"Published in 1860, Burckhardt's work redefined our sense of the European past, wholly reinterpreting what has since been known simply as the Italian Renaissance. With unsurpassed erudition, Burckhardt illuminates a world of artistic and cultural ferment, innovation, and discovery; of revived humanism; of fierce tensions between church and empire; and of the birth of both the modern state and the modern individual. The Civilization of the Renaissance...

Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella written by the German author Thomas Mann published in 1912. The work presents a great writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Tadzio, the boy in the story, is the nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and is based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911. As the story opens, he is strolling...

"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era of political greed and corruption that followed the American Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the era is exemplified through two fictional narratives; one of the Hawkins family, a poor family from Tennessee who try to get the government...

Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for 'music, poetry, passion and war.' On her travels she meets Clym Yeobright, a native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

"Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore. Young Kimball O'Hara's coming of age takes place in a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out between the Russians and the British in the mountain passages of Asia. Kim is torn between his allegiance to the ascetic...

From almost the moment of its publication in 1667, 'Paradise Lost' was considered a classic. This new edition is derived from the editors' modernized 'Oxford Authors' text, with a new introduction that discusses the poem's complexity and critical history.

In the dense, untamed jungles of Africa, a young child is raised by a band of apes, forging a story that resonates through the ages. Edgar Rice Burroughs weaves a tale of identity, survival, and the clash of civilization and nature. Set against the backdrop of the early 20th century, this story not only captivates with its thrilling escapades but also delves into the complex dynamics of nature versus nurture. Burroughs masterfully explores...

When a young Ramona falls in love with a handsome Indian, her family turns away from her and the young couple is forced to begin a life as social outcasts.

A young man just beginning a new job in London meets with a strange woman on a moonlit road, offers her assistance getting into the city and then finds she may have just escaped an asylum. Hidden connections are unveiled between the family that employs the young man and the mysterious woman, pulling the reader into a suspenseful web of plots within plots, theft, betrayal, mistaken identities and attempted murder. Punctuating his dramatic narrative...