Classic Fiction

Some of our favorite classic stories, modern classics, and classic stories reimagined.

Updated September 11, 2025
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Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison "A...
Watership Down
Adams, Richard
Paper Book
Now with a new introduction by Madeline Miller, the New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles and Circe. The 50th anniversary edition of Richard Adam's timeless classic, the tale of a band of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place...
Little women
Alcott, Louisa May
Paper Book
&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RLittle Women&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RLouisa May Alcott&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R&&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality...
Bless me, Ultima
Anaya, Rudolfo A.
Paper Book
This coming-of-age classic from "one of the nation's foremost Chicano literary artists" follows a young boy as he questions his faith and beliefs after a curandera woman introduces herbs and magic into his life (Denver Post) . .Antonio Marez is six years old...
Persuasion
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
Persuasion, by Jane Austen, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general...
The silence of the girls
Barker, Pat
Paper Book
A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Economist, Financial Times   Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction Here is the story of the Iliad as we've never...
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman....
Jane Eyre
Bront,? Charlotte
Paper Book
Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at...
The good earth
Buck, Pearl S.
Paper Book
The timeless Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece following a humble farmer's journey through 1920s China returns with this beautifully repackaged edition that celebrates its nearly ninety years as an American classic. Travel to 1920s China, a time when the last emperor still ruled...
Impasse
Buckingham, Royce
Paper Book
In Royce Scott Buckingham'sImpasse, a man is left to die in Alaska while on an "adventure vacation" and must somehow survive to get his revenge on those who betrayed him. Forty and facing a mid-life crisis, Stu Stark has lost his mojo. He simply gave up after being...
A clockwork orange
Burgess, Anthony
Paper Book
A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his...
Kindred
Butler, Octavia E.
Paper Book
One of the 100 best novels ever published in English (The Guardian), most consequential novels of the past 100 years (The Atlantic), most essential books published in the U.S. since 1776 (Publishers Weekly) Experience the novel that redefined American literature...
O pioneers!
Cather, Willa
Paper Book
Set on the Nebraska prairie where Willa Cather (1873-1947) grew up, this powerful early novel tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the lands they have struggled to farm. In Alexandra's long flight to survive and...
Don Quixote
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Paper Book
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, a landmark work of early modern literature, in an expanded P.S. edition Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, this classic of Spanish literature, Don Quixote,...
The awakening
Chopin, Kate
Paper Book
Kate Chopin's riveting, daring story of one woman's search for personal freedom was so far ahead of its time that its publication in 1899 aroused a storm of controversy violent enough to end its author's career.   With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Chopin tells the...
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
Paper Book
"There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road-there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven-stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments." Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in...
The last of the Mohicans
Cooper, James Fenimore
Paper Book
The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the...
The red badge of courage
Crane, Stephen
Paper Book
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel
Paper Book
Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God. This edition features maps.
Great expectations
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
Crime and punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Paper Book
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman's murder into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. * ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME ...
Invisible man
Ellison, Ralph.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. One of The Atlantic<...
James : a novel
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view * In development as a feature film to be...
The sound and the fury : the corrected text
Faulkner, William
Paper Book
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER * One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin.  *  The definitive corrected text, including Faulkner's Appendix One of The Atlantic...
Beatrice and Benedick
Fiorato, Marina
Paper Book
Hidden in the language of Shakespeare's best-loved comedyMuch Ado About Nothingare several clues to an intriguing tale. It seems that the witty lovers Beatrice and Benedick had a previous love affair that ended bitterly. But how did they meet? Why did they part? And what brought them...
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald's family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author's own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book...
A room with a view
Forster, E. M.
Paper Book
This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a...
One hundred years of solitude
Garca? Mr?quez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
Cold Comfort Farm
Gibbons, Stella
Paper Book
"Quite simply one of the funniest satirical novels of the last century." --Nancy Pearl, NPR's Morning Edition The deliriously entertaining Cold Comfort Farm is "very probably the funniest book ever written" (The Sunday Times, London), a...
Lord of the flies
Golding, William
Paper Book
NOW A NETFLIX SERIES William Golding's profound tale of stranded youth, survival, and the shadowy depths of human nature, with an afterword by Lois Lowry "Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. I still read it every couple of years."--Suzanne Collins,...
A haunting on the hill
Hand, Elizabeth
Paper Book
From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House--an "eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting" (Alix E. Harrow) new ...
Far from the madding crowd
Hardy, Thomas
Paper Book
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period...
Catch-22 : a novel
Heller, Joseph
Paper Book
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save...
The sun also rises
Hemingway, Ernest
Paper Book
This authorized edition celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's first novel--a quintessential story of the Lost Generation--with an introduction by bestselling author Colm Tóibín. "The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and...
Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale.
Paper Book
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly."--Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century,...
Ayesha at last
Jalaluddin, Uzma
Paper Book
As seen on The Today Show! One of the best summer romance picks! One of Publishers Weekly Best Romance Books of 2019! A modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice for a new generation of love. Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of...
Meg & Jo
Kantra, Virginia
Paper Book
A heartwarming modern novel inspired by Little Women, to coincide with the release of the new film in early 2020.
Zorba the Greek
Kazantzakis, Nikos
Paper Book
This moving fable sees a young Greek writer set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance. But when he arrives, he meets Alexis Zorba, a middle-aged Greek man with a zest for life. Zorba has had a family and many lovers, has fought in the Balkan wars, has lived and loved - he is a simple but deep...
Demon Copperhead : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION New York Times Readers' Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller * An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post...
Captains courageous
Kipling, Rudyard
Paper Book
After being washed overboard from an ocean liner, fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, spoiled son of a millionaire, is rescued by New England fishermen who put him to work on their boat.
To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
Paper Book
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made...
Main Street
Lewis, Sinclair
Paper Book
Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis's barbed portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, shattered the myth of the American Middle West as God's Country and became a symbol of the cultural narrow-mindedness and smug complacency of small towns everywhere. A Penguin Classic ...
The call of the wild
London, Jack
Paper Book
In this quintessential adventure story, Jack London takes readers on an arduous journey through the forbidding Alaskan landscape during the gold rush of the 1890s. Buck, a rangy mixed breed used to a comfortable, sun-filled life as a family dog, is stolen by a greedy opportunist and sold to dog...
Moby-Dick
Melville, Herman
Paper Book
Circe : a novel
Miller, Madeline
Paper Book
This #1 New York Times bestseller is a "bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story" that brilliantly reimagines the life of Circe, formidable sorceress of The Odyssey (Alexandra Alter, TheNew York Times). In the house of Helios,...
Beloved : a novel
Morrison, Toni.
Paper Book
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend...
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
Paper Book
Lady Murasaki's exquisite, 11th-century portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan has been widely celebrated as the world's first novel. Offering a lively and well-rounded glimpse of golden age Japan with a cast of richly conceived and nuanced characters, Royall Tyler's superb translation, detailed...
Lolita
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
Paper Book
The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. * With a new introduction by Claire Messud "The conjunction of a sense of...
Hello beautiful : a novel
Napolitano, Ann
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! From the author of Dear Edward comes a "powerfully affecting" (People) family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole? "Another tender tearjerker...
The things they carried : a work of fiction
O'Brien, Tim
Paper Book
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking work of Vietnam War fiction and a meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. ...
Cry, the beloved country
Paton, Alan.
Paper Book
"The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time." --The New Republic "A beautiful novel...its writing is so fresh, its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its understanding...
The bell jar
Plath, Sylvia.
Paper Book
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels "A coming-of-age masterpiece." --Boston Globe "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." --USA Today A beautifully designed Harper Perennial...
All quiet on the Western Front
Remarque, Erich Maria
Paper Book
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time--with an Oscar-winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix.   "[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank."--...
Wide Sargasso Sea
Rhys, Jean.
Paper Book
Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys's return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into...
Wild and distant seas : a novel
Roberts, Tara Karr
Paper Book
Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once...
Portnoy's complaint
Roth, Philip.
Paper Book
The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish...
The catcher in the rye
Salinger, J. D.
Paper Book
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.     "If you...
Frankenstein : or, The modern Prometheus
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear....
A thousand acres
Smiley, Jane.
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A "powerful and poignant" twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear (The New York Times Book Review) that takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride--and centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to...
A tree grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Betty
Paper Book
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick A special 75th anniversary edition of the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century. From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for ...
The grapes of wrath
Steinbeck, John
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning...
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
Paper Book
In 1897 Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, launching a literary sensation. In this new illustrated edition, Jae Lee, onw of the most renowned artists from the Marvel stable, reawakens Count Dracula. Critics and fans alike have praised Lee for his mastery of complex emotion and, in this new book, 40...
Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Paper Book
When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it became an international blockbuster, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States alone in its first year. Progressive for her time, Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the earliest writers to offer a shockingly realistic depiction of slavery....
Vanity fair
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Paper Book
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their...
War and peace
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Paper Book
A beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition of Tolstoy's magnificent epic novel of love, conflict, fate and human life in all its imperfection and grandeur At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war....
A confederacy of dunces
Toole, John Kennedy
Paper Book
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."--The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero,...
Fathers and sons
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Paper Book
With an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an afterword by Tatiana Tolstaya Turgenev's depiction of the conflict between generations and their ideals stunned readers when Fathers and Sons was first published in 1862. But many could also sympathize with Arkady...
The adventures of Tom Sawyer
Twain, Mark
Paper Book
The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town in the early nineteenth century.
A journey to the centre of the earth
Verne, Jules
Paper Book
Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade : a duty-dance with death
Vonnegut, Kurt.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is "a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century" (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time * One of...
The age of innocence
Wharton, Edith
Paper Book
Widely regarded as one of Edith Wharton's greatest achievements, The Age of Innocenceis not only subtly satirical, but also a sometimes dark and disturbing comedy of manners in its exploration of the 'eternal triangle' of love. Set against the backdrop of upper-class New York society during...
The picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde, Oscar
Paper Book
VINTAGE CLASSICS X MADE.COM Dorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt lifestyle...
The man who lived underground : a novel
Wright, Richard
Paper Book
NAACP IMAGE AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2021 ONE OF OPRAH'S 15 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021 ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 A BOSTON GLOBE BEST...
The story of Edgar Sawtelle
Wroblewski, David.
Paper Book
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and...

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