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

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

In 1659, after becoming the sole survivor of a shipwreck, Englishman Robinson Crusoe lives on a deserted island for more than twenty-eight years.

Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of...

"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded...

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...

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

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

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

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