Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised. "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be...

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction and one of H. G. Wells' most visionary novels. It recounts the harrowing ordeal of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rescued by a man named Montgomery, Prendick finds himself on an island belonging to Dr. Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London who was expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments. Prendick...

"The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons, Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through...

A colorful murder mystery in which a spirited young woman plays amateur sleuth aboard a luxury cruise ship to South Africa After young Anne Beddingfeld witnesses an accidental death in a London tube station--and the bizarre behavior of a man in a brown suit who flees the scene--she becomes convinced that foul play is at work. A woman is found murdered the next day and the police show no interest in Anne's theory that the two incidents are connected....

"Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, did more to change the style of fiction in English than any other writer of his time with his economical prose and terse, declarative sentences that conceal more than they reveal. In Our Time, published in 1925, was the collection that first drew the world's attention to Hemingway. Besides revealing his versatility as a writer and throwing fascinating light on the themes of his major...

"When Kate Chopin's classic was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her death, The Awakening is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement and a celebrated work of early feminist literature. Through careful, subtle changes of style, Chopin shows the transformation of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother, who...

John Dos Passos's second novel, Three Soldiers, was published in 1921 after many rejections from publishers and censorship squabbles. The novel, which was hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication, stands as one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. This anti-war novel focuses on three soldiers, Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted...

Unknown to most modern-day investors and traders who cherish Reminiscences of a Stock Operator as one of the most important investment books ever written, the material first appeared in the 1920s as a series of articles and illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post. Now, for the first time ever, this beloved classic is being made available in its original, illustrated format. You'll track the exploits of Jesse Livermore as he won and lost tens of...

In 813, Maurice Leblanc's epic tale, Arsène Lupin, master of disguise and celebrity thief, is framed in the murder of millionaire Rudolf Kesselbach, nicknamed alternatively the King of Diamonds and the Lord of the Cape. Lupin assumes the identity of the chief detective on the case in order to find the real murderer and, in the interest of France, find a secret parcel of documents that have the power to redraw the map of Europe. Lupin must use every...

"Her life was a bridge from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from the time-hallowed beauty and rigidity of a samurai household to the disorienting, forward-looking freedoms of the West." --Janice P. Nimura, from the foreword. This is the story of one woman's remarkable life successfully navigating two very different cultures--the first memoir of an Asian-American woman. Beautifully told, this immigrant's account of an unforgettable journey...