The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had...

"Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, inspiring artists and writers from Titian to Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as you've never read them before--sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious--from the fall of Troy to birth of the minotaur, and many others that only appear in the Metamorphoses. Connected together by the immutable laws of change and metamorphosis,...

"Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best -- the meanest, dirtiest, most feared crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld. Their glory days long past, the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk - or a combination of the three. Then an ex-bandmate turns up at Clay's door with a plea for help. His daughter Rose is trapped in a city besieged by an enemy one hundred thousand strong and hungry for blood. Rescuing Rose is the...

One of the greatest epic novels in history, Les Misérables is the moving story of Jean Valjean's struggle for redemption and his lifelong pursuit by Javert, a police detective determined to return Valjean to chains. Always one step ahead of Javert, Valjean encounters the tragic Fantine, and ultimately rescues Fantine's daughter, Cosette, from her wretched life with the Thénadiers, treating the child as his own as she comes of age in pre-revolutionary...

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution, Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence...

The Iliad: Join Achilles at the Gates of Troy as he slays Hector to Avenge the death of Patroclus. Here is a story of love and war, hope and despair, and honor and glory. The recent major motion picture Helen of Troy starring Brad Pitt proves that this epic is as relevant today as it was twenty five hundred years ago when it was first written. So journey back to the Trojan War with Homer and relive the grandest adventure of all times. The Odyssey:...

The story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Etched in the wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform on clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh stands as the earliest classic of world literature. Its earliest surviving fragments date back to the eighteenth century BC, more than 3,700 years ago. In The Buried Book, David Damrosch tells the story of George Smith, a self-taught linguist, who one momentous afternoon in 1872 was working at the British Museum, going through a pile of Layard's clay tablets,...

Rags is a thief-an excellent one. He's stolen into nobles' coffers, picked soldiers' pockets, and even liberated a ring or two off the fingers of passersby. Until he's caught by the Queensguard and forced to find an ancient fae relic for a sadistic royal sorcerer. But Rags could never have guessed this "relic" would actually be a fae himself-a distractingly handsome, annoyingly perfect, ancient fae prince called Shining Talon. Good thing Rags can...

Presents an English translation of the nineteenth-century French novel about Jean Valjean, a peasant who is released from prison, where he spent nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family, only to find himself threatened by people and events from his past.