The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the greatest novels of all time and in fact stands at the fountainhead of the entire stream of popular adventure-fiction. Dumas himself was one of the founders of the genre. The cold, brooding, vampiric C...

Moby Dick belongs to the first rank of world literature. Melville read widely and deeply within the Western tradition, and brought it all together in his complex masterpiece. Within the framework of a simple tale of obsession, Melville offe...

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Uncle Tom's Cabin was t...

It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreak...

When Max Havelaar was first published in Holland in 1860, it ignited a major political and social brouhaha. The novel, written by a former official of the Dutch East Indian Civil Service under the pen name Multatuli, exposed the massive cor...

In what may be Dickens’s best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman—and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of “gre...

Darwin said it first, but Huxley said it best. Known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his tenacious and successful defense of evolution by natural selection, biologist T.H. Huxley wrote Man's Place in Nature to bolster his case with hard facts. Th...

Adventure, suspense, bravery, sea monsters, underground caverns, unbearable heat these are just a few of the wonderful subjects this book has to offer. The story begins when Professor Hardwigg finds a very old book with a piece of parchment...

Jules Verne's novel "From the Earth to the Moon" is the imaginative story of an attempt, made shortly after the U.S. Civil War, to send a projectile to the moon. This daring plan is masterminded by veteran artilleryman Impey Barbicane, pres...

This is Jules Verne at his best, creating the enigmatic character of Captain Nemo. The setting is the mid-nineteenth century. Deadly and mysterious calamities continue to befall ocean-going vessels, with wild reports by survivors that the c...

Before there was any kind of high-speed travel an English gentleman named Phileas Fogg betted 20,000 pounds that he can travel around the world in 80 or less days. He starts his journey in London. On his way he meets a beautiful Indian Prin...

Kipling was once the literary lion of the English-speaking world; within a generation his fame, as a poet at least, was all but extinguished. In a tendentious foreword to this edition of his complete verse, Kaye makes an unconvincing attemp...

A 19th-century literary masterpiece, tremendously influential in the arts and in philosophy, uses the Persian religious leader Zarathustra to voice the author’s views, including the introduction of the controversial doctrine of the Übermens...

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels' "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (its original title) was written as a pamphlet for the International Workingmen's Association. At the time the association was the most leftward in Europe, and involved itse...

Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the o...