Chichikov, an amusing and often confused schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from landholders' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit

A 19th-century woman pursues her romantic dreams through a series of lovers.

Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. This Modern Library edition presents the acclaimed Samuel Putnam translation of the epic tale, complete with notes, variant readings, and an Introduction by the translator." Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being," said novelist Milan Kundera....

Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life, abject poverty, incessant gambling, and the death of his firstborn child, Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent...

While Hank Morgan, Twain's time-displaced Yankee traveller, keeps up a steady stream of flippancies, founding the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, and organizing a game of baseball between armour-clad knights, he also keeps up a steady commentary on the social mores of King Arthur's court, criticizing the hereditary social classes and state church still strong in the Victorian England of Twain's own day, and championing...

When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland, "that terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything." As the consequent drama unfolds, Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit...

Young Carrie Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.

Victorian novel set in the pottery district of Staffordshire and France during the Siege of Paris.

A translation of nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel in which the four sons of Fyodor Karamazov, a man of immoral character, must contend with a criminal investigation and with their own inner questions about justice and the existence of God after they are involved in their father's murder.