Written in just fifty-two days in the year 1839, "The Charterhouse of Parma" has since become known as Stendhal's finest work. Evidence of haste is infrequently apparent in this remarkable story, which follows the eventful life of the young Italian nobleman Fabrizio del Dongo. From his childhood in the family castle by Lake Como to the battlefields of Waterloo, Fabrizio proves himself charmingly headstrong and painfully naïve. Upon returning injured...

The first novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart, America's queen of crime This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. So says Rachel Innes, the spinster in question and one of the most remarkable heroines in American...

Uncovering a governmental conspiracy to frame a friend for murder puts David Balfour on the run and striving to protect the woman he's come to love. Released with the title David Balfour when originally released in the United States, Catriona is Robert Louis Stevenson's follow-up to Kidnapped. David Balfour, hero of both books, is made a target by his willingness to testify in favor of a friend falsely accused of murder. His stubborn sense of justice...

A Century of Dishonor (1884) is a work of nonfiction by Helen Hunt Jackson. Inspired by a speech given by Ponca chief Standing Bear in Boston, A Century of Dishonor attempts to reckon with the genocide and displacement of Native Americans and the passage of Indian Appropriations Act of 1871. At her own expense, Hunt Jackson sent copies of the book to every member of Congress, hoping to convince them to amend official government policies and to end...

Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential figures of the 18th century. His political philosophy has been pointed to as a major contributing factor in causing the French Revolution. Social and economic inequality has been a pervasive element of human existence for the entirety of recorded history. The causes of this inequality are principal to the discussion of political, legal, and economic theory. Rousseau acknowledges...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. In Alexander, Theodore Ayrault Dodge lays out a detailed account of Alexander's spectacular life and supplies a vivid reconstruction of all of the major battles Alexander fought in his short but successful march of conquest. Dodge amply illustrates through this detailed history of the nature of warfare in the ancient world why both his contemporaries and later historians...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.Although most people do not think of Herman Melville as a particularly funny writer, his "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and The Confidence Man have kept readers laughing for a century and a half. "Bartleby" is a simultaneously accurate and absurd depiction of life in a Wall Street office in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the gentle comedy of a boss' helpless...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. In 1885, Elizabeth ("Libbie") Custer published her memoir about her marriage to General George Armstrong Custer, the most controversial military officer of the nineteenth century. Set at Fort Lincoln, Dakota Territory, Boots and Saddles offers a singular historical view of the frontier West and the Plains Wars. Women who followed the army endured both boredom and...

In De Anima, Aristotle seeks to uncover what separates the living from the dead. He steers a course between two extremes, with all of reality as nothing more than atoms on one side and the mind as independent from the body on the other side. Ultimately, he invents a third kind of position that views mental phenomena to be thoroughly dependent on, though not reducible to, physical events.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Niccolò Machiavelli warns potential revolutionaries to expel the privileged elites of the old regime or risk certain doom. In the Discourses, he applied himself to the enduring problems of popular government, struggling to devise ways government by the people might survive in the modern world and how the transition from monarchy to republic might be managed. Political...