Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, editor, and journalist whose poems, articles, short stories, and novels had a single focus: equality for women. Although best known for "The Yellow Wall-Paper," her spine-chilling takedown of the "rest cure" prescribed for postpartum depression, Gilman spent her life advocating for a woman's right to an education, to creative self-expression and economic self-sufficiency, and an end to the consumerism that blinded...

The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the...

Haunting readers since its first publication in 1911, the classic story of the disfigured Erik who haunts the Paris Opera House and secretly trains singer Christine Daa, leading to an obsessive love and pattern of fear and violence, remains a riveting journey into the darkest regions of the human heart. This updated edition features a new introduction to the gothic horror classic.

"Search for fortune on the high seas with this abridged retelling of Treasure Island, part of the bestselling Classic Starts® series that has sold more than 8 million copies! After Jim Hawkins finds the map to a mysterious treasure, he sets sail in search of the fortune. Little does he realize he s boarded a pirate ship, and that surprises and danger await him . . . including a meeting with the unforgettable Long John Silver! This abridged retelling...

Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...

"Although Gabriel Oak loves the proud Bathsheba Everdene, she willfully becomes involved with two other unsuitable men, with tragic consequences." "Based on the author's firsthand knowledge of the attitudes, habits, and idiosyncrasies of rural men and women, this is Hardy's best-loved and most humorous novel."