"Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W.H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike...

"An orphan living on the dangerous London streets, Oliver has no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape" -- Amazon.com

Sherlock Holmes is asked to investigate the tale of a hound that haunts the lonely moors around the Baskervilles' ancestral home.

The plot of Washington Square has the simplicity of old-fashioned melodrama: a plain-looking, good-hearted young woman, the only child of a rich widower, is pursued by a charming but unscrupulous man who seeks the wealth she will presumably inherit. On this premise, Henry James constructed one of his most memorable novels, a story in which love is answered with betrayal and loyalty leads inexorably to despair.

Often referred to as a “father of science fiction”, H. G. Wells was one of the first authors to write a type of speculative fiction which referenced the advancements in science of his time. Characteristic of Wells’s work is their warning against the unintended consequences of technological development gone too far. First published in 1896, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” is the account of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who finds himself stranded...

The passionate attachment between a headstrong young girl and a foundling boy brought up by her father causes disaster for them and many others, even in the next generation.

Relates the incredible adventures of Professor William Waterman Sherman who in 1883 sets off in a balloon across the Pacific, survives the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, and is eventually picked up in the Atlantic.