Classic Fiction

Some of our favorite classic stories

Updated April 19, 2024
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Watership Down
Adams, Richard
Watership Down is the compelling tale of a group of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place in the world--now a Emmy Award-winning Netflix animated miniseries starring James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Oscar and Grammy award-winning Sir Ben Kingsley. A phenomenal...
Little women
Alcott, Louisa May
This keepsake edition of the classic novel Little Women is illustrated with gorgeous black-and-white photos from the award-winning film starring Timothée Chalamet, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern, Louis Garrel, James Norton, Bob Odenkirk, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen,...
Northanger Abbey
Austen, Jane
Catherine Morland's sentimental illusions crumble as she enters into adulthood.
WOMEN OF TROY
BARKER, PAT
A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it--an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and "one of contemporary literature's most thoughtful...
A manual for cleaning women : selected stories
Berlin, Lucia.
One ofTheNew York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 One ofJezebel's Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Womencompiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the...
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
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....
Wuthering Heights
Bront©±, Emily
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before- of the intense passion between the foundling...
Eternal wonder a novel
Buck, Pearl S.
Lost for forty years, a new novel by the author of The Good Earth The Eternal Wonder tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax (Rann for short), an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New...
Book club [kit] : [for Kindred]
Butler, Octavia E.
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic...
Miranda and Caliban
Carey, Jacqueline
Miranda and Caliban is bestselling fantasy author Jacqueline Carey's gorgeous retelling ofThe Tempest. With hypnotic prose and a wild imagination, Carey explores the themes of twisted love and unchecked power that lie at the heart of Shakespeare's masterpiece, while serving up a...
The spy who came in from the cold
Le Carr©♭, John
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Our Kind of Traitor; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston. The 50th-anniversary edition of the bestselling novel that...
O pioneers!
Cather, Willa
The novel that first made Willa Cather famous--a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman One of America's greatest writers, Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel--the first of her...
Don Quixote
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, in an expanded P.S. edition Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his...
The Awakening
Chopin, Kate
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice,...
The last of the Mohicans : a narrative of 1757
Cooper, James Fenimore
The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook and...
The red badge of courage
Crane, Stephen
First Published in 1895, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE is set during the Civil War. The novel follows the development of an ordinary Union soldier as he experiences the reality of war. It has been called the first modern war novel.
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe, once a brave sailor out to seek his fortune, is now a captive -- a captive of a lonely desert island on which he is marooned. With only his wits and the few supplies he is able to carry from his sinking ship to sustain him, he is forced to create a new life for himself, out of...
Great expectations
Dickens, Charles
One of Charles Dickens's most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the young Pip's first terrifying encounter with...
Crime and punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
One of the greatest works of fiction ever written, Crime and Punishment is at once an intense psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, and a fascinating detective thriller instilled with philosophical, religious, and social commentary. Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact...
The sound and the fury
Faulkner, William
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Beatrice and Benedick
Fiorato, Marina.
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...
To kill a mockingbird : a graphic novel
Fordham, Fred
"This gorgeously rendered graphic-novel version provides a new perspective for old fans but also acts as an immersive introduction for youngsters as well as any adult who somehow missed out on the iconic story set in Maycomb, Alabama."--USA Today A beautifully...
A room with a view
Forster, E. M.
Young and well bred, Lucy Honeychurch finds herself in a muddle after encountering the Emersons on a trip to Florence. Their social class is different from Lucy's and their manner -- unlike the "respectable" people she's used to -- is simple and direct, causing her to find the people around her...
Love in the time of cholera : a novel
García Márquez, Gabriel
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * "A love story of astonishing power" (Newsweek), the acclaimed modern literary classic by the beloved Nobel Prize-winning author. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry...
Wives and daughters
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
Secrets and scandals steer a young woman's life as she comes of age and finds love in Victorian England.   Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson has grown up under the watchful eye of her widowed father, the doctor Mr. Gibson. After one of his apprentices develops an interest...
King Solomon's mines
Haggard, H. Rider
Praised as "the most amazing story ever written," this 1885 story tells the tale in which Allan Quatermain, a gentleman adventurer, is hired to locate a man who has disappeared into the heart of Africa while hunting for the legendary lost diamond mines of King Solomon.
Far from the madding crowd
Hardy, Thomas
This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous. Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters, Far from the Madding Crowd is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong...
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him...
The mere wife
Headley, Maria Dahvana
New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers--a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran--fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife.
Catch-22
Heller, Joseph
This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller's masterpiece with a new introduction; critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos; and much more. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels...
The sun also rises
Hemingway, Ernest
The only authorized edition of Ernest Hemingway's first novel. "The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost." --The Wall Street Journal ...
Alice
Henry, Christina
Alice has been in the mental hospital in Old Town for years. She doesn't remember why. All she can remember is a tea party long ago. Long ears and blood. Until one night she escapes, free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago. When Alice escapes, something escapes with...
Ayesha at last
Jalaluddin, Uzma
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...
Demon Copperhead : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION A New York Times "Ten Best Books of the Year" * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller * An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post Bestseller...
Captains courageous
Kipling, Rudyard
Harvey Cheyne is the over-indulged son of a millionaire. When he falls overboard from an ocean liner her is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and, initially against his will, joins the crew of the We're Here for a summer. Through the medium of an exciting adventure story, Captain'sCourageous (1897)...
Babbitt
Lewis, Sinclair
1919. Lewis, was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Possibly the greatest satirist of his age, Lewis wrote novels that present a devastating picture of middle-class American life in the 1920s. Although he ridiculed the values, the lifestyles, and even the speech of his...
The call of the wild
London, Jack
Commonly considered to be Jack London's tour de force, The Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck, a domesticated dog ripped from a comfortable life when he is stolen from his home on a California ranch. Sold to a pair of men in Canada, Buck is trained as a sled dog in cold wilderness of the...
Northanger Abbey
McDermid, Val
The internationally bestselling crime writer "offers a canny new twist on Jane Austen's early novel . . . a reimagined delight for Austen fans" (Booklist).   A homeschooled minister's daughter in the quaint, sheltered Piddle Valley in...
Moby Dick, or, The whale
Melville, Herman
"As a revelation of human destiny it is too deep even for sorrow", was how D.H. Lawrence characterized MOBY-DICK. Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, this great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul is the ultimate achievement of that...
Tropic of Capricorn
Miller, Henry
Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn’s ethnic neighborhoods and Miller’s...
Circe : a novel
Miller, Madeline
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,...
Sula
Morrison, Toni
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom--a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma's girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear...
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
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
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) When it was published in 1955, "Lolita" immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as...
Slaughterhouse-five : or the children's crusade : a duty-dance with death
North, Ryan
An American classic and one of the world's seminal antiwar books, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is faithfully presented in graphic novel form for the first time from Eisner Award-winning writer Ryan North (How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler) and Eisner...
The things they carried : a work of fiction
O'Brien, Tim
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of...
The bell jar
Plath, Sylvia.
The Bell Jaris a classic of American literature.  Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963--only a month before the author's suicide--Sylvia Plath's harrowing autobiographical novel traces a young woman's descent into an emotional breakdown.  The brilliant and disturbing...
All quiet on the western front
Remarque, Erich Maria
Now repackaged--the timeless classic of World War I Germany that speaks to generation after generation.
The plot against America
Roth, Philip.
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly...
Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J. D.
Home fire : [a novel]
Shamsie, Kamila
"Ingenious... Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I've read in a novel this century." --The New York Times WINNER OF THE 2018 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE 2019 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLISTED FOR...
Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
This series of beautifully packaged and affordably priced editions of classic works of literature from all over the world.encompasses a variety of periods, themes, and authors.
A thousand acres
Smiley, Jane.
A thousand acres, a piece of land of almost mythic proportions. Upon this fertile, nourishing earth, Jane Smiley has set her rich, breathtakingly dramatic novel of an American family whose wealth cannot stay the hand of tragedy. It is the intense, compelling story of a father and his daughters, of...
Tomorrow will be better
Smith, Betty
The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spark, Muriel.
The critically acclaimed story of an independent-minded Scottish schoolteacher returns in a new edition. Includes an updated author biography and a history of the book's publications. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Of mice and men
Steinbeck, John
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression, in a deluxe centennial edition   Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck's tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America's most widely read and taught...
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
Since its publication in 1897, Dracula has enthralled generation after generation of readers with the same spellbinding power with which Count Dracula enthralls his victims. Though Bram Stoker did not invent vampires, and in fact based his character's life-in-death on extensive research in...
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
  Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and...
Vanity fair
Thackeray, William Makepeace
A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is...
War and peace
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit....
A confederacy of dunces
Toole, John Kennedy
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,...
The adventures of Tom Sawyer
Twain, Mark
Mark Twain's hymn to the secure and fantastic world of boyhood and adventure From the famous episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain...
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea
Verne, Jules
Trapped aboard a fantastic submarine with a mad sea captain, a French professor and his companions come face to face with exotic ocean creatures and strange, forbidden sights hidden from the world above. This is the classic deep sea adventure from the world's first and best science-fiction author.
Hocus pocus
Vonnegut, Kurt.
Hocus Pocus is the fictional autobiography of a West Point graduate who was in charge of the humiliating evacuation of U.S. personnel from the Saigon rooftops at the close of the Vietnam War. Returning home from the war, he unknowingly fathered an illegitimate son. In 2001, the son begins a search...
Ethan Frome
Wharton, Edith
Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a...
The picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde, Oscar
This Norton Critical Edition is the only edition available that includes both the 1890 Lippincott's and the 1891 book versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray, allowing students to compare the two published versions with the editorial guidance of Michael Patrick Gillespie.
Frankissstein : a love story
Winterson, Jeanette
Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love...
Native son
Wright, Richard
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels "If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son." - Henry Louis Gates Jr. "The most powerful American novel to...
The story of Edgar Sawtelle : a novel
Wroblewski, David.
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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