Item category 1: Classics

He jumped down to the wharf and walked alone out of the torchlight to stand behind Letty. Frances looked from his face to her sister's, and once again felt the weakening flush of fear. She was too much at the mercy of her company, and was about to discover which of her unpredictable selves would ...

With an introduction by David Aaronovitch, "The Communist Manifesto" was first published in London, by two young men in their late twenties, in 1848. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to be recognized as one of the most important political t...

Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a goose made of gold...the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers created an astonishingly influential imaginative world. However, this is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew, a man marries a snake, a princes...

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 ...