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...

"The epitome of the chivalric novel, Ivanhoe sweeps readers into Medieval England and the lives of a memorable cast of characters. Ivanhoe, a trusted ally of Richard-the-Lion-Hearted, returns from the Crusades to reclaim the inheritance his father denied him. Rebecca, a vibrant, beautiful Jewish woman is defended by Ivanhoe against a charge of witchcraft -- but it is Lady Rowena who is Ivanhoe's true love. The wicked Prince John plots to usurp England's...

Presents seventeenth-century British poet John Milton's classic epic poems "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," along with a scholarly introduction, a Milton chronology, and a selected bibliography. These controversial epic poems demonstrate Milton's genius for fusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative and drama in profound explorations of the moral problems of God's justice-and what it truly means to be human.