Henry James' story of a pair of adulterous lovers who are married, respectively, to a rich American collector of European art and to his inexperienced daughter provides-beyond its expensive, burnished, beautifully appointed exteriors-an understanding of the rises and betrayals inherent in society that is unparalleled in literature.

A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure. Written in a fanta[s]tic dream language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the "Wake" features some of Joyce's most brilliant inventive work. Sixty years after its original publication, it remains, in Anthony Burgess's words,...

This pioneering novel explores a young man's journey from boyhood to the warfront by the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Jacob Flanders is a young man typical of his generation-like so many who would go on to face death in the battlefields of the Great War. In this probing, elegiac book, his life is recounted through the private memories and sentiments of those who knew him. We meet Jacob as the boy who preoccupies his mother's thoughts;...

"Call me Ishmael". So begins Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's epic account of the last voyage of the ill-fated whaling ship Pequod, and its captain's obsessive pursuit of the legendary white whale that maimed him years before. Melville's classic novel has given American literature some of its most iconic characters. Inspired by the real-life ordeal of the crew of the whaling ship Essex--who, in 1819, were set adrift in the heart of the sea for eighty-nine...