Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and the corrupting power of money.

From the Publisher: Young Major Heyward is assigned to escort Cora and Alice Munro through the dangerous frontier wilderness and deliver them safely to their father at Fort William Henry. But their guide, the evil Magua, leads the two women and their escorts into a trap. The frontiersman Hawkeye and his Mohican companions set out to rescue the kidnapped women, but the sly and clever Magua is the most murderous of enemies. To help students experience...

Five daughters and no inheritance: what can a mother do but find them rich husbands? Jane seems willing, but headstrong Lizzy actually turns down a perfectly eligible suitor. And then that proud odious Mr. Darcy starts to interfere. Jane Austen's novel wittily explores the competing demands of sex, class, sense and money on spirited but vulnerable young women.

"James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and...

Retells the adventures of the orphan boy who is forced to practice thievery and live a life of crime in nineteenth-century London.

Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters. Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee...

From the Publisher: Against the wishes of his widowed mother, young Henry Fleming enlists to fight for the Union in the Civil War. As he first travels from his New York farm to Washington, D.C. and then to a winter campsite in Virginia, he romanticizes battle and anticipates gaining glory. However, when Henry finally sees combat, he is terrified and horrified. He reacts in varying ways to war's intense psychological and physical stress. Largely, he...

The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the...

From the Back Cover: When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents' farm, he doesn't know what to expect. The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed-marooned-blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don't speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited-and eager for Jim to teach her English....

Goofy bonds with his teenage son, Max, on a cross-country road trip. But en route to the ol' fishing hole, they find themselves up to their floppy ears in misadventure! Will Max learn there's nothing wrong with taking after dear old dad--even if he is a little goofy?