Madame Bovary is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857,...

Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, and is one of the longest novels in the English language. Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful and virtuous young lady whose family has become wealthy only recently and now desires to become part of the aristocracy. Their original plan was to concentrate the wealth and lands of the Harlowes into the possession of Clarissa's...

With two sons of her own and twelve orphan boys filling the informal school at Plumfield, Jo March couldn't be happier. But boys have a habit of getting into scrapes, even when they are being cared for by the warm and affectionate March family.

"I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain." In this intriguing literary fragment-published seventeen years after Bram Stoker's most famous novel-an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But...

George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against...

He is a 23-year-old bounty hunter, known for his outstanding fire-based abilities and an excellent track record. One day, he took on a mission to explore a zombie-infested area, aiming to find a mysterious energy source. However, the mission turned into a disaster when the mysterious energy erupted, causing a devastating explosion. Directly hit by a black object, he was unexpectedly reborn in another world.The Tianxing Empire, one of the three main...

Cousin Bette (1846) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Part of Balzac's La Comédie humaine sequence, the novel is recognized as being the author's last fully-realized work, and features several characters who appear elsewhere throughout his legendary series. It has inspired several film and television adaptations, as well as earned comparisons to Shakespeare's Othello and Tolstoy's War and Peace. The novel focuses on the life and exploits...

First published in England in 1791 and the United States in 1794, Susanna Rowson's "Charlotte Temple" was America's first best-selling novel. The story is an example of the seduction novel genre, which was wildly popular in early American literature and focuses on the dangers to young ladies of being seduced by unscrupulous men. In Rowson's novel, the main character is Charlotte Temple, a lovely and naïve young British girl who falls for the overwhelming...

"The Greek Interpreter", one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”. The story was originally serialised in Strand Magazine in 1893. This story introduces Holmes's elder brother Mycroft. Doyle ranked "The Greek Interpreter" seventeenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. On a summer evening, while engaged...

Euripides turned to playwriting at a young age, achieving his first victory in the Athens' City Dionysia dramatic competitions in 441 BC. He would be awarded this honor three more times in his life, and once more posthumously. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of classical decorum and rules. In 408 BC, Euripides left war-torn Athens for Macedonia, upon the invitation of King Archelaus, and there he spent his last...