Read to Learn! Classics for Teens and Adults

Learn something new by studying the classics and participating in our September SweetBean Challenge on Beanstack!

Updated August 27, 2024
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The call of the wild
London, Jack
Paper Book
Puffin Classics- the definitive collection of timeless stories, for every child Join Puffin in celebrating 120 years since Call of the Wild first published with this very special anniversary edition. To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing,...
David Copperfield
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
'The most perfect of all the Dickens novels' Virginia Woolf David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of...
Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless...
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...
The hobbit, or, There and back again
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Paper Book
The stirring adventure that begins The Lord of the Rings, the greatest fantasy epic of all time When Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves embark upon a dangerous quest to reclaim the hoard of gold stolen from them by the evil dragon Smaug, Gandalf the wizard suggests an...
The house of mirth
Wharton, Edith
Paper Book
A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century--now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan. Wharton's first literary...
If not, winter : fragments of Sappho
Sappho.
Paper Book
In this "gorgeous translation" (The New York Times), one of our most fearless and original poets provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia.  Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to...
Kidnapped
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paper Book
This is the story of sixteen-year-old David Balfour, an orphan, who after being kidnapped by his villainous uncle manages to escape and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Paper Book
"The Metamorphoses of Ovid offers to the modern world such a key to the literary and religious culture of the ancients that it becomes an important event when at last a good poet comes up with a translation into English verse." --John Crowe Ransom " . . . a charming and expert English...
Pride and prejudice
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners is one of the most universally loved and admired English novels of all time. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The Bennets are a family of...
Siddhartha : an Indian tale
Hesse, Hermann
Paper Book
A bold translation of Nobel Prize-winner Herman Hesse's most inspirational and beloved work, which was nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Hesse's famous and influential...
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
Paper Book
  In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the world's first novel, more than three centuries before Chaucer. The Heian era (794--1185) is recognized as one of the very greatest periods in Japanese literature,...
The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Shakespeare, William
Paper Book
The authoritative edition of Hamlet from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers. Hamlet is Shakespeare's most popular, and most puzzling, play. It follows the form of a "revenge tragedy," in...

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