The Tempest is a comedy that was written by William Shakespeare. The action centers around a sorcerer named Prospero, who is the rightful Duke of Milan, as he plans to restore his daughter's place in society through manipulation. Though The Tempest was listed as a comedy in Shakespeare's First Folio it is now often considered to be a tragicomedy. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is a delightful comic love story. The play begins with a shipwreck,...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the most popular comedies of the legendary playwright, William Shakespeare. The play revolves around Hermia and her best friend, Helena. Hermia runs away into the woods with her lover, Lysander, and Demetrius, the man of her father's choice, follows them. Helena follows Demetrius, as she is in love with him and wishes she could win his love. In the woods, they come across Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the...

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a...

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is a literary masterpiece that defies conventional description. Published in 1939, this enigmatic novel stands as one of the most complex and challenging works in the English language. Set in a dream-like landscape, Finnegans Wake delves into the subconscious mind, blurring the boundaries between reality and myth, language and music, past and present. At its heart lies the story of the mythical figure of HCE (Here Comes...

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, none more so than the "complicated"...

The life of a simple country girl in nineteenth-century England is destroyed by her father's determination to use her in order to regain the family's former social standing.

Hailed by Dostoyevsky as The final and greatest utterance of the human mind," Don Quixote constitutes a founding work of modern Western literature. Cervantes' masterpiece has been translated into more than sixty languages, and the novel's fantasy-driven "knight," Don Quixote, and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, rank among fiction's most recognized characters. Their adventures have been interpreted for film, opera, and ballet, and they head a cast...