The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor's prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt. Instead, he lost all his money; he had...

Immerse yourself in the world of Oscar Wilde with the collection: "The Plays of Oscar Wilde." Containing all of Wilde's plays, this collection is a must-have for every bookshelf. Oscar Wilde was born in mid-1800's Dublin to highly intellectual parents. He found a niche in the growing trend of aestheticism and was mentored by Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Although he dabbled in short stories and poems at the beginning of his career, Wilde was taken...