The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

Jennie Gerhardt (1911) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Controversial for its honest depiction of work, desire, and urban life, Jennie Gerhardt has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Originally titled The Transgressor, the novel was shelved by Dreiser following a nervous breakdown in 1903. Controversial upon publication, Jennie Gerhardt has been largely...

If you have ever come across the word "rogue" before, chances are you have either been playing video games, perused old X-Men comics or have overheard it as part of your aunt's vocabulary, while she was being cajoled over the phone by that slick, dapper mediterranean gentleman she met on her holiday in Barcelona. Shockingly, and somewhat regrettably, Wilkie Collins is less romantically inclined and resorts to using the word in its traditional sense...

Royal Highness (German: Königliche Hoheit) is a 1909 novel by Thomas Mann. It is Mann's second novel and was written between the summer of 1906 and February 1909. Royal Highness is characterized by its fairytale-like qualities and was modeled after Mann's own romance and marriage to Katia Mann in February 1905. First published in 1909 in Die neue Rundschau, the novel was met with great enthusiasm from the public. However, it was met with a more divided...

Haiti, under the rule of Papa Doc and his menacing paramilitary, the Tontons Macoute, has long been abandoned by tourists. Now it is home to corrupt capitalists, foreign ambassadors and their lonely wives-and a small group of enterprising strangers rocking into port on the Dutch cargo ship, Medea: a well-meaning pair of Americans claiming to bring vegetarianism to the natives; a former jungle fighter in World War II Burma and current confidence man;...

"The Man Who Would be King and Other Stories" is a classic collection of some of the most loved short stories of Rudyard Kipling, one of the most important and accomplished English authors of the twentieth century. The youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature at age 42 in 1907, Kipling, who was born in India in 1865, captured in his writing the British Empire in all of its glory and contradiction in unparalleled detail and nuance. Contained...

The moving story of a wealthy English clan and the infidelities and intrigues threatening to tear one marriage apart.
In Chancery begins where The Man of Property—and its subsequent interlude—left off, pursuing Soames and Irene Forsyte across Edwardian England, meanwhile highlighting the failing marriage of Soames’s sister, Winifred. Galsworthy juxtaposes the two relationships while bringing more members...

Horror was my familiar.
Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural.

The tale...

A decade after their wild boat ride adventure on the Thames river, J, Harris, and George reunite for another vacation. Older, richer, and fatter, but not wiser, the three men stumble through mishaps and surprises as they journey to Germany. First saying their goodbyes, J and Harris seek the approval of their wives, worried about leaving their kids. Their wives are supportive, secretly considering their husbands' trip from home as a vacation for themselves...

First published in English in 1927, "Elmer Gantry" is Sinclair Lewis' novel which satirizes the Christian fundamentalist and evangelistic movements of the early part of the 20th century. From the 17th century onward there have been a number of efforts to reassert the influence of Christianity on social, cultural, and political life. In America, Christian Revivalism, as it is often referred to, has come in four waves, or "Great Awakenings" starting...