The spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period, and the crowning achievement of that caustic, brilliantly learned age was Voltaire's Candide, published in 1759, at the height of its author's enormous European fame. Following the worldwide encounters - with shipwrecks, earthquakes, pestilence, and human insanity - of its hero and his incomparably absurd tutor, Dr. Pangloss, Candide is the most entertaining of all philosophical...

"The Turn of the Screw," one of Henry James's most popular novellas, is an intense psychological tale of terror. In an old house on Christmas Eve a Governess comes to live with and take care of two young children. The Governess loves her new position in charge of the children, however she is soon disturbed when she begins to see ghosts. This classic story is included in this volume with the three other following tales: "The Friends of the Friends,"...

"After his mistreatment at the hands of his brother, William Crimsworth is relieved of his employment as a clergyman and offered a position at an all-boys boarding school in Belgium. Soon, word of his proficiency as a professor spread and he is offered a second position in a neighboring all-girls school. He accepts the offer and discovers that there is something special to one of the teachers named Frances?"--Amazon.

This book is the earliest and most influential of the Gothic novels. First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." He gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting...

"Brought up by her widowed father in a remote English castle, Arabella resorts to reading the French novels popular in her mother's youth, and in the solitude of this Arcadia paints a picture of her life as adventurous and deeply romantic. When her father dies, however, she inherits a barbed legacy: if she is not to lose part of the estate it appears she must marry her cousin Glanville. But Arabella has developed a different, private code of conduct...

Dante's first major work links 31 poems inspired by his love of Beatrice, with a prose narrative that celebrates the subject of love while commenting on the nature of the poet's art.