For its 800th anniversary, a new edition of one of democracy’s founding legal documents, with extensive new commentaryWrested by rebellious barons from a very reluctant King John, Magna Carta set out a series of rights and duties that have been appealed to, ignored, suppressed, and argued about ever since. Here, David Carpenter’s forceful new translation is accompanied by extensive commentary …
One of the great books of world literature–an unforgettable tale of jealousy, unrequited love, greed, and vengeance. Based on Viking Age poems and composed in thirteenth-century Iceland, The Saga of the Volsungs combines mythology, legend, and sheer human drama in telling of the heroic deeds of Sigurd the dragon slayer, who acquires runic knowledge from one of Odin’s …
A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s greatest literary treasures–as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled …
Nevill Coghill’s masterly and vivid modern English verse translation with all the vigor and poetry of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Middle EnglishIn The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion …
“On what slender threads do life and fortune hang”Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure …
Jane Austen: The Complete Works: Classics hardcover boxed set (Hardcover Classics)
Few novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social milieu with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, she painted vivid portraits of English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close. Each of these novels is a love story and a story about …
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authorsIn his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the …
A landmark American drama that inspired a classic film and a Broadway revival—featuring an introduction by David MametA blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, …
The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus
The heroic Greek dramas that have moved theatergoers and readers since the fifth century B.C.Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, the three plays that tell the story of the fated Theban royal family—Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus—are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. Robert Fagles’s authoritative and acclaimed translation conveys all of Sophocles’s …
The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
To celebrate the centennial of his birth, the collected plays of America’s greatest twentieth-century dramatist in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition In the history of postwar American art and politics, Arthur Miller casts a long shadow as a playwright of stunning range and power whose works held up a mirror to America and its shifting values. The Penguin Arthur …