The Dracula mythology has inspired a vast subculture, but the story has never been better told than by Bram Stoker. He succeeds entirely in his aim to terrify. His myth is powerful because it allows...

"Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions," wrote D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love, his...

One of the great works of American literature, Moby Dick is the epic tale of one man's fight against a force of nature. The outcast youth Ishmael, succumbing to wanderlust during a dreary New...

First published in 1899, this revolutionary novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as...

Pride and Prejudice captures the affectations of class-conscious eighteenth-century English families with matrimonial aims and rivalries. This story of the Bennet family and the novel's two...

Set in London's backstreet slums, Oliver Twist is the story of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a den of thieves, where some of Dickens's most depraved villains preside: the...

Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband—and Russian high...

Set among the elegant brownstones and opulent country houses of turn-of-the-century upper-class New York, Edith Wharton's first great novel is a precise, satiric portrayal of what the author herself...

When the starving French masses rise to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the...

Set in the heady Jazz Age of New York, The Beautiful and Damned chronicles the relationship between Anthony Patch, a Harvard-educated aspiring aesthete, and his beautiful trophy wife, Gloria,...