"Like most boys, Tom Sawyer would rather play hooky than go to school. But Tom's lively imagination and thirst for adventure lead him into the most extraordinary situations, from a search for buried treasure to the accidental witness of a murder in a graveyard. All of his exploits -- tricking his pals into whitewashing a fence, sharing his medicine with the family cat, disrupting a church service with a pinching insect -- are flavored with the humor...

Raskolnikov commits murder. He then must deal both with the police, and his own guilty conscience. Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost...

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero.

"This ... is a new annotated translation ... in which Corngold follows the German text closely, never knowingly using a word that was not current in English at the time the novel was written. "Backgrounds and Contexts" contains letters and diary entries written by Goethe and Johann Christian Kestner, the husband of Charlotte Buff, as well as lampoons by Friedrich Nicolai and William Makepeace Thackeray, and excerpts from Goethe's Autobiography. 'Criticism'...