All Books

A tale of intrigue, deception, murder and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the rise and fall of an ambitious prince who cannot avoid facing the consequences of his dark past. Based on the historical figure of the nobleman Boris Godunov, who seized...
By: Alexander Pushkin

When an ageing, poverty-stricken nobleman decides to style himself “Don Quixote” and embark upon a series of daring endeavours, it is clear that his ability to distinguish between the fantasy world of literary romance and day-to-day reality has...
By: Miguel De Cervantes

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. Wandering through the snow-laden devastated streets of what once was a city, a soldier on the losing side has a parcel...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil : the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and...
By: Charles Baudelaire

Unsuccessful in his endeavours, the young and naive Peter Schlemihl seals a pact with the Devil in which he exchanges his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus, thereby gaining everlasting riches. But when he is ridiculed, persecuted and hated for...
By: Adelbert von Chamisso

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, The Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet , this...
By: Gustave Flaubert

After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and is at once confronted with the stark realities of life in the Russian...

First published in 1797, The Italian , with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance between Vincenzo di Vivaldi and Elena di Rosalba and lofty poetics of the sublime, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction. Enlisted by Vincenzo's mother...
By: Ann Radcliffe