Search results for ""alma""

It is a winter evening, and Yegor Aduyev, the scion of a wealthy family from the landed gentry, slips into the house of Baron Neyleyn with the intention of asking his beautiful daughter, the eighteen-year-old Yelena, to be his wife. Will the besotted lover be successful in his pursuit or will the young coquette - who seems at times to reciprocate his feelings, but who lavished lingering looks on two dashing princes during a recent ball - shatter his hopes, his dreams and his entire world? A Serendipitous Error, written in 1839, when Goncharov was still in his twenties, is accompanied here by another early novella, An Evil Malady and a short fictional fragment. Taken together, these stories - translated for the first time into English - are further proof of the eclectic narrative skills of the celebrated author of Oblomov.

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The story of young Henry, who struggles to fulfil his ambitions to become a successful painter and is torn between the gentle Anna and the proud and sensual Judith, is one of the most outstanding and personal Bildungsroman writ¬ten in the German language. Composed between 1846 and 1855, Keller’s poetic, semi-autobiographical novel draws on the author’s own youth, artistic studies and development as a man, as well as providing a comprehensive portrait of his country and his times. Green Henry is one of the most important novels in European literature, and undoubtedly the greatest work of fiction by a Swiss writer.

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Poverty-stricken and cut off from society, former law student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov leads a desolate life in a dreary little room in St Petersburg. Having abandoned all hopes of sustaining himself through work, he now obsesses over the idea of changing his fortunes through an extreme act of violence: the killing of an elderly pawnbroker. His mind baulks at the horror of his plan, but when he hears that his sister Dunya is about to agree to a loveless marriage in order to escape the advances of her employer, his disgust for the world becomes unbounded, and his feelings of rebellion and revenge push him closer and closer to the edge of the precipice. A masterpiece of psychological insight, Dostoevsky's 1866 novel features some of its author's most memorable characters - from the temperamental protagonist Raskolnikov to the amoral sensualist Svidrigailov and the immoral lawyer Luzhin. Presented here in a sparkling new translation by Roger Cockerell, Crime and Punishment is a towering work in Russian nineteenth-century fiction and a landmark of world literature.

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When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wagers with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that behind her cockney parlance the girl in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her creator – and the scene is set for a play that questions the class system, social appearances and the role of women in society. Universally regarded as Shaw’s most successful work, Pygmalion – here presented in its definitive 1941 version, with footnotes indicating the textual variants from the first volume edition of 1916 – has spawned a great number of adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth’s undiminished ability to find new incarnations in modern life.

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On a cold morning, at daybreak, the 304th New York Regiment is waiting to engage with the Confederate army. Among the soldiers is young Henry Fleming, who has enlisted against his mother’s wishes and is now shaken by a sense of fear and regret at the prospect of battle. But when the confrontation begins and, fearing for his life, he escapes from the field, other feelings – above all guilt and shame for deserting and for having retreated without a wound – pierce his heart and eventually force him back into the fray. Although its author never experienced the horrors of the Civil War at first hand, The Red Badge of Courage has often been praised for its realism and the authenticity of its settings and battle scenes, as well as for the nuanced psychology of its protagonist’s internal struggles. Hailed as one of the greatest American novels ever written, it is as fresh today as it was when it was first published over a century ago.

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During his short and restless life, Percy Bysshe Shelley produced a great number of poems, three verse plays and numerous prose works, as well as many essays in which he propounded his philosophical views and radical political ideas. These, together with his highly unconventional itinerant life and his literary connections, make him one of the most important and intriguing figures in British Romanticism. This volume provides a generous selection of his poetry, from the sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ to famous lyrics such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’, to the longer poems of his maturity, Adonais and Epipsychidion, all thoroughly annotated and presented in chronological order.

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A wonderful story for children and an allegory for adults about the absurdity of war, presented here with an introduction and guide to the text by Lemony Snicket. Starving after a harsh winter, the bears descend from the mountains in search of food and invade the valley below, where they face fierce opposition from the army of the Grand Duke of Sicily. After many battles, scrapes and dangers, the bears' reign is established over the land, but their victory comes at a price.

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"Rising from humble beginnings as a foundling, Castruccio Castracani came to prominence as one of the most powerful and shrewd warlords in Italy. Indeed, Machiavelli argues, so great was his vigour and charisma that - had he not been prevented by his untimely death - he might have surpassed in fame the great generals of antiquity and brought all the territories of Italy under his sole dominion. Written in Machiavelli's characteristically lucid and terse style, Life of Castruccio Castracani is not only a key text in understanding the development of the author's ideas on leadership and good statesmanship that would find fuller expression in The Prince, but also a revealing account of the political ferment and fractious factionalism of fourteenth-century Italy. This edition is accompanied by selected passages from Machiavelli's Florentine Histories and a detailed map with historical notes."

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Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, following the example of the Brothers Grimm in Germany, Alexander Afanasyev embarked on the ambitious task of sifting through the huge repository of tales from Russian folklore and selecting the very best from written and oral sources. The result, an eight-volume collection comprising around 600 stories, is one of the most influential and enduringly popular books in Russian literature. This large selection from Afanasyev’s work, presented in a new translation by Stephen Pimenoff, will give English readers the opportunity to discover one of the founding texts of the European folkloristic tradition. Displaying a vast array of unforgettable characters, such as the Baba-Yaga, Ivan the Fool, Vasilisa the Fair and the Firebird, these tales – by turns adventurous, comical and downright madcap – will enchant readers for their raw beauty and constant ability to surprise and excite.

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The shop owner Adolf Verloc, member of an anarchist group and secret agent for a foreign government, is summoned to meet Mr Vladimir, the country’s ambassador, who asks him to carry out a terrorist attack at a famous London landmark. Verloc has misgivings, but Mr Vladimir knows how to make people do what he wants, and when the plan goes wrong, it is Verloc – as well as his young wife, Winnie – who must deal with the consequences. A story of espionage, intrigue and corruption based on a real-life attempted terrorist attack in Victorian London, The Secret Agent was one of literature’s first political thrillers, and is widely considered to be among Conrad’s most compelling works.

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As he was finishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce proclaimed, “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want.” Indeed, with his last book, which took him seventeen years to write, Joyce takes literary modernism to new territories by harvesting from as many as eighty different languages to create a wordscape that is both precise and impressionistic, a work that is intellectual, avant-garde, but also sad, funny, earthy and brimming with humanity. This edition includes an introduction by Dr Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin.

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Between 1892 and 1895, Oscar Wilde’s drawing-room comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest made his name as a playwright who fearlessly mocked the hypocrisy and snobbery of Victorian society and took gleeful delight in appearing to trivialize its most sacred institutions. With its premiere on Valentine’s Day 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest – a hilarious comedy of mistaken identities and coruscating language – was a phenomenal success, but its run was cut short prematurely by Wilde’s court case and subsequent incarceration, and the play was not published until 1899, after Wilde had been released from prison. Also including the powerful Salome, originally written in French and banned by the British censor, this collection displays Wilde at his provocative and witty best, and demonstrates why he was a playwright who delighted audiences and infuriated critics in equal measure.

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In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates. Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov’s motivations and objectives for visiting the colony and writing the exposé, Sakhalin Island is a haunting work which had a huge impact both on Chekhov’s career and on Russian society.

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Having frittered away his family’s fortune in Paris, the profligate Guido, driven by his ungovernable passions, is forced out of his native Genoa and harbours plans for revenge. After a mighty storm, he sees a mysterious, misshapen creature approaching from the sea, with whom he makes an infernal bargain to exchange bodies, with momentous consequences. First published in 1831 and here presented with the supernatural stories ‘The Evil Eye’ and ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the chilling Gothic tale ‘Transformation’ is a paragon of the genre by the author of Frankenstein.

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First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcil­able relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky’s later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which – in concept and execution – affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.

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Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing littérateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia’s succession of ruses. In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo – who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age – parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.

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Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family’s fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Liza, the daughter of a senior civil servant, his rivalry with the dashing Prince N. and his ensuing humiliation. These pages helped establish the archetype of the “superfluous man”, a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian literature. First published in 1850, ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’ was initially censored by the authorities, as some of its passages were deemed too critical of Russian society. This volume also includes two other masterly novellas, also touching on the theme of disappointed love: ‘Asya’ and ‘First Love’.

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First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman’s lifetime ambition to create a new voice that could capture the spirit and vibrancy of the young American nation, while celebrating at the same time “Nature without check with original energy”. Famously written in free verse and brimming with sensuous imagery and an unbridled love of nature and life in all its forms, and containing celebrated poems such as the ebullient ‘Song of Myself’ – described by Jay Parini as the greatest American poem ever written – and the elegiac ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, Leaves of Grass is not only the finest achievement of a highly unique poet, but a founding text for American literature and modern poetry. Considered one of the most influential poets in American literature and a pioneer of free verse, Walt Whitman (1819–92) was also a prolific writer of essays and articles. Controversial in its time, his sprawling collection Leaves of Grass is regarded as his magnum opus.

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“Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.” Described by his friend Charles Lamb as “an archangel slightly damaged”, Coleridge was deemed a towering genius by many of his contemporaries, and one who, in conversation, had no equal. Fascinated by, among other subjects, psychology, philosophy and chemistry, his mind roamed extravagantly and without restraint, leading Hazlitt to opine that “there is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested”. Yet, while this literary itinerancy left some to lament his refusal to devote himself to verse, Coleridge remains one of English literature’s most enduringly popular poets. From sonnets and ballads to elegies and intimate blank verse, this collection brings together poetry written throughout Coleridge’s life, particularly his prolific early years, which saw the composition of poems such as ‘Christabel’, ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’. This volume also includes ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, one of the most popular poems ever written in the English language, and ‘Kubla Khan’, which highlight Coleridge’s gift for suffusing his strange, haunting and captivating verse with unsurpassed musical and rhythmic qualities.

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The heir to his grandfather's considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the temptations of the 1920s Jazz Age. His descent into dissolution and profligacy is accelerated by his marriage to the attractive but turbulent Gloria, and the couple soon discover the dangerous flip side of a life of glamour and debauchery. Containing obvious parallels with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's own lives, The Beautiful and Damned is a tragic examination of the pitfalls of greed and materialism and the transience of youth and beauty.

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The founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works of Alexander Pushkin, collects the poems written by Pushkin at the time of his marriage to Natalia Goncharova right until his untimely death in a duel, and includes some of the greatest lyrical poems of his maturity, such as `In an Album', `Arab Imitation' and `Worldweariness', each presented in a verse translation opposite the original Russian text. Enriched with notes, pictures and an appendix on Pushkin's life and works, this will be essential reading for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the Russian bard's genius.

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While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in their social circle and exposes the cracks in their fragile marriage. As their relationship unravels, glimpses of their troubled past emerge, and a series of disturbing events unfolds. Peopled by an unforgettable cast of aristocrats and high-fliers, Tender Is the Night is at once a scathing critique of the materialism and hypocrisy of the Roaring Twenties and a poignant and sensitive account of personal tragedy and disillusionment.

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As the young Zinaida and her sweetheart, the student Nemovetsky, stroll through the idyllic Russian countryside, their memories, dreams and thoughts about life and the future mingle in the evening breeze. But when night falls, they hasten to retrace their steps back to town through a small wood, where they are accosted by three threatening drunkards, who knock Nemovetsky unconscious and start to chase the girl through the underwood. When the young student comes round, he is confronted with the horror of what has just happened. Haunting, disquieting, shocking, `The Abyss' - one of the most powerful short stories ever written - is accompanied in this volume by fifteen other stories, never translated into English before by Andreyev, including `Silence', `The Thief' and `Lazarus, some of them never translated before into English. Together, they provide a clear account of the lasting legacy of Russia's foremost man of letters of the early twentieth century.

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This volume, first published in 1856, includes three of the tales widely considered to be among Melville’s masterpieces. In ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, a Wall Street lawyer hires a melancholy young clerk called Bartleby, whose sudden and mysterious refusal to work plunges the firm into disarray. ‘Benito Cereno’ is the account of a mutiny on a slave ship, based on the real-life journals of an American sea captain. ‘The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles’ is a series of sketches about the Galápagos Islands which was a huge success with the reading public and contains some of Melville’s most celebrated prose. Also included in this volume are ‘The Lightning-Rod Man’, ‘The Bell Tower’ and a story written especially for the collection, ‘The Piazza’. Taken together, these tales, in their masterful use of irony and concision, display the author of Moby Dick at his most uncompromising and compelling.

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Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the unsympathetic attitude of the textile-mill owner John Thornton, whose factory workers are engaged in an acrimonious strike. Against this backdrop of social unrest, the relationship between the two is tumultuous, and it takes further upheaval and tragedy for them to see each other in a different light. First serialized in Dickens's magazine Household Words in the same period as Hard Times, North and South shares its famous counterpart's concern with the inequality and hardship generated by the Industrial Revolution in northern England, while at the same time creating one of the nineteenth century's most memorable and engaging female protagonists in Margaret Hale.

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First published in 1797, The Italian, with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance and its sublime depiction of landscape, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction. Enlisted by the Marchesa di Vivaldi, the perfidious monk Schedoni casts a malevolent presence throughout the book as he tries to thwart the passion of the two young lovers Vincenzo di Vivaldi and Elena di Rosalba. Against the backdrop of the Catholic Inquisition and the unforgettable scenery of the Bay of Naples and the Apennines, The Italian celebrates the heroic struggle of love in the face of malice and deceit.

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Nellie March and Jill Banford manage an ailing Berkshire farm at the time of the First World War, a task which is made all the more complicated by the frequent rampages of a local fox through their chicken coop. When a young soldier turns up and begins to interfere with the farm and the lives of the two women, they must find ways to react to this new fox in their midst. A compelling study of the question of power, gender and sexuality, as well as a realistic portrayal of wartime rural England, The Fox showcases Lawrence’s inimitable gift for psychological observation and dramatic description.

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We takes place in a distant future, where humans are forced to submit their wills to the requirements of the state, under the rule of the all-powerful Benefactor, and dreams are regarded as a sign of mental illness. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its chief engineer, a man called D-503, keeps a journal of his life and activities: to his mathematical mind everything seems to make sense and proceed as it should, until a chance encounter with a woman threatens to shatter the very foundations of the world he lives in. Written in a highly charged, direct and concise style, Zamyatin's 1921 seminal novel - here presented in Hugh Aplin's crisp translation - is not only an indictment of the Soviet Russia of his time and a precursor of the works of Orwell and the dystopian genre, but also a prefiguration of much of twentieth-century history and a harbinger of the ominous future that may still lay ahead of us.

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In order to repay a small debt, the young student Mitya is persuaded by a friend to falsify a bank bond and cash it in. Little does he suspect that this small misdemeanour will have a profound impact on the lives of many other people around him – indirectly even leading to the gravest of crimes. This in turn sets off a long journey towards redemption and rehabilitation. Published only in 1911, after Tolstoy’s death, The Forged Coupon examines the deep, unpredictable consequences of every human act, revealing the Russian master’s moral preoccupations in the last years of his life, as well as his rejection of Christianity’s simplistic division between good and evil.

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Orphaned at an early age, Heidi has been brought up by her mother's sister Dete in Switzerland. Having been offered a job in Frankfurt, however, her aunt is forced to entrust her young charge into the care of her grandfather, the reclusive Alp-Uncle who lives in the mountains without any interaction with the villagers beneath. The curmudgeonly old man is initially reluctant to accept the new arrangement, but his grand-daughter's warmth, cleverness and exuberance soon win him over, while Heidi learns to love her new surroundings and makes a new friend, Peter the goatherd. But as Heidi gets settled in her new life, little does she suspect that a major upheaval is just around the corner. A timeless classic of Swiss literature that has inspired many adaptations and has captured the imaginations of children the world over, Heidi's Early Lessons and Travels is here presented in a brand-new, unabridged translation by James Bowman, with charming illustrations by Susan Hellard.

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When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf of war, grief and loss will have opened in the meantime. As each character tries to readjust their memories and emotions with the shifts of time and reality, this long-delayed excursion will also prove to be a journey of self-discovery and fulfilment for them. Rich in symbolism, daring in style, elegiac in tone and encapsulating Virginia Woolf's ideas on life, art and human relationships, To the Lighthouse is a landmark of twentieth-century literature and one of the high points of early Modernism.

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In the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante recounts his journey through heaven, after the travails and torments of Hell and the arduous ascent of Mount Purgatory, creating a cosmology of the highest realm of creation which is astonishing in its complexity. In Dante's imagining, Paradise is formed out of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, beginning with the Moon and ending with the Empyrean. Dante must traverse these ethereal regions guided by his beloved Beatrice, as a means of attaining wisdom, revelation and beatitude. Containing some of Dante's finest poetry, Dante's Paradise is an enduring vision of grace and a powerful allegory for the struggle for redemption. This dual-text edition completes J.G. Nichols's masterful verse translation of The Divine Comedy.

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When an army of invading Martians lands in England, panic and terror seize the population. As the aliens traverse the country in huge three-legged machines, incinerating all in their path with a heat ray and spreading noxious toxic gases, the people of the Earth must come to terms with the prospect of the end of human civilization and the beginning of Martian rule. Inspiring films, radio dramas, comic-book adaptations, television series and sequels, The War of the Worlds is a prototypical work of science fiction which has influenced every alien story that has come since, and is unsurpassed in its ability to thrill, well over a century since it was first published.

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As ideological ferment grips Russia, a small group of revolutionaries, led by Pyotr Verkhovensky and inspired by Nikolai Stavrogin, plan to spread destruction and anarchy throughout the country. Morally bankrupt, they are prepared to use whatever means necessary to achieve their goal, including murder and incitement to suicide. But when they are forced to test the limits of their doctrine and kill one of their own to secure the secrecy of their mission, the ragtag group breaks up in mutual recrimination.Devils is at once a compelling political statement and a study of atheism and its calamitous effect on a country that is teetering on the edge of an abyss. Seen as Dostoevsky's most powerful indictment of man's propensity to violence, this darkly humorous work, shot through with grotesque comedy, is presented here in Roger Cockrell's masterful new translation.

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A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi. Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying cityscape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening ape-like creatures known as Morlocks, whose dark underground world he must explore to discover the terrible secrets of this fractured society, and the means of getting back to his own time. A biting critique of class and social equality as well as an innovative and much imitated piece of science fiction which introduced the idea of time travel into the popular consciousness, The Time Machine is a profound and extraordinarily prescient novel.

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Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy. Regarded as Fitzgerald's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Great Gatsby is a vivid chronicle of the excesses and decadence of the "Jazz Age", as well as a timeless cautionary critique of the American dream.

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Shipwrecked on an unknown island, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself surrounded by its six-inch-tall natives, the Lilliputians. But this is only the first in a long line of wonderful discoveries, as his adventures take him to other far-off lands such as Brobdingnag, populated by a race of giants, Luggnagg, home to the eternally ageing Struldbrugs, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, a race of benevolent talking horses. Parodying the popular travel accounts of its time, Gulliver's Travels is not only a tour de force of imaginative and comic writing, which has thrilled readers of all ages for almost three centuries, but also a masterly, merciless satire on Western society and human nature.

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The most ambitious narrative of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old orthodoxies. Eliot's sophisticated and acute characterization gives rich expression to every nuance of feeling, and vividly brings to life the town's inhabitants - including the young idealist Dorothea Brooke, the dry scholar Casaubon, the young, passionate reformist doctor Lydgate, the flighty young beauty Rosamond and the old, secretive banker Bulstrode - as they move in counterpoint to each other. Art, religion, politics, society, science, human relationships in all their complexity, nothing is left unexamined under the narrator's microscope. One of the greatest novels written in the English language, Middlemarch is a literary landmark in its groundbreaking approach, as well as a priceless document of its age.

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Alongside his monumental Zibaldone (Notebooks) and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy’s greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit. First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi’s own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, Moral Fables will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy’s last great polymath.

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After her parents die of cholera in India, Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in his gloomy house in Yorkshire, where she leads a lonely and neglected life, with nothing to do apart from exploring her surroundings. One day she discovers a walled garden which has been locked up, and becomes determined to enter it and find out its secret and the source of the mysterious crying sound that can be heard nearby. A powerful tale of regeneration and personal transformation, The Secret Garden has become one of the most popular children's classics, and has continued to delight generations of young readers.

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"There is absolutely no necessity to learn how to read; meat smells a mile off, anyway. Nevertheless, if you live in Moscow and have a brain in your head, you'll pick up reading willy-nilly, and without attending any courses. Out of the forty thousand or so Moscow dogs, only a total idiot won't know how to read the word 'sausage'." When a stray dog dying on the streets of Moscow is taken in by a wealthy professor, he is subjected to medical experiments in which he receives various transplants of human organs. As he begins to transform into a rowdy, unkempt human by the name of Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, his actions distress the professor and those surrounding him, although he finds himself accepted into the ranks of the Soviet state. A parodic reworking of the Frankenstein myth and a vicious satire of the Communist revolution and the concept of the New Soviet man, A Dog's Heart was banned by the censors in 1925 and circulated only in samizdat form. Nowadays this hugely entertaining tale has become very popular in Russia, and has inspired many adaptations across the world.

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Filled with dreams of pursuing a career as a poet, the young Alexander Aduev moves from the country to St Petersburg, where he takes up lodgings next to his uncle Pyotr, a shrewd and world-weary businessman. As his ideals are challenged by disappointment in the fields of love, friendship and poetical ambition, Alexander must decide whether to return to the homely values he has left behind or adapt to the ruthless rules and morals of city life. Told in the author's trademark humorous style and presented in a sparkling new translation by Stephen Pearl, The Same Old Story - Goncharov's first novel, preceding his masterpiece Oblomov by twelve years - is a study of lost illusions and rude spiritual awakening in the modern world.

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Among Dostoevsky’s later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the illegitimate son of the landowner Versilov and the maid Sofia Andreyevna – as he struggles to find his place in society and “become a Rothschild” against the background of 1870s Russia, a nation still tethered to its old systems and values but shaken up by the new ideological currents of socialism and nihilism. Both a Bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, dealing with themes such as the relationship between fathers and sons and the role of money in modern society, The Adolescent – here presented in a brand-new translation by Dora O’Brien – shows Dostoevsky at his finest as a social commentator and observer of the workings of a young man’s mind.

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When the corpse of Sir Charles Baskerville is found on the grounds of his Dartmoor estate next to a mysterious animal footprint, thoughts turn to a fabled family curse: that of a hellhound set out to avenge a crime committed by one of Sir Charles's ancestors. As the only surviving heir of the Baskervilles is terrified for his safety, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are called in to investigate. The most famous novel in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes cycle, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a masterpiece of terror, suspense and mystery which has enthralled readers young and old since it was first published in 1902.

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One of the best-loved adventure stories ever written, Treas ure Island's timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps, mutiny and derring-do has appealed to generations of readers ever since Robert Louis Stevenson penned it in 1881 with the claim: If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. But more than just a children's classic, the novel is considered to be one of the greatest feats of storytelling in the English language, with characters such as the unforgettable Long John Silver becoming part of the cultural consciousness. Treasure Island is a coming-of-age story that will captivate both adults and children for as long as stories are told.

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Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is considered by many to be the first novel in English, and its success was so enormous that by the end of the nineteenth century it had spawned more translations and versions than any other previous English book. An everyman character who has become part of our cultural heritage, Defoe's castaway - shipwrecked, imperilled and facing a host of elemental challenges - lives an archetypal life of survival, adventure and personal development. On one level a simple adventure story, while at the same time an allegory, a quest novel and a spiritual autoEdition Biography, Robinson Crusoe has captured the imagination of readers for nearly three centuries.

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"Sense and Sensibility" is famously characterised as the story of two Dashwood sisters who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of 'civilised' society and the human desire for romantic passion. However, there is far more to this story of two daughters made homeless by the death of their father. Elinor, 19, and Marianne, 17, initially project the opposing roles with Elinor cautious and unassuming about romantic matters, while Marianne is wild and passionate when she falls hopelessly in love with the libertine Mr Willoughby. But the lessons in love and life see the two characters develop and change with sense and sensibility needing to be compromised as a matter of survival.Written when Austen was just nineteen, this story has been read as a biographical reflection of her relationship with her own sister Cassandra, with the younger Jane being the victim of 'sensibility.' However, the novel is far more than a simple case of passion versus manners, and depicts the romantic complications of two women made highly vulnerable by the loss of their father and estate. With a raw and intense quality Austen creates a romantic masterpiece on the backdrop of a fragile social context.

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