Our hero confronts a large and varied cast, including Wackford Squeers, the fantastic ogre of a schoolmaster, and Vincent Crummles, the grandiloquent ham actor, on his comic and satirical adventures up and down the country. Punishing wickedness, befriending the helpless, strutting the stage, and falling in love, Nicholas shares some of his creator's energy and earnestness as he faces the pressing issues of early Victorian society. -provided by publisher....

"On board the 'Fidele', a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises--from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a 'cosmospolitan' gentleman. Making very little from his hoaxes, the pleasure of trickery seems an end in itself for this slippery conman. Is his chicanery merely intended...

After being kidnapped by his villainous uncle, sixteen-year-old David Balfour escapes and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule.

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...

Following both the adventures of Satan and the lives of Adam and Eve, this telling of key biblical stories is split into multiple books to form an epic poem. Beginning with Satan's promise to corrupt God's Earth, Milton tells the tale of how Satan entered the Garden of Eden and filled Adam and Eve's angelic existence with sin. Written in blank verse, this seventeenth-century English poem solidified Milton's reputation as one of the greatest poets...

Prince Myshkin, a good yet simple man, is out of place in the corrupt world created by Russia's ruling class.

A young man's quest for eternal youth and beauty ends in scandal, depravity and death. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The picture of Dorian Gray was a...