Geoffrey Giuliano and The Icon Ensemble

A satire on the horrors of totalitarianism, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is set in a society run by Big Brother where people are made to conform to orthodoxy by the Thought Police. Winston Smith yearns for truth and liberty, but he comes to realize that he cannot outwit the forces at work.

The classic eighteenth-century saga—a masterpiece of Chinese literature— about an aristocratic family and a forbidden love during the Qing dynasty.

Considered one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature, The Dream of the Red Chamber is believed to be a semiautobiographical account of author Cao Xueqin and his aristocratic family’s rise and fall, and focuses particularly on the women in his life,...

An English family's complex lives are followed and picked up again after a 10 year hiatus in order to explore the effects of time.

The consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his faithful companion Dr. Watson, are two of fiction's most intriguing figures. This volume contains all four Sherlock Holmes novels - A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear - as well as all the short stories originally collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Facing down Victorian villains and elusive criminals...

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist. Its...

Since the Battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) possessed one of the most unique places in American history. Although he was a capable cavalry officer who served honorably during the Civil War, he remains one of the most instantly identifiable and famous military men in American history due to the fact he was killed during one of the country's most well known and ignominious defeats, the Battle of Little Bighorn. And yet, this...

When she was 19 months old, Helen Keller (1880–1968) suffered a severe illness that left her blind and deaf. Not long after, she also became mute. Keller mounted a tenacious struggle to overcome these handicaps with the help of her inspired teacher, Anne Sullivan. Here is one of the greatest stories of human courage ever committed to paper. In this classic autobiography, Miss Keller recounts the first 22 years of her life, including the magical...

Herbert George Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking,...

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...