the image of God renewed, and…
Christian theology and devotion
The City of God
Augustine’s monumental defense of Christianity and meditation on empire, history, providence, civic life, evil, judgment, and the two…
Philosophy and religion
Confessions
Augustine searches his remembered life—from infancy, ambition, and divided desire through conversion and grief—for the nature of memory…
Philosophy and ideas
The Rule of St Benedict
The concise sixth-century rule that ordered Benedictine life around prayer, work, humility, hospitality, and measured authority—and became…
Christian theology and devotion
On Loving God
A compact masterpiece of medieval devotion that asks why and how far God should be loved, then traces desire through four degrees until…
Christian theology and devotion
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Calvin’s systematic account of knowledge of God, redemption in Christ, grace and the Christian life, the church, sacraments, and civil…
Philosophy and religion
Heretics
Chesterton tests the fashionable doubts of his age against the things people actually live by: conviction, locality, ritual, family…
Christian theology and devotion
Orthodoxy
Chesterton retraces his way from modern doubt and the common sense of fairy tales to a Christian vision in which wonder and homecoming…
Christian theology and devotion
The Everlasting Man
Answering H. G. Wells’s evolutionary outline of history, Chesterton argues first that the creature called man is a radical surprise among…
Christian theology and devotion
Sermons and Treatises
The great German mystic on the birth of God in the soul, the poverty that lets all things go, and the silent ground where the distinction…
Christian theology and devotion
Homilies on the Gospel of St Matthew
Ninety sermons moving through Matthew verse by verse: vivid, urgent preaching on mercy, wealth, discipline, Scripture, the life of Christ…
Christian theology and devotion
Revelations of Divine Love
The first surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman: sixteen visions of suffering and divine love, meditated over a…
Christian theology and devotion
The Ninety-Five Theses
Luther’s disputation on indulgences, repentance, papal authority, purgatory, Christian charity, and the theology of the cross.
Philosophy and religion
Complete Works
The whole of the corpus that taught the West to speak of God by denial: nine ranks of angels, a church ordered in their image, divine names…
Christian theology and devotion
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus
Teresa traces the difficult work of prayer through illness, friendship, divided loyalties and the founding of a convent. Her account joins…
Christian theology and devotion
Summa Theologica
Aquinas’s summation of Christian theology, written, he says, for beginners — God, creation, the moral life, Christ and the sacraments…
Philosophy and religion
The Imitation of Christ
The complete devotional classic on humility, inward life, consolation, and the sacrament of the altar.
Philosophy and religion
Centuries of Meditations
An empty book becomes an invitation to discover the world anew. Traherne addresses a friend through meditations on love, childhood…
Religion
The Little Flowers of St Francis
A beloved cycle of vivid Franciscan legends in which humility, holy joy, fellowship with animals, and radical poverty turn the ordinary…
Christian theology and devotion
The Mishnah
The foundation layer of rabbinic law in an early substantial English selection: prayer and agriculture, Sabbaths and feasts, marriage and…
Sacred texts
The Talmud
The great record of rabbinic law and argument in Rodkinson’s historic English selection: Sabbath and festivals, civil and criminal law…
Sacred texts
The Zohar
The central book of Kabbalah, in the longest early English excerpt of it — about a tenth of a work so vast that a complete English…
Sacred texts
The Qur’an
Islam’s central scripture in George Sale’s historical English rendering of its 114 surahs.
Scripture and religion
The Bhagavad Gita
The dialogue of Krishna and Arjuna on action, knowledge, devotion, duty, selfhood, and liberation.
Scripture and religion
The Dhammapada
A foundational Buddhist collection of teachings on mind, conduct, attention, wisdom, desire, and release.
Scripture and religion
The Upanishads
Eleven major Upanishadic works on self, consciousness, knowledge, death, cosmos, and ultimate reality.
Scripture and religion
Chuang Tzu
Daoist parables and arguments on transformation, spontaneity, language, death, and freedom from fixed distinctions.
Philosophy and religion
Tao Te Ching
The complete Taoist classic with Legge's translator-authored apparatus.
Philosophy and religion
The Analects
The collected sayings and conversations of Confucius on learning, virtue, ritual, government, and humane conduct.
Philosophy and religion
A True and Faithful Relation
Dee's extensive record of his conferences, visions, travels, and reported communications with spirits.
Esoterica and religion
A Vision (1925 Version)
Yeats’s esoteric system of lunar phases, personality, history, afterlife, and intersecting gyres in its first published form.
Philosophy and religion
Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price
Revelations, letters and instructions set out the beliefs and daily life of the early Latter-day Saint church. Doctrine and Covenants turns…
Christian scripture and tradition
Gnostic Texts
Ancient hymns, dialogues and surviving fragments ask where the soul comes from and how it can return to the light. Jesus’s sayings and the…
Sacred texts
Kebra Nagast
The complete Ethiopian Glory of Kings: the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, Menyelek, Zion, and the Ark of the Covenant.
Myth, legend and folklore
Malleus Maleficarum
The complete historical witchcraft treatise, preserving its theological, practical, and judicial divisions and the Bull of Innocent VIII.
Myth, legend and folklore
Natural Magick
Della Porta’s encyclopedic Renaissance investigation of natural causes, plants, animals, medicine, optics, metals, cookery, mechanics, and…
Science and nature
Pistis Sophia
A vast Gnostic dialogue of the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene and the disciples: Sophia's fall and repentance, the nested realms of light…
Sacred texts
The Apostolic Fathers
The voices nearest to the apostolic generation: letters, martyrdoms, instruction, and surviving fragments from Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp…
Sacred texts
The Book of Enoch the Prophet
The ancient collection of visions attributed to Enoch: the Watchers and giants, journeys through the heavens, parables of judgement…
Spirituality
The Book of Mormon
The complete text of the 1830 first edition, with Joseph Smith's preface and the two witness statements.
Scripture and religion
The Book of the Cave of Treasures
An ancient Syriac sacred history carries the biblical story from Creation to Christ, weaving Adam’s relics, the patriarchs, the Flood…
Spirituality
The Book of the Damned
Fort's complete procession of anomalous observations, rejected data, cosmic speculation, and attacks on scientific orthodoxy.
Science and nature
The Gospel of Thomas
A collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, preserved in the Coptic Nag Hammadi library and traditionally written down by Didymos…
Religion and spirituality
The Rosicrucian Trilogy
Two manifestoes promise a brotherhood devoted to healing and the renewal of knowledge; a seven-day romance sends Christian Rosenkreutz…
Esoterica and the occult
The Sibylline Oracles
Prophecies spoken in the ancient Sibyl’s voice gather creation, empires, disasters, judgement, and hopes for a transformed world. Jewish…
Spirituality
Aphorisms
Kafka's Zürau meditations on the true way, impatience, evil, Paradise, the indestructible, knowledge, suffering, and the impossible freedom…
Held until 2027
Philosophy and religion
Cthulhu Mythos Tales
The Colour Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Dunwich Horror are joined by The Whisperer in Darkness, whose Vermont floods uncover…
Held until 2027 (adds The Whisperer in Darkness)
Horror
Eighteen Stories
Eighteen stories turn walks, family visits, professional duties and public performances into encounters with demands their narrators cannot…
Held until 2027 (adds Investigations of a Dog, The Great Wall of China, The Hunter Gracchus, and The Bridge)
Short fiction
Essays in Persuasion
Keynes argues with the policies shaping Europe after the First World War: reparations and war debts, falling prices, unemployment and the…
Held until 2027
Economics
In Search of Lost Time
A taste of a madeleine opens a search through memory, society, love, art, and time that reaches its culmination in the vocation to make the…
Held until 2027 (adds Time Regained to the six volumes already available)
Essential novels
Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes tests what can be known when sense, memory and even reasoning are called into question. Six meditations examine thought, God and…
Held until 2027 (adds the seven sets of Objections and Replies and the letter to Father Dinet)
Modern philosophy
Mourning Becomes Electra
At the end of the Civil War, two soldiers are expected home at the Mannon house, whose white Greek portico conceals a grim family history…
Held until 2027
Drama
On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I
Gödel numbers the language of a formal system, makes arithmetic speak about its own proofs, and establishes the incompleteness and internal…
Held until 2027
Science and mathematics
Sanctuary
A lawyer leaving his marriage and a college student stranded on a country road enter the orbit of a moonshine house, a Memphis underworld…
Held until 2027
Modernism
Shadows on the Rock
As the last ship leaves Quebec for France in 1697, apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cécile face another winter cut off from…
Held until 2027
Historical fiction
Strophe
In the fourteen poems of his first collection, Seferis turns doves, hourglasses, shorelines, cars, myth, eros, memory, and the sea into…
Held until 2027
Poetry
The Dream Life of Balso Snell
Balso Snell enters the Trojan horse through its most undignified opening and crosses a grotesque interior republic of poets, prophets…
Held until 2027
Modernism
The Glass Key
A gambler moves through the favors, grudges and guarded conversations of a city approaching an election. An alliance reaches from a ward…
Held until 2027
Mystery and detection
The Waves
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis speak their lives from childhood to age while nine changing visions of sea, sun, birds…
Held until 2027
Modernism
These 13
Thirteen stories move from the damaged airmen and veterans of the First World War to Yoknapatawpha’s burdened households and racial…
Held until 2027
Modernism
Brave New World
In a World State engineered for stability, people are bred by caste, trained to consume, and spared the claims of history, solitude, and…
Held until 2028
Science fiction
Death in the Afternoon
A first encounter with the bullfight leads Hemingway into its rituals, techniques and personalities, and into questions about courage, art…
Held until 2028
Essays and criticism
Light in August
Lena Grove walks toward Jefferson in search of the father of her unborn child as Joe Christmas flees the fire and killing that expose the…
Held until 2028
American modernism
Mutiny on the Bounty
Roger Byam joins the Bounty as a young midshipman, charged with learning the language of Tahiti. The voyage sets skilled seamanship beside…
Held until 2028
Adventure and sea stories
Pensées
Pascal’s posthumous fragments on faith, reason, human misery, and grace, read through T. S. Eliot’s complete 1931 introduction to W. F…
Held until 2028 (adds T. S. Eliot’s 1931 introduction and its notes)
Philosophy and religion
The Common Reader
Woolf follows her pleasure and curiosity through books, from Chaucer and the Greeks to the novelists and essayists of her own time. Lives…
Held until 2028 (adds the Second Series of 1932 to the First Series already available)
Essays and criticism
The Sleepwalkers
Three lives in 1888, 1903, and 1918 trace the disintegration of a shared moral world from romantic order through anarchy to the cold…
Held until 2028
European modernism
The Tale of Genji
The Heian court tale passes beyond Genji’s life to Kaoru and Niou, Prince Hachi’s daughters, and the riverside house at Uji, where…
Held until 2028 (adds The Lady of the Boat, beginning the Uji chapters)
Fiction
Early Work
Eleven works trace Hurston’s early movement between Eatonville and Harlem: river stories and porch tales, comic folklore, urban courtship…
Held until 2029 (adds The Gilded Six-Bits)
Short fiction
Miss Lonelyhearts
A newspaper advice columnist receives suffering as daily copy until the letters, his editor's jokes, and his own hunger for religious…
Held until 2029
Modernism
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Eleven essays move from dreams, psychotherapy, psychological types, and the stages of life to archaic humanity, literature, modern…
Held until 2029
Psychology
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki’s court world continues after Genji through Kaoru, Niou, Agemaki, Kozeri, and Ukifune, carrying patterns of desire, rank, memory…
Held until 2029 (adds The Lady of the Boat and The Bridge of Dreams, completing Waley’s translation)
Fiction
To a God Unknown
Joseph Wayne leaves his father’s Vermont farm to claim land in a California valley. As his brothers and their families join him, an oak…
Held until 2029
American modernism
A Cool Million
A Vermont innocent follows the success manuals westward while banks, courts, medicine, entertainment, advertising, and a home-grown fascist…
Held until 2030
Modernism
Call It Sleep
Young David Schearl enters New York through Ellis Island and grows into the streets, cellars, tenements, schools, and faith of the Lower…
Held until 2030
American modernism
Early Work
Fourteen works trace Hurston’s early movement between Eatonville and Harlem: river stories and porch tales, comic folklore, urban…
Held until 2030 (adds The Gilded Six-Bits, Mother Catherine, Uncle Monday, and The Fire and the Cloud)
Short fiction
In Praise of Shadows
Tanizaki considers houses, paper, lacquer, food, theatre, skin, light, and darkness to ask how Japanese beauty was shaped by shadow rather…
Held until 2030
Essays
Mensagem
Pessoa turns Portugal’s heraldry, founders, voyages, lost king, and Sebastianist prophecies into a forty-four-poem meditation on myth…
Held until 2030
Poetry
Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism
Writing in 1934, Levinas asks what elemental conception of freedom, the body, truth, race, and universality gives Hitlerism its…
Held until 2030
Philosophy and ideas
Prices and Production
Hayek follows changes in money, credit, saving, prices, and the rate of interest through the successive stages of production. His four…
Held until 2031
Economics
Cthulhu Mythos Tales
Seven tales carry Lovecraft’s imagined prehistory from New England fields and drowned ports to Antarctic ruins and the archives of minds…
Held until 2032 (adds The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time)
Horror
Twenty Stories
Twenty stories turn walks, family visits, professional duties and public performances into encounters with demands their narrators cannot…
Held until 2032 (adds Investigations of a Dog, The Great Wall of China, The Hunter Gracchus, The Bridge, Description of a Struggle, and Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, completing the twenty stories)
Short fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford returns to Eatonville and tells Pheoby the story of three marriages, the horizons each one opened or closed, and the voice…
Held until 2033
American modernism
The Day of the Locust
A young artist designing Hollywood illusions studies the people who have come to California for beauty and miracles, while his planned…
Held until 2035
Modernism
Cthulhu Mythos Tales
Eight tales form a widening archive of cosmic horror, from a fallen colour and a drowned cult to Antarctic history, stolen memory, tainted…
Held until 2037 (adds The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
Horror