The first pages of "Northanger Abbey" send up Ann Radcliffe's "The Mysteries of Udolpho." Jane Austen's heroine spends the novel exploring decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers--but none of them are what one would expect in a gothic potboiler, nor in a title of Radcliffe's. …More

1997 Man Booker Prize Winner

"A banquet for all the senses", said "Newsweek" of this bestselling and Booker Prize-winning literary novel--a richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love. …More

American icon BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790), born in Massachusetts to a British immigrant father and colonial mother, published the famous Poor Richards' Almanack, helped found the University of Pennsylvania, and was the first Postmaster General of the United States. His likeness adorns, among other things, the United States' hundred-dollar bill. Benjamin Franklin was as wildly intriguing a personality as his legend suggest, and as you've always heard, as his autobiography makes plain. From his hoarding of his pay as a teenager to buy books to his askance asides at such habits as the drinking of beer, from his work as a printer to his experiments with electricity, and much more, this is the story of Franklin's life-told as only he could tell it-in the years before the American Revolution. A classic of autobiography, this is must reading for American-history buffs, and for anyone fascinated by larger-than-life personalities. …More

A reissue of a Pulitzer prize-winning classic, and now the major motion picture GETTYSBURG. As a result of these acclamations, this book is considered one of the greatest novels written on the Civil War. …More

An enchanting literary debut--already an international best-seller.
At the height of Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for "re-education." The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin--as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.
But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed.
From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling. …More

Winner - 2001 ALA Non-Fiction Notable Selection
One of the most mesmerizing memoirs of the literary season: a wrenching, hilarious, and stylistically groundbreaking story of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. …More

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps Shakespeare's most popular play, particularly as a first introduction to Shakespeare for children--filled as it is with a marvelous mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies. For this edition, Peter Holland's introduction looks at dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows. …More

George Eliot was the literary pseudonym of British author Mary Anne Evans, born in 1819 in Warwickshire, and destined to be one of the most celebrated, and notorious, of British female writers. Many of her novels deal with happy memories of her Warwickshire childhood, including her first great novel, "The Mill on the Floss," and "Silas Marner." For their depiction of childhood experiences and illustrations of children learning about moral themes, George Eliot's works have been taught as classic literature since their initial publication. "Silas Marner" is regarded by many as one of Eliot's best books, second only to her masterpiece, "Middlemarch." The story of the miser and title character of "Silas Marner," and his redemption from greed and misery by the love of a small child, is one of the classics of English literature. …More

Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's best-known novel, a narrative whose spare beauty achieves epic--and even mythic--qualities as it recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. …More

Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Lewis (1773-1818), whose novel "The Monk" (1796) achieved marvelous popularity and earned him the nickname 'Monk' Lewis. …More

A BookPage Notable Title

This thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London is a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. …More