The Cliff

Published in 1880, Ben-Hur is a fictionalization of the events of Christ's life, beginning with the Nativity and ending with the Crucifixion. The story uses a parallel structure to simultaneously explore the life of Judah Ben-Hur, a Hebrew prince who lived in the time of Christ. This remarkable work of historical fiction reshaped the landscape of American popular literature and prompted millions of readers to reevaluate their personal views of Christianity....

        
"        Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
        Of all of Dickens's novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that "combines intellectual authority with addictive readability"...

Written in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's experimental and brilliant third novel. The narrative concerns the annual visits by the Ramsay family to their summer home in the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Once again employing her unique, stream-of-consciousness style of writing, Woolf creates a fascinating and complex novel where the point of view of the narration switches between the various Ramsay family members and their...

When orphaned, eleven-year-old Pollyanna comes to live with austere and wealthy Aunt Polly, her philosophy of gladness brings happiness to her aunt and other unhappy members of the community.

H.G. Wells' original masterpiece now includes a newly established text, a full biographical essay on the author, a list of further reading, and detailed notes. Famous for the mistaken panic that ensued from Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization, "The War of the Worlds" remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works.

Huxley's bleak future prophesized in Brave New World was a capitalist civilization which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years ahead, in "this year of stability, A.F. 632"—the A.F. standing for After Ford, meaning the godlike Henry Ford.

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When a Swiss couple and their four sons are shipwrecked on an isolated island, they adapt to their "New Switzerland" using many imaginative methods of farming and animal taming.