"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...

Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. A roman à clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and...

"A spirited, gracefully polemical introduction and the final story, "She Unnames Them, '' frame this collection of fiction and poetry, placing it in a natural but unsentimental light. These are not really "talking animal'' stories: they are about human apprehension of natural creation (including rocks and plants) and the relations this apprehension governs; or, how communication makes communities. Seven of ten stories and seven of 19 poems having...

They are formidable enemies in their own rights: a French scientist, an American millionaire, a brilliant Chinese gentleman, and a master of disguise. But together they are the Big Four, a partnership with one simple goal, murder. Hercule Poirot has never come up against an opponent so vicious, or so deadly.

Wrongfully imprisoned for 14 years, Edmond Dantès escapes to the island of Monte Cristo. What awaits him there is a fortune in gold--and a new identity with which to pursue his revenge and redemption

In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston was living in New York as a fledgling writer. This collection of stories, found in archives after her death, reveal African American folk culture in Harlem in the 1920s. This book includes eight of Hurston's "lost" Harlem gems.

"Here is an engaging group of more than fifty gardening writers - and writing gardeners - reveling in their likes and dislikes, confessing their shortcomings, and sharing their successes and failures. The Writer in the Garden presents a colorful bouquet of prose and poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. With subjects ranging from an old-fashioned rose to ornery weeds, the hazards of rare plant collecting, and the tribulations of inclement weather,...

""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone...

A charming, young English woman is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own desires when she finds herself attracted to someone socially unsuitable.