CLASSICS

Hans Christian Andersen is the best-loved of all tellers of fairy tales.


This collection of over forty of Andersen's most popular stories includes The Mermaid, The Real Princess, The Red Shoes, The Little Match Girl, The Snow Queen, The Tinder Box, The Ugly Duckling and many more.

Aesop's celebrated collection of fables has always been popular with both adults and children. These simple tales embody truths so powerful, the titles of the individual fables - the fox and the grapes, the dog in the manger, the wolf in sheep's clothing and many others - have entered the languages and idioms of most European tongues.

Plato's Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare.

The animals at Manor Farm have had enough of Farmer Jones - he's drunk, reckless and cares little for their welfare. When the boar, Old Major, shares his revolutionary plans, the animals are convinced they can thrive on their own once the despot Jones is overthrown. But as the pigs vie for power, they begin to bear an uncanny resemblance to the tyrants they have overthrown...

The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy's Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beauty of Egdon Heath - reaching out to touch the lives and fate of all who dwell on it. The central figure is Clym Yeobright, the returning 'native' and the story tells of his love for the beautiful but capricious Eustacia Vye.

As the narrative unfolds and character after character is driven to self-destruction the presence of the Heath becomes all-embracing, while Clym becomes a travelling preacher in an attempt to assuage his guilt.

William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art.


Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem 'The Prelude' was completed in 1805, but was not published until after his death, and it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry.

With this volume, readers can dive into the now widely respected poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Our life is what our thoughts make it
The extraordinary writings of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180), the only Roman emperor to have also been a stoic philosopher, have for centuries been praised for their wisdom, insight and guidance by leaders and great thinkers alike. Never intended for publication, Meditations are the personal notes born from a man who studied his unique position of power as emperor while trying to uphold inner balance in the chaotic world around him.

Universally admired and quoted, Shakespeare's Sonnets have love, beauty and the passing of time at their heart. Featuring some of the best-known and best-loved lines in the history of poetry ('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?', 'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds'), these evocative sonnets explore passion, the fleeting nature of beauty and the essence of true and everlasting love.
Enticing lovers and scholars alike, these 154 beautiful and sensual sonnets are as relevant and important today as when they were written 400 years ago.

The unnamed narrator of the novel, a former government official, has decided to retire from the world and lead a life of inactivity and contemplation. His fiercely bitter, cynical and witty monologue ranges from general observations and philosophical musings to memorable scenes from his own life, including his obsessive plans to exact revenge on an officer who has shown him disrespect and a dramatic encounter with a prostitute.

A complete collection of beloved tales, myths and legends
from around the world, bound into a beautiful new edition.

Whether you're ready to sail the high seas with Sinbad
the Sailor, or fight alongside brave warrior Hua
Mulan, you're guaranteed to find all of your favourite legends
right here.
And no matter how the story starts, you'll always find your happy ending. Including: Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Hua Mulan and many more.

The principal characters who lead us through that world are ordinary human beings like ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose falling in love is also an act of rebellion against the Party. Opposing them are the massed powers of the state, which watches its citizens on all sides through technology now only too familiar to us. No-one is free from surveillance; the past is constantly altered, so that there is no truth except the most recent version; and Big Brother, both loved and feared, controls all. Even the simple act of keeping a diary - as Winston does - is punishable by death. In Winston's battle to keep his freedom of thought, he has a powerful adversary in O'Brien, who uses fear and pain to enter his very thought processes. Does 2+2 = 4? Or is it 5? We find out in Room 101.

edition also includes the following selection of Orwell's essays, column extracts and broadcasts: A Hanging; Spilling the Spanish Beans; Reviews of Jack London, The Iron Heel; H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Awakes; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ernest Bramah, The Secret of the League ; England Your England; Looking Back on the Spanish War; Arthur Koestler; The Prevention of Literature; Politics and the English Language; Why I Write; Politics Vs Literature; Sir Walter Raleigh; The Three Super-States of the Future; Persecution of Writers in USSR; Literature and Totalitarianism; Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift

In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain's ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin's brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a "disgusting murderer" and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way.

Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional 'beast fable' with the satire of Gulliver's Travels. A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old.

Our edition also includes the following essays: Shooting an Elephant; Charles Dickens; Inside the Whale; The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda; Literature and Totalitarianism; Fascism and Democracy; Patriots and Revolutionaries; Catastrophic Gradualism; Some Thoughts on the Common Toad; Why I Write; Writers and Leviathan

King Lear has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeare's most powerful tragedy.
Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world's literature.
In the theatre and on screen King Lear continues to challenge and enthral.

A collection of the world's finest love poems--from ancient Greece to the twentieth century.
For thousands of years, poets across the world have expressed their thoughts on love with profound and memorable verses.
Love Poems is a collection of works from more than fifty prolific poets, including Sappho, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. This volume contains over a hundred works of poetry that have been cherished for generations, and that continue to stir modern readers' hearts with their beauty.

Bring on the merriment whenever you open this collection of Shakespeare's entertaining comedies.
The comedies of William Shakespeare--including The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It--have entertained readers and theatergoers for centuries. This elegant Word Cloud edition of William Shakespeare Comedies includes all fourteen of the Bard's comedies in a single volume so readers can revisit their favorite plays and passages with ease.

The lights of Hollywood do little to distract Cecelia as she watches Monroe Stahr, wunderkind studio executive and object of her desire, descend into a reckless and ardent love affair with an auspicious starlet - an affair that threatens to destroy his reign as the Silver Screen's golden boy. In this tragic tale Fitzgerald exposes the corruption, sex and towering ambition at the dark heart of 1930s Hollywood.

Everyone in the Yorkshire town of Greenall Bridge knows Lassie, the prize collie of miner Sam Carraclough and his son Joe. But when the family falls on hard times, Sam is forced to sell his dog to the Duke of Rudling, who takes her hundreds of miles away to his estate in Scotland. Undeterred by the distance and driven by instinctive love, Lassie escapes from her new owners and embarks on an epic journey to be reunited with her young master Joe. Will she survive the hardships of the long journey and the various dangers along the way?

Emma is considered by many readers to be Jane Austen's crowning achievement, a timeless comedy of manners that lays bare the limits on women's autonomy in Regency England. The disparity between Emma Woodhouse's self-confidence and self-knowledge, and her determination to arrange marriages for her friends while avoiding one for herself, leads to a painful series of misunderstandings for everyone who suffers from her well-meaning altruism - and with Mr Knightley being the only person of her acquaintance who has the good sense to challenge her, Emma must eventually recognize her match in every sense.

To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.

Initially a vivacious, outgoing person, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) progressively withdrew into a reclusive existence. An undiscovered genius during her lifetime, only seven out of her total of 1,775 poems were published prior to her death. She had an immense breadth of vision and a passionate intensity and awe for life, love, nature, time and eternity.

Jane Austen's stories of clever women, elusive love, and social mores have struck a chord with millions of fans who consider her work compelling, heartwarming, and essential.
Adapted time and again for screen and stage, these enduring classics remain as enjoyable as ever. This elegant collection includes Austen's acclaimed novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.

Readers will be enchanted by the specially designed spines, custom endpapers, and six brilliant stories.
Just like Jane Austen's memorable characters, readers will fall in love with this set of novels on their bookshelf.

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.

One of Dickens's finest novels, Great Expectations chronicles the fortunes of its young protagonist Pip as he is unexpectedly endowed by a mysterious benefactor with the life of a gentleman, enabling him to escape to London from the prospect of a humble blacksmith's career in rural Kent. In the bustling, unforgiving capital he must learn for himself the pitfalls of love and wealth, and how to sort his friends from his enemies.

Through the lives of its unforgettable and iconic characters - such as Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella - Great Expectations charts the course of an England undergoing rapid social and economic change, and tells a tale that is among the foremost classics of the English language.

The four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth – live in financial hardship in New England with their mother, while their father has been drafted to fight in the Civil War. As the four come of age and their distinct personalities develop, destiny has contrasting fortunes in store for them – in the form of marriage, career, European travel or fatal illness – but the bonds holding together the March family remain intact.

This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, the only child of wealthy parents, whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University, where his literary talents flourish, in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family’s fortune, and the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode, the novel is a rich fusion of satiric and romance idioms, and found a captivated audience on its publication in1920. It made Fitzgerald rich and famous overnight.


The Beautiful and Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth and its privileges, one of Fitzgerald’s abiding subjects. Anthony Patch, is heir to a huge fortune, whose marriage to the beautiful and indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony’s fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars, it is a pyrrhic victory, for he is now a physically and morally broken man.

A Room of One's Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf's best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place of women within the power structures of modern society.

The essay lays bare the woman artist s struggle for a voice, since throughout history she has been denied the social and economic independence assumed by men. Woolf's prescription is clear: if a woman is to find creative expression equal to a man's, she must have an independent income, and a room of her own. This is both an acute analysis and a spirited rallying cry; it remains surprisingly resonant and relevant in the 21st century.

When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claimed countless human victims and destroyed many fleets. With some sinister crew members in their midst and the hazardous conditions of the sea to contend with, the expedition becomes increasingly dangerous the closer it gets to its quarry.One of the great American novels, if not the greatest, Moby Dick epically combines rip-roaring adventure, a meticulously realistic portrayal of the whaling trade and a profound philosophical disquisition on the nature of good and evil.