In Charles Dickens' "Hard Times," the industrial landscape of Coketown serves as a bleak backdrop to a tale that explores the harsh realities of the 19th-century British society, a world driven by utilitarianism and the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. The novel is a powerful narrative that delves into the lives of the characters living in this grim, factory-dominated town. The story is centered around two contrasting characters: Thomas...

Nickleby is a young man of nineteen, handsome and hot-headed, devoted to his sister Kate and his parents. Following the death of Nicholas's father, they find themselves penniless and travel to London to seek help from his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a heartless, cunning rogue. He grudgingly finds employment for Nicholas in Dotheby Hall, a school in Yorkshire run by the brutal Mr. and Mrs. Wackford Squeers. Appalled at the condition and treatment of the...

A classic novel based on Dickens' personal experiences, it delineates the sufferings and sentiments of orphans and abandoned children through the outstandingly portrayed character of David. The novel shows Dickens incredible knack of uniting humor with pathos. The story ponders on the themes of self-exploitation, hypocrisy, sexual degradation, and fraud. Wondrously realistic masterpiece! - From cover.

[This book is] a simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger ... Uniquely ... African, at the same time it reveals [the author's] ... awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.-Back cover.

If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript. Thirty-year-old Josef K., a financial officer in a European city bank, is suddenly arrested....

From the Publisher: A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947-and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.

"The novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain's heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion....

One of the greatest examples of war journalism ever written, Michael Herr's collection of dispatches from the front lines of the Vietnam War reveal with shattering impact how that war differed from any combat theatre fought before. Herr's clearheaded yet unsparing retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, capturing the unique flavor of the time and place and finding clarity in one of the most incomprehensible events...