OW Classics

In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death and corruption, featuring a host of colourful characters from lascivious...
By: Giovanni Boccaccio

Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and when her doctor, the well-meaning but awkward and unremarkable Charles Bovary, begins to pay her attention, she...
By: Gustave Flaubert

A glorious exercise in cheeky punmanship, The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders sees Jonathan Swift in fine form. Flying by the seat of his pants, the great author treats us to a condensed biography of his posterior, enlivened by some inspired wordplay....
By: Jonathan Swift

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey’s innovative, idio­syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism and aesthetic judgements, in a work strewn with examples ranging from...
By: Thomas de Quincey

Documenting the colourful escapades of the former gladiator Encolpius and his less than faithful lover Giton, the Satyricon plunges the reader into the lives of ordinary Roman citizens, vividly revealing the Empire’s seamy underbelly. A host of...
By: Petronius Arbiter

Following an incident at sea, fifty-year-old Captain Eugène Marius finds himself without employment or purpose in Marseille, paying fruitless daily visits to the port’s shipping offices. Consumed by guilt, spurned by his family and faced with the...
By: James Hanley

This is the first of three volumes collecting the complete plays of Luigi Pirandello, one of the foremost playwrights and fiction writers of the twentieth century, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Edited by actor and...
By: Luigi Pirandello

Fathers and Children , arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 – the controversial character of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist intent on rejecting all existing...
By: Ivan Turgenev

In Hard Times , Dickens illustrates the condition of England through his depiction of the fictional northern city of Coketown. Among its inhabitants are Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian headmaster who attempts to impose his rigid worldview on his...
By: Charles Dickens