Everyman's Library CLASSICS – serie

Middlemarch- A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Published in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith’s celebrated defence of free market economics is notable also as one of the Enlightenment’s most eloquent testaments to the sanctity of the individual in his relations to the state.

Describing his collection of Essays as ‘a book consubstantial with its author’, Montaigne identified both the power and the charm of a work which introduces us to one of the most attractive figures in European literature. A humanist, a sceptic, an acute observer of himself and others, he reflects the great themes of existence through the prism of his own self-consciousness. Apparent in every line he wrote, his virtues of tolerance, moderation and disinterested inquiry amount to an undeclared manifesto for the Enlightenment, whose prophet he is. This complete edition of his works supplements the Essays with travel diaries and letters, thereby completing the portrait of a true Renaissance man.

The name of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-1798), in now synonymous with amorous exploits, and there are plenty of these, vividly narrated, in him memoirs. But Casanova was not just an energetic lover. In his time he was diplomat, business man, trainee priest, traveller, prisoner, magician, confidence trickster, gambler, professional entertainer and chalatan. He financed business projects, organised lotteries, wrote opera libretti and dabbled in high politics. Above all he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance and subtlety who left behind him what is probably the most remarkable confession ever written. Casanova was a Venetian who explored to the full all the possibilities 18th century Venice offered by way of love and profit before being imprisoned, escaping from gaol, and fleeing from the city to begin travels which took him across Europe. In Moscow and London, Berlin and Constantinople, he met the famous men and women of the time - Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Louis XV, Rousseau - and recorded his encounters for the memoirs he wrote in retirement at the end of his life. These memoirs are by turns subtle, touching, thrilling, wonderfully comic and quite irresistible. Although the present edition includes one third of Casanova's enormous (though unfinished) book, it contains all his major adventures and all is greatest affairs of the heart. 'Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th century Europe. he ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace.' - V S PRITCHETT

This is a three-volume boxed set of Tolstoy's historical chronicle of Russia's struggle with Napoleon. The novel is an affirmation of life itself, focusing on the lives of individuals and the physical reality of human experience and its bewildering complexity.

This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done '- the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, illuminated by Dickens' lively comedy

On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the cellars of the Chateau d'If, an impregnable sea fortress in which he is imprisoned indefinitely. Escaping from the chateau by a series of daring manoeuvres, he unearths a great treasure on the island of Monte Cristo, buried there by a former fellow prisoner who bequeaths to him the secret of its whereabouts. Thus armed with unimaginable wealth and embittered by his long imprisonment, he resolves to devote his life to tracking down and punishing those responsible. This classic nineteenth-century translation has been revised and updated by Peter Washington, with an introduction by award-winning novelist Umberto Eco.

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labour, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.

Benjamin Franklin’s account of his rise from poverty and obscurity to affluence and fame is a self-portrait of a quintessential American which has charmed every generation of readers since it first appeared in 1791. Begun as a collection of anecdotes for his son, the memoir grew into a history of his remarkable achievements in the literary, scientific and political realms. A printer, inventor, scientist, diplomat and statesman, Franklin was also a brilliant writer whose wit and wisdom shine on every page. Franklin was a remarkably prolific author, well known in his lifetime for his humorous, philosophical, parodic and satirical writings, and for the parables and maxims which he published under an astonishing number of pen names, including Poor Richard, the Busy-Body, and Silence Dogood. This Everyman edition contains a varied selection of these, including 'The Kite Experiment', 'A Parable Against Persecution', 'Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind', 'Rules for Making Oneself a Disagreeable Companion' and 'The Way to Wealth'.

Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.

ON WAR is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work's first appearance in 1832 it has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soilders statemen, and intellectuals from Marx and Bismarck to Raymond Aron.

In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired. Few readers can fail to be touched by David's fate, and fewer still to be delighted by his story. The cruel Murdstone, the feckless Micawber, the unctuous and sinister Uriah Heep, and David Copperfield himself, into whose portrait Dickens puts so much of his own early life, form a central part of our literary legacy.This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.

Although Plato's celebrated work of philosophy describes a society which to some seems the ideal human community and to others like a totalitarian nightmare, it also raises enduring questions about politics, art, education and the general conduct of life.

In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion.

Tolstoy is said to have called Les Miserables the greatest novel ever written, and it exerted a powerful influence on the creation of War and Peace. At one level a detective story in which the relentless Inspector Javert obsessively pursues the escaped convict Jean Valjean, culminating in a dramatic chase through the sewers of Paris, at another level Hugo's masterpiece is a drama of crime, punishment and rehabilitation set against a panoramic description of French society in the years after Napoleon's fall from power. But this book is also about the metaphysical struggle between good and evil in the soul of every man and every community. Coloured by Hugo's distinctive philosophy, it is a plea for social justice, political enlightenment and personal charity which continues to speak with the undiminished authority more than a century after its first appearance.

A brilliant short novel based on Tolstoy's early life as a soldier in the Caucusus, THE COSSACKS has all the energy and poetry of youth while at the same time foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy's later years. A young officer finds himself living among tribesmen on the borders of southern Russia. In depicting his experience, Tolstoy explores the birth and death of love, the transience of life, the love of honour and the pain of war, all portrayed amidst the wild and magnificent landscape of the mountains and described in exquisite detail.

A dazzling collection of early stories and later fragments which throw an entirely new light on Jane Austen. In particular, they reveal a precociously brilliant genius with a talent for broad comedy and even farce. Most of the pieces in this collection are very funny indeed, and several - including the novella LADY SUSAN and the unfinished novel SANDITION are also neglected masterpieces. Other material includes the celebrated HISTORY OF ENGLAND, poems, prayers, the Plan of a Novel, etc. The volume is arranged in two parts, with the mature stories in Part 1 edited for easy reading, and the juvenilia collected by Austen herself presented exactly as she wrote them in Part 2. It includes everything she wrote apart from letters and the six famous novels, and is the final volume in the complete Everyman edition of her works now available in seven uniform volumes.

One of the founding texts of Western literature, the Metamorphoses is nevertheless anything but earnest or off-putting. Ovid’s sequence of fifteen witty and playful poems sketches the history of the world from its creation to the poet’s own time through a series of transformation myths in which gods and goddesses succumb to all-too-human passions, not least in the matter of love. Frequently translated, imitated and paraphrased.

Born in Florence in 1469, Niccolo Machiavelli was one of the principal secretaries to the Signoria at Florence and undertook diplomatic missions to various courts, before his imprisonment and exile. To quote his own words, this book discusses "what a principality is, what kinds there are, how they can be acquired, how they can be kept and why they are lost". The book was written at a crisis when Machiavelli considered the case of Italy so desperate that it could hope for salvation only by the intervention of a powerful despot. The significance of this work today, is that it marks a stage in the development of the scientific method, whether in statecraft, or in general political analysis.

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the worshipper and frequenter of the great men of his time, the 'divine' Michelangelo, who came to his studio, the 'marvellous' Titian (the adjectives are Cellini's ). He loathed the sculptor Torregiano because he had broken Michelangelo's nose.His autobiography gives a quite extraordinarily vivid account of daily life in Renaissance Florence and Rome, its studios, its taverns, its violence, his loves, the kings, cardinals and popes who commission his works. At 27 he helps direct the defence of the castello San Angelo; his account of his imprisonment there under a mad castellan (who thought he was a bat), his escape by an improvised rope, his recapture, his confinement in 'a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms' is a chapter of adventure equal to any in fact or fiction. Later he describes burning all his furniture to achieve sufficient heat to cast of one of his most famous works, Perseus and the Head of Medusa. Cellini's Life was translated by Goethe into German. The Everyman translation by Anne Macdonell (1903) is widely recognised as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.

Tacitus was the greatest historian of the Roman empire. Born in about AD 55, he served as administrator and leading senator. This career gave him an intimate view of the empire at its highest levels, experience brought to bear on his writing.His major works are the Annals and the Histories, both of which have come down to us incomplete. Between them, they cover a period of about 80 years, from the death of the first emperor, Augustus, to the death of Domitian in 96AD. In addition, Tacitus also composed two short historical books or essays, the Agricola (about his father-in-law, a distinguished provincial governor) and the Germania, an account of the tribes beyond the Rhine.Tacitus is a brilliant narrator and master stylist who had ample material for his story in the dramatic, violent and often bloody events of the first century. His portraits - especially those of Tiberius, Nero, and Nero's immediate circle - are unforgettable, his scene-setting masterly, his psychological analysis as acute as any novelist. He is also a fierce critic of the decadence and corruption which marked struggles for the imperial succession. As Robin Lane Fox writes in his brilliant introduction, 'Above all Tacitus was supremely wary of the distortions and "spin" of official announcements. He had no illusions about the capacities of presidential, one-man rule.' Napoleon disliked him, not surprisingly.Everyman reprints the classic translation by A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, with extensive notes considerably revised and updated by Dr Eleanor Cowan.

These brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-cass people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters.Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Summer, also set in rural New England, is often considered a companion to Ethan Frome - Wharton herself called it 'the hot Ethan' - in its portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening. Bunner Sisters takes place in the narrow, dusty streets of late-nineteenth-century New York, where the constrained but peaceful lives of two spinster shopkeepers are shattered when they meet a man who becomes the unworthy focus of all their pent-up hopes.All three of these novellas feature realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured, and together they provide a superb introduction to the shorter fiction of one of America's greatest writers.

Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in 1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17 of them in China. He isone of the few early adventurers whose name nearly everyone knows. His book was one of the best-loved works of the Middle Ages, and has remained popular ever since. At a time when China is again assuming global importance, his account of China under the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan - the dazzlingly splendid capital in Beijing, the great southern metropolis of Hangzhou - is a classic reminder of the antiquity of Chinese power and civilization.Marco Polo also portrays countries and cities all along the trade route from the Mediterranean to Mongolia. He reminds us that Iraq's present suffering is not unique by relating the story of the attack on Baghdad by Mongol forces in 1258. He conveys the daunting prospect of the deserts of central Asia and the distant charms of Yunnan. And he reminds us of the huge merchant ships dominating China's trade with foreign countries, ships that far outstripped their European counterparts. He even writes about Japan, the first European to do so. His book was often thought of as a book of marvels, but one of its striking features to a contemporary reader is its clarity, realism and tolerance. As this new edition shows, he sometimes exaggerates, but his reputation for making things up is quite unfair, as Colin Thubron makes clear in his introduction. The original manuscript of Marco Polo's book is lost, and in the many later versions names and other details have become so garbled that it has been said that his itineraries are impossible to follow. This new Everyman edition shows this need not be so. It explains clearly all the references in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to south-east China. It also provides an up-to-date history of the book and the controversies surrounding it.

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way of Dostoevsky and Kakfa. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of satire and realism that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Some believe many parts of the tales are indebted to the influence of The Book of Good Love. Many notable writers such as Chaucer are said to have drawn inspiration from The Decameron

This book presents the story of Scrooge, a miser who becomes a different man when he is presented with visions of past, present and future by Marley's ghost.

In The Time Machine an inventor travels to the remote future where he finds both love and terror. The protagonist of The Invisible Man struggles to come to terms with his condition in a narrative which is by turns comic and tragic. The War of the Worlds imagines planetary conflict from an individual point of view. If these themes reveal the originality of Wells as a thinker, each story displays his skill as a novelist by the ways in which he anchors astonishing events in vivid everyday details of character and place.All three have spawned countless adaptations and imitations but Wells remains the greatest poet of science we have, an inexhaustible source for speculation about the nature of the future and the meaning of the present.