No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau. His central preoccupations — the illusory nature of much of what we call progress, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal, the moral and political case for non-violence, the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the 'rules' by which we might live our lives — these, and many other matters are as real to us now as they were to Thoreau in 1845 when he began his experiment in self-sufficiency. Walden is his autobiographical record of his life of relative isolation at Walden Pond, some twenty miles west of the city of Boston, but it is also a work of detailed natural history and the expression of a philosophy of life by a deeply poetic sensibility. His essay (originally a lecture), Civil Disobedience, has over the 150 or so years since its publication exerted an enormous influence, animating thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi as well as political movements such as the British Labour Party, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and various forms of oppositional activism across the globe. Walden and 'Civil Disobedience' are reprinted here in a new edition alongside three of Thoreau's seminal essays, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown, and Life Without Principle. Henry Claridge's introduction illuminates the extent to which Thoreau's writings and his thinking were a response to the dramatic changes wrought by the physical expansion of the United States and the migration of European peoples across the American sub-continent in the first half of the nineteenth-century. The edition also comes with a bibliography and extensive explanatory notes.

'Everyone in Greenall Bridge knew Sam Carraclough's Lassie. In fact, you might say that she was the best-known dog in the village... because nearly every man in the village agreed she was the finest collie he had ever laid eyes on.' Sam's son Joe and Lassie are a devoted pair but a time comes when they have to be parted. The Carracloughs are not well off and when they fall on hard times Sam is forced to sell his champion dog to the Duke of Rudling, whose great estate borders their Yorkshire village. But Lassie escapes and makes her way home to the Carracloughs. The Duke, not one to be tricked by a dog, claims Lassie back and she is taken many miles away to the Duke's other home in Scotland. But again Lassie pines for her proper home and escapes. Undaunted by the challenge, she sets off on the long trek back to her Yorkshire home. She faces many dangers and adventures along the way but she also meets some kind people who offer her help and comfort. At the end, when Joe has given up all hope of ever seeing his long-lost companion again, the weary Lassie returns and he finds her waiting for him at the school gates in her accustomed spot, just like old times. Lassie and Joe are joyfully reunited. Against all the odds, Lassie has come home!

This endearing edition proudly includes the original telling of the beloved tale, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. Together, we travel alongside the Velveteen Rabbit on his magical journey towards becoming real and discover how he and other toys are brought to life once they are truly loved by their little owners. Also in this edition are modern, infant-friendly retellings of: The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Three Little Pigs, The Frog Prince and The Tale of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse. All stories are beautifully illustrated with exclusive line drawings which truly bring these charming tales to life... just like your favourite toys.

This novel, when originally published in 1936, was entitled The Wheel Spins. However, since the Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation in 1938, the novel has become better known by its 'Hollywood name' The Lady Vanishes. The novel tells of a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, and the two proceed to search the train for clues to the old woman's disappearance.

A historical psychological novel by Stendhal which chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially beyond his modest upbringing through a combination of talent, hard work, deception, and hypocrisy-yet who ultimately allows his passions to betray him.

This edition also includes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is a memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York, details his kidnapping in Washington, D.C. and subsequent sale into slavery. After having been kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana by various masters, Northup was able to write to friends and family in New York, who were in turn able to secure his release. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.

The Sea-Wolf belongs in the honorific tradition of American sea fiction where the voyage motif became a means of exploring the meaning of life, as in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). The dominant subject is an intellectual conflict between a ship-wrecked literary figure, Humphrey Van Weyden, and the brutal captain of a seal-hunting schooner, Wolf Larsen, who rescues Van Weyden and puts him to menial work on the schooner. The central chapters focus on the gory details of seal-hunting, and the final section shows how far Van Weyden has learned seamanship as he restores The Ghost to sailing health and returns to port with the only woman passenger, another shipwrecked figure, to plight their troth.

The anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. The novel consists of the notes that the man writes, a confused and often contradictory set of memoirs or confessions describing and explaining his alienation from modern society.

Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare's historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play: a role to gratify such leading actors as David Garrick, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Sher, Ian McKellen and Al Pacino. Since, in real life, political Machiavellianism is never out of date, Richard III remains perennially topical. Numerous revivals on stage and screen have demonstrated the enduring cogency of this drama about the lethally corrupting quest for power. Richard III is the twentieth play in the Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series. The Times Literary Supplement says: Many students and ordinary readers will be grateful to Watts and his publishers for making such useful editions available at such low cost. Furthermore, this series is now used in the workshops of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

With an Introduction by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading Une Vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885) seem almost diametrically opposed in tone and temper. The 'Life' of the first is poignantly restricted within a woman's lot, while Bel-Ami is robustly masculine. Jeanne dreams of love. Duroy constructs a career in journalism through a string of sexual conquests, reaching political and economic success by endless intimate betrayals. The first novel conveys endurance, the next, constant activity. One is provincial and domestic in setting, tragic in form, and slow in tempo; the other, Parisian, which is to say cosmopolitan, satirical, fast and furious. Both are alive with sights, sounds, smells; but they also chart aspects of a complex history and changing culture, where political and philosophical ideas, religion, class, and gender are all under question. Exploring his world, Guy de Maupassant stretches the scope of the novel form.

Les Liaisons dangereuses better known as Dangerous Liaisons is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782. It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals (and ex-lovers) who use sex as a weapon to humiliate and degrade others, all the while enjoying their cruel games. It has been claimed to depict the decadence of the French aristocracy shortly before the French Revolution, thereby exposing the perversions of the so-called Ancien Regime. However, it has also been described as a vague, amoral story. As an epistolary novel, the book is composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other. In particular, the letters between Valmont and the Marquise drive the plot, with those of other characters serving as illustrations to give the story its depth.

Hello, I'm Raggedy Ann. Welcome to my world. I'm going to tell you about myself and this book. Some grown-ups think I'm just another rag doll with floppy arms and legs who has been nibbled by the mice but they are wrong. When the other toys and I are left alone we get up to all sorts of games and adventures. Once I nearly got boiled to bits in the washing machine. Then I had fun with the kittens and the puppy. But best of all, one day Marcella's daddy brought home a package with another rag doll in it. They called him Raggedy Andy. What jolly times we have! What funny games we play! He is now my best friend. I'm sure you will enjoy reading this book full of stories about us.

Voltaire was the nom de plume of Francois-Marie Aroue, an 18th-century philopsopher of the Age of Enlightenment. Candide, a biting satire on the naive view of the world prevalent during his lifetime, is considered his finest work. The edition includes his other major works.

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution. She is found guilty on a technicality, and he determines to overturn the verdict. This pitches him into a hellish labyrinth of Russian courts, prisons and bureaucracy, in which the author loses no opportunity for satire and bitter criticism of a state system (not confined to that country) of cruelty and injustice. This is Dickens for grown-ups, involving a hundred characters, Crime and Punishment brought forward half a century. With unforgettable set-pieces of sexual passion, conflict and social injustice, Resurrection proceeds from brothel to court-room, stinking cells to offices of state, luxury apartments to filthy life in Siberia. The ultimate crisis of moral responsibility embroils not only the famous author and his hero, but also you and me. Can we help resolve the eternal issues of law and imprisonment?

Published in 1651, 'Leviathan' is Thomas Hobbes' classic work on the structure of society and the nature of legitimate government.

With an Introduction by Ellen Rees, Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. The plays of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) are critically acclaimed throughout the world. The father of modern drama, Ibsen broke with theatrical conventions and created a more realistic form of drama that used the stage as a forum for debating social problems, notably the rights of the individual, and the damaging effects of orthodoxy. This collection of four plays contains, A Doll's House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), his most striking depictions of the struggle by individuals — especially women — to realize their full potential; it also presents Peer Gynt (1867), an early verse tour-de-force, not originally intended for the stage, on the nature of the self, and The Master Builder (1892), a play that explores the clash between the old and the new in richly metaphorical language. This collection returns to the acclaimed translations of William Archer (1856-1924), who through these renditions played a major role in promoting Ibsen's reputation outside Norway. Archer was also a critic, who with actress Elizabeth Robbins and dramatist George Bernard Shaw was central in the modernisation of English theatre.

Gogol's works constitute one of Russian literature's supreme achievements, yet the nature of their brilliant originality, comic genius, and complex workings is difficult to summarize precisely. The Government Inspector, a perennial favourite on stage and screen, is considered a national institution in Russia, and Gogol's stories present us with one of the most marvellous worlds a writer has ever created. His quirky characters — the lowly official who imagines himself to be the King of Spain, the man committed to chase his nose around St. Petersburg, a whole village paralyzed at the prospect of being visited by an authority from the capital — are immortal. Although Gogol's fiction was commandeered by Russia's progressive critics as the work of an important social commentator, he was in many ways an arch-conservative, and there is a madcap strain in it that makes him a precursor of Kafka and absurdist drama.

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature. Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally, in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.