Item category 1: Classics

In "America" Karl Rossmann is 'packed off to American by his parents' to experience Oedipal and cultural isolation. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and 'America' is never quite as real as it should be. "Kafka", a Czech writing in German, never acutally visited America; so, as Max Brod...

An overlooked classic of Italian literature, this epic and unforgettable novel recounts one man's long and turbulent life in revolutionary Italy. At the age of eighty-three and nearing death, Carlo Altoviti has decided to write down the confessions of his long life. He remembers everything: his u...

This is a hilarious and daring trip into the heart of darkness. Striking out for the Marxist-Leninist People's Republic of Congo, O'Hanlon takes an unsuspecting friend to hidden Lake Tele in search of Mokele-mbembe the rarely seen Congo dinosaur.

When A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story ...

Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy takes the discipline of logic and the mind back to its roots. Drawing inspiration from six of the finest minds in history - Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - he addresses lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy...

He straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was, and stood still in front of him, for he was here on business. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy.

On the eve of his wedding, a young sailor named Edmond Dantés is wrongly accused of treason and imprisoned for life in the Château d'If, a reputedly impregnable island fortress. After a daring escape, Dantés unearths a treasure revealed to him by another prisoner and devotes the rest of his li...