Special Collections

Heart of Darkness

This Norton Critical Edition includes:- A newly edited text based on the first English book edition (1902), the last version to which Conrad is known to have actively contributed.

"Textual History and Editing Principles" provides an overview of the textual controversies and ambiguities perpetually surrounding Heart of Darkness.
- Background and source materials on colonialism and the Congo, nineteenth-century attitudes toward race, Conrad in the Congo, and Conrad on art and literature.
- Fifteen illustrations. - Seven contemporary responses to the novella along with eighteen essays in criticism--ten of them new to the Fifth Edition,including an entirely new subsection on film adaptations of Heart of Darkness.
- A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Frankenstein

For the bicentennial of its first publication, Mary Shelley’s original 1818 text, introduced by National Book Critics Circle award-winner Charlotte Gordon.

2018 marks the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel.

For the first time, Penguin Classics will publish the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice.

This edition also emphasizes Shelley’s relationship with her mother—trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—and demonstrates her commitment to carrying forward her mother’s ideals, placing her in the context of a feminist legacy rather than the sole female in the company of male poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Janie is an independent African American woman who grows up with a grandmother who is determined to keep her from the sexual and racial violence of her own past.

Janie's first marriage is filled with hard labor, so she runs off with Joe, a handsome and wealthy storekeeper.

Joe becomes mayor of the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, but Janie is still unfulfilled by her new relationship.

After Joe's death, she lives with another man who brings passion into her world, if not stability.

Soon tragedy strikes and Janie learns to face it head-on with optimism and strength.

[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Last of the Mohicans

A massacre at a colonial garrison, the kidnapping of two pioneer sisters by Iroquois tribesmen, the treachery of a renegade brave, and the ambush of innocent settlers create an unforgettable, spine-tingling picture of American frontier life in this classic 18th-century adventure -- the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.

First published in 1826, the story -- set in the forests of upper New York State during the French and Indian War -- movingly portrays the relationship between Hawkeye, a gallant, courageous woodsman, and his loyal Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas.

Embroiled in one of the war's bloody battles, they attempt to lead the abducted Munro sisters to safety but find themselves instead in the midst of a final, tragic confrontation between rival war parties.

Imaginative and innovative, The Last of the Mohicans quickly became the most widely read work of the day, solidifying the popularity of America's first successful novelist in the United States and Europe.

Required reading in many American literature classics, the novel presents a stirring picture of a vanishing people and the end to a way of life in the eastern forests.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

All Quiet on the Western Front

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I.

Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers.

But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.

And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other--if only he can come out of the war alive.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Candide

Caustic and hilarious, Candide has ranked as one of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759.

It concerns the adventures of the youthful Candide, disciple of Dr. Pangloss, who was himself a disciple of Leibniz.

In the course of his travels and adventures in Europe and South America, Candide saw and suffered such misfortune that it was difficult for him to believe this was "the best of all possible worlds" as Dr. Pangloss had assured him.

Indeed, it seemed to be quite the opposite. In brilliantly skewering such naïveté, Voltaire mercilessly exposes and satirizes romance, science, philosophy, religion, and government -- the ideas and forces that permeate and control the lives of men.

After many trials and travails, Candide is reunited with Cunegonde, his sweetheart.

He then buys a little farm in Turkey where he and Cunegonde, Dr. Pangloss and others all retire. In the end, Candide decides that the best thing in the world is to cultivate one's own garden.

A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

To Kill a Mockingbird

Look for The Land of Sweet Forever, a posthumous collection of newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces by Harper Lee, coming October 21, 2025.Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American ReadHarper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatredOne of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Woman Warrior

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER &“A classic, for a reason.&” —Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts, via TwitterAs a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother&’s &“talk stories.&” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother&’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston&’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family&’s past and her own present.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty.

There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.

With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Iliad

Probably composed in the eighth century B.C. and based on an actual historical event of the thirteenth century B.C., Homer's Iliad is one of the great epics of the Western world.

The poem unfolds near the end of the ten-year-long Trojan War, detailing the quarrel between the great warrior-hero Achilles and King Agamemnon, the battle between Paris and Menelaus for Helen of Troy, the Greek assault on the city and the Trojan counterattacks, the intervention of the gods on the part of their favorites, and numerous other incidents and events.

Vast in scope, possessing extraordinary lyricism and poignancy, this time-honored masterpiece brilliantly conveys the inconsistencies of gods and men, the tumultuous intensity of conflict, and the devastation that results from war.

This inexpensive edition reproduces the celebrated Samuel Butler prose translation, admired for its simple, unadorned style, clarity, and readability.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Wuthering Heights

Considered lurid and shocking by mid-19th-century standards, Wuthering Heights was initially thought to be such a publishing risk that its author, Emily Brontë, was asked to pay some of the publication costs.

A somber tale of consuming passions and vengeance played out against the lonely moors of northern England, the book proved to be one of the most enduring classics of English literature.

The turbulent and tempestuous love story of Cathy and Heathcliff spans two generations -- from the time Heathcliff, a strange, coarse young boy, is brought to live on the Earnshaws' windswept estate, through Cathy's marriage to Edgar Linton and Heathcliff's plans for revenge, to Cathy's death years later and the eventual union of the surviving Earnshaw and Linton heirs.

A masterpiece of imaginative fiction, Wuthering Heights (the author's only novel) remains as poignant and compelling today as it was when first published in 1847.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Long Day's Journey into Night

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work.

First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies.

This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Walden

An American masterwork in praise of nature, self-reliance, and the simple lifeI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

In 1845, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau moved from his home in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, to a small cabin he built by hand on the shores of Walden Pond.

He spent the next two years alone in the woods, learning to live self-sufficiently and to take his creative and moral inspiration from nature. P

art memoir, part philosophical treatise, part environmental manifesto, Walden is Thoreau's inspirational account of those extraordinary years and one of the most influential books ever written.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Selling more than 300,000 copies the first year it was published, Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852.

Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters.

Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee a country that condones slavery; Simon Legree, a brutal plantation owner; Little Eva, who suffers emotionally and physically from the suffering of slaves; and fun-loving Topsy, Eva's slave playmate.

Critics, scholars, and students are today revisiting this monumental work with a new objectivity, focusing on Stowe's compelling portrayal of women and the novel's theological underpinnings.

This Norton Critical Edition includes:
The 1852 first book edition, accompanied by Elizabeth Ammons’s preface, note on the text, and explanatory annotations.
Twenty-two illustrations.
A rich selection of historical documents on slavery and abolitionism.
Seventeen critical reviews spanning more than 160 years.
A Chronology, A Brief Time Line of Slavery in America, and an updated Selected Bibliography.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom, The New York Review of Books declared, "the English-speaking world is indebted."

First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities--Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times.

Stunningly rendered in the spirit of Pasternak's original--resurrecting his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone--and including an introduction, textual annotations, and a translators' note, this edition of Doctor Zhivago is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.From the Hardcover edition.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.

It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel.

Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel Garcia Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Tom Jones

Tom, a foundling, is discovered one evening by the benevolent Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget and brought up as a son in their household; when his sexual escapades and general misbehavior lead them to banish him, he sets out in search of both his fortune and his true identity.

Amorous, high-spirited, and filled with what Fielding called "the glorious lust of doing good," but with a tendency toward dissolution, Tom Jones is one of the first characters in English fiction whose human virtues and vices are realistically depicted.

This edition is set from the text of the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Beowulf

The story of one man's triumph over a legendary monster, Beowulf marks the beginning of Anglo-Saxon literature as we know it today.

This Enriched Classic includes:
• A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
• A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
• An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
• Detailed explanatory notes
• Critical analysis and modern perspectives on the work
• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
•

A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary.

The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. Series edited by Cynthia Brantley Johnson

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Bartleby, the Scrivener

The classic tale of existential despair A Wall Street lawyer specializing in bonds and mortgages hires a respectable young man to copy legal documents by hand. At first, the new scrivener approaches his duties with a calm efficiency. Then comes the day when his response to a new assignment is, &“I would prefer not to.&” The mysterious phrase soon becomes Bartleby&’s reply to everything asked of him, and his surrender to inertia is both maddening and inexorable. Torn between frustration and pity, anger and sorrow, his employer desperately tries to save Bartleby, but the cause is as doomed to disappointment as life itself. A strange and haunting fable that continues to resonate a century and a half after it was first published, Bartleby, the Scrivener is a masterpiece of American literature. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic American novel The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, a woman living in the rigid Puritan society of 17th century Boston.

Condemned as an adulteress and forced to wear a scarlet A on her dress, Hester refuses to name the father of her child, born out of wedlock.

Her quiet dignity in the face of persecution only serves to further enrage many of the townspeople.

Separated from society, Hester begins to ask questions about the nature of sin and redemption and comes to conclusions unthinkable to her fellow Puritans.

A story of perseverance in the face of ignorance and injustice, The Scarlet Letter enjoyed immediate and lasting success.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

The Stranger

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order.

A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Odyssey

This excellent prose translation of Homer's epic poem of the 9th century BC recounts one of Western civilization's most glorious tales, a treasury of Greek folklore and myth that maintains an ageless appeal for modern readers.

A cornerstone of Western literature, The Odyssey narrates the path of a fascinatingly complex hero through a world of wonders and danger-filled adventure.

After ten bloody years of fighting in the Trojan War, the intrepid Odysseus heads homeward, little imagining that it will take another ten years of desperate struggle to reclaim his kingdom and family.

The wily hero circumvents the wrath of the sea god Poseidon and triumphs over an incredible array of obstacles, assisted by his patron goddess Athene and his own prodigious guile.

From a literal descent into Hell to interrogate a dead prophet to a sojourn in the earthly paradise of the Lotus-eaters, the gripping narrative traverses the mythological world of ancient Greece to introduce an unforgettable cast of characters: one-eyed giants known as Cyclopses, the enchantress Circe, cannibals, sirens, the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, and a fantastic assortment of other creatures.Remarkably modern in its skillful use of flashbacks and parallel line of action, Homer's monumental work is now available in this inexpensive, high-quality edition sure to be prized by students, teachers, and all who love the great myths and legends of the ancient world.

A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Things Fall Apart

THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a "strong man" of an Ibo village in Nigeria.

The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries.

These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.

[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 9-10 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Call It Sleep

A sensitive boy's growing up is one strand in a complex web of his parent's tense life, their immigrant strangeness in a new land.

Date Added: 05/08/2018