The mighty warrior Beowulf offers to help the King of the Danes in a quest to kill the monster Grendel and free his people from terror. After killing Grendel, Beowulf must also kill the monster's mother before he can return to his homeland, where he eventually becomes king. But he is called for a new adventure ... [4e de couverture]
FAIRY TALE & FANTASY A story of love and friendship about a fisherman who catches a mermaid. He lets her go because she promises to help him fish. Each day the mermaid appears and sings her song, so he falls in love with her. However, she cannot marry him until he has lost his human soul. Dossiers: Children’s Literature Aestheticism
Jane Austen's brilliant satire of the gothic novel. “If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” The most sprightly and satirical of Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey was written when the author was herself in her early twenties, and takes for its heroine seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a spirited young woman preoccupied with the pleasures of dressing, dancing, and reading sensational novels. When she visits Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of handsome Henry Tilney, Catherine’s taste in books comes back to haunt her. The rambling house, full of locked doors, and the family’s mysterious history give rise to delightfully dreadful suspicions, and finally only Catherine’s sweet nature and good humor triumph over her susceptibility. A sly commentary on the power of literature as well as a cautionary tale about the perils of naïveté, Northanger Abbey is a fresh and funny tale of one young woman receiving, as Margaret Drabble reveals in her illuminating introduction, “intensive instruction in the ways of the world.” With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble and an Afterword by Stephanie Laurens
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.
Doctor Faustus is the most brilliant scholar of his day. He has studied hard and is now master of all areas of learning. However, he wants something more, so he enters into an agreement with the Devil. He agrees to sell his soul in return for twenty-four years of knowledge, power and riches, which only brings him despair and terror as he realises the full implication of his impulsive action.