Find your next classic.

Wharton’s intense rural novella follows Charity Royall through desire, class constraint, shame, and the limits of escape.

A coastal historical novel of love, press-gangs, Quaker witness, family loyalty, and wartime trauma in Yorkshire.

Henry James’s American novel explores reform politics, public speech, feminism, rivalry, and emotional possession in Boston.

Jack London’s dystopian political novel imagines oligarchy, class war, labor movements, repression, and revolutionary memory.

A daring James novel that sees divorce, adult selfishness, desire, and moral confusion through a child’s changing awareness.

E. Nesbit’s children’s fantasy sends five siblings into wish-making adventures with the strange sand-fairy Psammead.

Walter Scott’s medieval romance of knights, Saxons, Normans, tournaments, outlaw bands, and the return of Richard the Lionheart.

Melville’s South Seas novel follows desertion, island captivity, and comic encounters with colonial power in Tahiti.

Trollope’s parliamentary novel follows Phineas Finn through ambition, reform politics, society, love, and moral compromise.

Defoe’s late novel follows Roxana through survival, wealth, disguise, sexuality, guilt, and social risk in early modern Europe.

The first Waverley novel follows Edward Waverley through Jacobite Scotland, divided loyalties, romance, and political rebellion.

English edition of Kafka’s modernist novel about Josef K., invisible accusation, bureaucratic nightmare, guilt, and law.

Origin tales full of rhythm, wit, animals, invention, and Kipling’s playful storytelling voice.

A Revolutionary War novel of espionage, divided loyalties, patriotism, and secret sacrifice.

An early American gothic novel of religious delusion, ventriloquism, fear, and family catastrophe.

Swift’s savage political satire on poverty, exploitation, policy language, and moral blindness.

A powerful realist novel of ambition, desire, class pressure, crime, and moral collapse.

A medical novel about science, ambition, public health, research ethics, and institutional pressure.

Byron’s travel poem of exile, melancholy, politics, landscape, and the Byronic hero.

A transatlantic novel about marriage, wealth, travel, American identity, and emotional reinvention.

Keats’s mythic romance of beauty, desire, dream, transformation, and poetic apprenticeship.

A founding Romantic poetry collection about nature, common life, imagination, memory, and feeling.

Bacon’s landmark statement of induction, experiment, observation, and modern scientific method.

Bacon’s program for organizing knowledge, reforming study, and advancing useful learning.