Books in Everyman's Library Classics Series series

An Everyman’s Library edition of Jane Austen’s revolutionary and inspiring novel, which is once again a major motion picture. Twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse is comfortably dominating the social order in the village of Highbury, convinced that she has both the understanding and the right to manage other people’s lives—for their own good, of course. Her well-meant interfering centers on the aloof Jane Fairfax, the dangerously attractive Frank Churchill, the foolish if appealing Harriet Smith, and the ambitious young vicar Mr. Elton—and ends with her complacency shattered, her mind awakened to some of life’s more intractable dilemmas, and her happiness assured. Austen’s comic imagination was so deft and beautifully fluent that she could use it to probe the deepest human ironies while setting before us a dazzling gallery of characters—some pretentious or ridiculous, some admirable and moving, all utterly true.

When John Harmon—who has been left a fortune if he will marry the girl his miserly father chose for him—is found floating dead in the Thames, he sets in motion a story overflowing with cases of deception and mistaken identity, of murder and attempted murder, of sin and redemption. The influence of the notorious Harmon inheritance ripples through a large cast of vividly drawn characters from every level of society, including Noddy Boffin, known as “the Golden Dustman”; the one-legged villain Silas Wegg; willful Bella Wilfer; saintly Lizzie Hexam; the sharp-witted doll’s dressmaker Jenny Wren; the social-climbing Veneerings; the ruthless speculator Fascination Fledgeby; and the river-scavenging corpse robbers Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood. Out of this flurry of invention Dickens creates in Our Mutual Friend a portrait of a city and a civilization that is at once indignant, compassionate, and utterly unforgettable.Charles Dickens’s last completed novel features one of his most surreal and haunting visions of London, shadowed by towering dust heaps that supply the corrupting riches at the heart of the plot and washed by the dark river that winds its way insistently through the story.This edition reprints the original Everyman’s preface by G. K. Chesterton and features forty illustrations by Marcus Stone.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Charlotte Brontë's last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness. With an introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallet.

"The Princess and the Pea," "The Little Mermaid," and other great Andersen fairy tales have enchanted children since the first ones appeared in Danish in the 1830s and '40s. Spink's translation into English is widely recognized as the finest, and the new Everyman's Library edition is further graced by the magical pictures made in 1899 by three of Britain's most celebrated illustrators.

Retold out of the old romances, this collection of Arthurian tales endeavors to make each adventure--"The Quest for the Round Table, " "The First Quest of Sir Lancelot, " "How the Holy Grail Came to Camelot, " and so forth--part of a fixed pattern that effectively presents the whole story, as it does in Le Morte D'Arthur, but in a way less intimidating to young readers. (All Ages)

Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin, his actions become more and more extreme. He convinces himself that he is one of the chosen few and that, therefore, all his actions are right and good . . . even murder.James Hogg ('the Ettrick Shepherd') was a poet, novelist, and farmer whose work was discovered by Sir Walter Scott and admired by writers as different as Wordsworth and Byron. His most famous book, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), is striking in its use of Calvinist doctrine, demonology, and a highly modern psychological perception to tell the story of the criminal Colwan, deluded by occult forces into thinking he represents an instrument of divine justice and vengeance. Introduction by Roger Lewis(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

An adventurous story of a frontier boy raised by Indians, The Light in the Forest is a beloved American classic.When John Cameron Butler was a child, he was captured in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted by the great warrrior Cuyloga. Renamed True Son, he came to think of himself as fully Indian. But eleven years later his tribe, the Lenni Lenape, has signed a treaty with the white men and agreed to return their captives, including fifteen-year-old True Son. Now he must go back to the family he has forgotten, whose language is no longer his, and whose ways of dress and behavior are as strange to him as the ways of the forest are to them.

Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.

rom one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.

Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William Weaver Italo Calvino’s masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book’s central character. Based on a witty analogy between the reader’s desire to finish the story and the lover’s desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book—IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER, by Italo Calvino, of course—are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another—an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction. Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.