Literature 530

Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as much as four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is the world's oldest epic, predating Homer by many centuries. The story tells of...

The personal and lifelong journey of an ordinary couple from rural Kentucky who thought they were going on just your ordinary missionary pilgrimage, but discovered it would be anything but. After spending...

Shakespeare's bleakest and profoundest tragedy, a searing dramatization of humankind at the edge of apocalypse that explores the family and the nature of being with passion, poetry, and dark humor. Edited...

The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional...

Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's collaboration on this new translation combines the strengths that have recently distinguished both as translators of Greek tragedy: expert knowledge of the Greek and...

Molière understood profoundly what makes us noble, pathetic, outrageous and funny, and in his splendid comedies satirized human folly to perfection. One of the best of his plays – and one of the greatest...

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's The Odyssey is the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies,...

A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating...

Caustic and hilarious, Voltaire's Candide has ranked as one of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759. It concerns the adventures of the youthful Candide, disciple of Dr. Pangloss,...

This luminous anthology brings together great poets from around the world whose work transcends culture and time. Their words reach past the outer divisions to the universal currents of love and revelation...

The basic principles involved in communicating ideas on paper are carefully reviewed for the aspiring writer as well as the student. This is one of the few English essay writing books that is actually...

Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a "strong man" of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual...

Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well. Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms...

Perhaps the most stirring masterpiece from the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy was an astonishing achievement that places the author among the ranks of the great epic poets of the classical...

A sweeping tale of abduction, battle, and courtship played out in a universe of deities and demons, The Ramayana is familiar to virtually every Indian. Although the Sanskrit original was composed by Valmiki...

This collection of contemporary multi-cultural fiction includes stories by: Bessie Head Charles Mungoshi Ngugi wa Thiong'o Wang Anyi Ding Ling Wang Meng Chen Rong Lu Wenfu Anita Desai Mahasweta Devi Ruth...

With his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote sets off on picaresque adventures in 16th-century Spain, in one of the treasures of Western literature, both an immoral satire and a biting portrayal...

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo...

Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the world's greatest novelists and the Crime and Punishment novel is one of his greatest achievements. When Raskolnikov believes he is above the law, he murders an old woman...

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."

Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six...

An explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a clandestine trip to Copenhagen...