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  Fairy Tales for Adults Volume 12

  William Shakespeare, Nikolai Leskov

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  There plenty of spooky action in this volume of tales. Ghosts, apparitions, entire armies of fairies and fairy queens. 
  The volume opens with Shakespeare's timeless classic 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and continues to get more frightening with haunted castles in Leskov's 'The Ghost of the Engineers' Castle'.

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  Dracula

  Bram Stoker

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  Dracula is a Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker, considered to be one of the most enduring and skillful examples of the modern vampire genre. It tells the story of Count Dracula, and of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who attempts to thwart the vampire in his attempt to move from Transylvania to London, in order to find new blood and spread the undead curse. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, Ph.D. in literature and modern studies from Yale University.Bram Stoker was a 19th-century Irish writer best known for Dracula. During his lifetime, Stoker was also the business manager of the Lyceum Theater in London. In order to write Dracula, Stoker spent years researching European folklore and vampire mythology, and the product was the book that would become a classic of horror fiction.Vivian Heller received her Ph.D. in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation(University of Illinois Press) and of The City Beneath Us   (W.W. Norton & Company), a history of the building of the New York City subway system.  She is an associate at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and is the writing tutor for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She is also a long-standing member of the non-fiction committee of the PEN Prison-Writing Committee, which awards prizes to inmates from across the country.Essential Classics publishes the most crucial literary works throughout history, with a unique introduction to each, making them the perfect treasure for any reader’s shelf.

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  Middlemarch

  George Eliot

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  "Middlemarch" is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, published in 1871-72. Widely regarded as one of the greatest novels in the English language, it is an intricate portrait of a provincial town and its inhabitants. The narrative explores the lives, ambitions, and relationships of several characters, with the central story revolving around Dorothea Brooke and her marriage to the older, pedantic scholar, Mr. Casaubon. Eliot uses the microcosm of Middlemarch society to provide astute commentary on politics, women's rights, marriage, idealism, self-interest, and the constraints of societal expectations.

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  The Good Soldier

  Ford Madox

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  Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal "good soldier" and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society's core. Beneath Ashburnham's charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts of deception, hypocrisy, and betrayal. Throughout the nine years of his friendship with an equally privileged American, John Dowell, Ashburnham has been having an affair with Dowell's wife, Florence. Unlike Dowell, Ashburnham's own wife, Leonora, is well aware of it. When The Good Soldier was first published in 1915, its pitiless portrait of an amoral society dedicated to its own pleasure and convinced of its own superiority outraged many readers. Stylistically daring, The Good Soldier is narrated, unreliably, by Dowell, through whom Ford provides a level of bitter irony. Dowell's disjointed, stumbling storytelling not only subverts linear temporality to satisfying effect, it also reflects his struggle to accept a world without honor, order, or permanence. Called the best French novel in the English language, The Good Soldier is both tragic and darkly comic, and it established Ford as an important contributor to the development of literary modernism.

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  The Gulistan of Saadi Shirazi

  Saadi Shirazi

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  Gulistan (Persian: گُلِستان, romanized: Golestān, lit. 'The Flower Garden'), sometimes spelled Golestan, is a landmark of Persian literature, perhaps its single most influential work of prose. Written in 1258 CE, it is one of two major works of the Persian poet Sa'di, considered one of the greatest medieval Persian poets. It is also one of his most popular books, and has proved deeply influential in the West as well as the East.The Golestan is a collection of poems and stories, just as a flower-garden is a collection of flowers. It is widely quoted as a source of wisdom.

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  Old Mortality - Extended...

  Walter Scott

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  This is the fully illustrated and extended annotated edition including a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, his life and works plus a wealth of illustrations.
  
  "Old Mortality" was the familiar title of an actual personage, Robert Paterson, a harmless itinerant hermit who received this nickname because of his habit of visiting the tombs of Scotch Covenanters. His daily labor of love was to care for these stones and deepen their lettering with his chisel; doing this in honor of the martyrs for the cause, who had fallen in their struggle against the state. He died about the beginning of the 19th century. The incidents of the present story are supposed to be based on reminiscences which he related to a friend. They deal with the Covenanter's insurrection during the reign of Charles II of England.
  
  At a general muster of troops and volunteers, in Lanarkshire, Henry Morton, a young man of Presbyterian stock, wins a victory over Lord Evandale in a target-shooting contest. Morton stops with friends at a neighboring tavern where he meets John Balfour, a Covenanter or Whig, and also is party to a quarrel with Sergeant Bothwell of the King's troops. Balfour escapes from the sergeant and is sheltered for the night by Morton. The next day the young man is arrested by the trooper, for aiding the insurgent, and is carried to Lady Bellenden's castle, where Colonel Graham of Claverhouse is stationed temporarily ...

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