"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of lonelinss and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...

"Lively, absorbing, often outrageously funny, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a work of genius, an undisputed classic that has held a special appeal for each generation of readers. The Tales gathers twenty-nine of literature’s most enduring (and endearing) characters in a vivid group portrait that captures the full spectrum of medieval society, from the exalted Knight to the humble Plowman."--

"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...

At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace (1868-9), Tolstoy entwines grand...

For David Copperfield, orphaned and with a cruel stepfather, the future looks bleak. But a new start beckons with the magnificent Mr Micawber, then with his eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood.

William Shakespeare's shortest-but one of his most popular, tragedies features a man, who will do anything to fulfill a prophecy that will lead him to become the King of Scotland. Fresh from battle, Macbeth and his companion Banquo come across three witches who tell of great power that is in store for Macbeth. Driven by their prophecy and aided by his wife, Macbeth sets out on a journey that is, wrought with deceit, murder, and suffering to acquire...

Presents the annotated text of Shakespeare's tragedy in which Cassius, fearing Julius Caesar's ambition, forms a conspiracy among Roman republicans, including Caesar's trusted friend Brutus, to assassinate him on the Ides of March; includes supplemental materials.

"In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis's prominence as a social commentator." From the bookjacket.