"A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the magic begins. A young woman flees Athens with her lover, only to be pursued by her would-be husband and by her best friend. Unwittingly, all four find themselves in an enchanted forest where fairies and sprites soon take an interest in human affairs, dispensing magical love potions...

"When a tornado hits Dorothy's home in the Kansas prairies, she and her dog, Toto, are whisked away to the magical Land of Oz. To return home, Dorothy must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and seek help from the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. So, accompanied by the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy sets out on a wild and magical adventure. This classic children's novel has been described as the first American...

From the Publisher: When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives...

"A 22-volume, highly illustrated, A-Z general encyclopedia for all ages. As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2023 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages, from school-age readers (9-18) to adults. Whether you are looking up information to understand a subject or checking a fact for a homework assignment, tens of thousands of index entries make it easy to...

A vivid graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Faithful to the original text while providing a new lavish rendition. When three witches prophecy to Macbeth that he will one day become the King of Scotland, an epic of unhappiness, treachery, and blood begins. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's ambitions lead to an ever-growing path of murder as Macbeth grows ever-closer to the throne. But where will it all end? Only with death - and with madness....

"This is the third New Cambridge edition of The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare's most popular yet controversial plays. Ann Thompson considers its reception in the light of the hostility and embarrassment that the play often arouses, taking account of both scholarly defences and modern feminist criticism. For this version the editor pays lively attention to the problematic nature of debates about the play and its reception in the twenty-first...

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity, " as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

"Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written in 1831, at a time when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was falling into disrepair. This epic novel helped spark a preservationist movement that led to the cathedral being restored to its full glory. Set in 1482, the story tells of how four men-the hunchbacked bell-ringer, Quasimodo; the archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo; the dashing soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers; and the poet Pierre...

Gulliver's Travels tells of the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman and ship's surgeon, who travels to the "several remote nations of the world." In the beginning, he becomes shipwrecked in the land of Lilliput, where the distressed inhabitants are only six inches tall. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where lives a race of giants. At Glubdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers, he speaks with great men of the past and learns from...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...