"A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Candide, his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of the theory that our world is "the best of all possible worlds." The book traces the picaresque adventures of the guileless Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved...

Beloved by a legion of fans, Queen Lucia is the first in a series of six novels written by E.F. Benson in the 1920's and 1930's.

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial...

Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas's epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare's greatest plays. 'Tis a tale told by fretful droids, full of faithful Wookiees and fearstome Stormtroopers, signifying...pretty...

Set on a Mississippi steamer on April Fool's Day and populated by a series of shape-shifting con men, The Confidence-Man is a challenging metaphysical and ethical exploration of antebellum American society.

Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has not been developing: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor, a major "ask" who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's...

Wormold, the quintessential ordinary man, accepts an assignment as a Secret Service agent in Havana.

The First Men in the Moon' chronicles humanity's first faltering steps to the stars. The story uses a human-meets-alien adventure to juxtapose two characters whose temperaments personify the extremes of scientific endeavour - the disinterested researcher and the seeker after fame and fortune. Wells' description of spaceflight, including weightlessness, low-gravity gymnastics on the moon and re-entry angles for returning spacecraft, have all proved...

"In the third of the Palliser novels, the central figure is Lizzie Eustace - young, beautiful, and widowed. Her determination to hold onto a famous necklace in the face of legal harassment by brother-in-law's solicitor entangles her in a series of crimes - apparent and real - and contrived love affairs. Often considered the least political of the Palliser novels, it is highly revealing study of Victorian Britain, its colonial activities in Ireland,...

Harry March is something of a wreck and more than half nuts. Up until now, he has lived peacefully on an island in the Hamptons with his talking dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and unapologetic capitalist. But March's life starts to completely unravel when Lapham-an ostentatious multimillionaire who made his fortune on asparagus tongs-begins construction of a gargantuan mansion just across the way. To Harry, Lapham's monstrosity-to-be represents...