The Cliff

Collects brief fictional works and legends by the nineteenth-century New England literary master.

A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, which centres on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporal and psychological elements. To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little...

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....

The Pickwick Club was founded by the most learned minds in London for the purpose of making a scientific tour of the world. No sooner have the distinguished members begun their historic journey than they are set upon by a charming but notorious con man. So begins a series of hilarious misadventures that takes the incorrigibly innocent Pickwicks wandering around England, coming in contact with some of the most colorful and comical characters in all...

In Baroness Emma Orczy's 1905 novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel", the year is 1792 and the French Revolution is complete. People die by the guillotine every day, often unjustly. Stepping in to right these wrongs and rescue the innocent is the elusive "Scarlet Pimpernel", a mysterious agent named for the red flower that is his signature. Meanwhile, foppish Sir Percy Blakeney and his French actress wife Marguerite are having marital difficulties when Marguerite...

In 1845 Thoreau, disdainful of America's commercialism and industrialism, left his home town in Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a hut on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. This is his account of this experiment in solitary living.

One of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tells the tragic story of Raskolnikov-a talented former student whose warped philosophical outlook drives him to commit murder. Surprised by his sense of guilt and terrified of the consequences of his actions, Raskolnikov wanders through the slums of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg trying to escape the ever-suspicious Porfiry, the official investigating...

David Copperfield enjoys an idyllic life with his gentle, widowed mother and his loving nurse, Peggotty. Then tragedy strikes when Mr. Murdstone weds David's mother and drives her to an early grave. Despised by his stepfather, the boy is forced to live in misery and poverty until he runs away to throw himself upon the mercy of his eccentric aunt. Charles Dickens's classic tale of growing up.

An English astronomer, in company with an artilleryman, a country curate, and others, struggle to survive the invasion of Earth by Martians in 1894.

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.