Everyman's Library CLASSICS

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons Dangereuses one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature.

Conrad's foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest novel, Nostromo - though over one hundred years old - says as much about today's Latin America as any of the finest recent accounts of that region's turbulent political life. Insistently dramatic in its storytelling, spectacular in its recreation of the subtropical landscape, this picture of an insurrectionary society and the opportunities it provides for moral corruption gleams on every page with its author's dry, undeceived, impeccable intelligence.

Robinson Crusoe runs away to sea, is wrecked, and leads a solitary existence on an uninhabited island near the Orinoco river for twenty-four years. He finds consolation in the Bible and after a while meets another human, a young native whom he saves from death and calls Man Friday, because he met him on a Friday.

Defoe based his story on the adventures of Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk. Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is one of the first novels in the English language and is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. It is one of the most widely read books in history, spawning numerous sequels and adaptations for stage, film, and television.

Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that followed in the wake of these two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought; and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activists she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. The present edition contains a substantial essay by a major scholar to celebrate the bicentenary of publication in 1792.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161 and Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. With a profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus provides insights, wisdom, and practical guidance on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity to interacting with others. Consequently, the Meditations have become required reading for statesmen and philosophers alike, while generations of ordinary readers have responded to the straightforward intimacy of his style.

Comprises such sacred books of India as the hymns of the "Rig-Veda", the world's first recorded poems, the stirring pantheistic speculations of the "Upanishads" and the "Bhagavad-Gita", a cosmic drama of God's self-revelation in human history, on the field of human battle.

Despised by many contemporaries as a Cockney versifier, in our own time Keats has outstripped more famous colleagues in public esteem. While Byron and Shelley languish in the academy, Keats is now regarded as the quintessential English Romantic poet: lyrical, passionate, tender, dreamy, sensuous. The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion and – above all – the five great Odes represent the pinnacle of poetic achievement in English. The Everyman edition of the poems presents a re-ordered and re-edited version of the complete text with detailed notes to every poem, plus chronology and bibliography.