First published in 1908, G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" has been described as a metaphysical thriller. It is the story of Gabriel Syme, who is recruited by Scotland Yard as part of an anti-anarchist task force. When he meets Lucian Gregory, a poet and member of a secret society of anarchists, he gains access to the underground movement. What follows is one of the most absurd and clever plots to ever have been written, one in which Chesterton's...

A comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1595/96. The play consists of multiple subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot revolves around a conflict between four Athenian lovers, one about a group of six amateur actors who have to act out their interpretation of the play 'Pyramus and Thisbe' at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. These subplots take place in a forest, inhabited by fairies who control the characters...

A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...

"Stevenson's brooding historical romance demonstrates his most abiding theme - the elemental struggle between good and evil - as it unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid the fierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottish history. When two brothers attempt to split their loyalties between the warring factions of the 1745 Jacobite rising, one family finds itself tragically divided. Stevenson's remarkably...

"Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, fastidious Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul--determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is inevitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp by entering into relationships with other women. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical...

"The story of an infant, the son of an aristocratic couple, abandoned when his parents die in the jungles of Africa. The baby is reared by apes and learns their language and ability to travel through the treetops." --

At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people. This collection of plays shows his subtle blend of comedy, tragedy and psychological insight.--

Forced by her parents' ambitions among her wealthy D'Urberville cousins, Tess Durbeyfield attracts the unscrupulous Alec. Seduced and discarded, she finds work as a milkmaid, and her steadfast integrity is finally rewarded by the love of Angel Clare. Of all the great English novelists, no one writes more eloquently of tragic destiny than Hardy. With the innocent and powerless victim Tess, he creates profound sympathy for human frailty while passionately...

"The epic novel of man and nature that won its author the Nobel Prize in Literature-the first new English translation since the novel's original publication ninety years ago." --

This novel, originally written in 1916, published in 1921, explores the lives of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their developing love affairs with Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist. The despair of one sister's relationship contrasts with the happiness of the other's as the four clash in thought, passion, and belief, in their search for a life that is truly complete. The novel is the sequel to The Rainbow....