The centuries old epic about the wrath of Achilles is rendered into modern English verse by a renowned translator and accompanied by an introduction that reassesses the identity of Homer. In Robert Fagles' beautifully rendered text, the Iliad overwhelms us afresh. The huge themes godlike, yet utterly human of savagery and calculation, of destiny defied, of triumph and grief compel our own humanity. Time after time, one pauses and re-reads before continuing....

Geralt de Riv, a Witcher, uses his vast sorcerous powers to hunt down the monsters that threaten the world, but he soon discovers that not every monstrous-looking creature is evil, and not everything beautiful is good.

"'The Divine Comedy' begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Allen Mandelbaum's astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece that genius whom...

"A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the...

Geralt is a witcher, a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent. He roams the country seeking assignments, but gradually comes to realise that while some of his quarry are unremittingly vile, vicious grotesques, others are...

This book contains four of Ibsen's most important plays in superb modern translations. With her assertion that she is first and foremost a human being, rather than a wife, mother or fragile doll, Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she appeared in Henrik Ibsen's greatest and most famous play, A Doll's House. Ibsen's follow-up, Ghosts, was no less radical, with its unrelenting investigation into religious hypocrisy, family secrets, and...

Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its minimalism and brevity, usually running three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations...

CLASSIC FICTION. In "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", an obsessive German professor and his nephew travel towards the earth's core in the steps of a medieval explorer beneath an Icelandic volcano where they discover a lost world. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" is famous for its portrayal of the Byronic Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus, in which he explores the ocean while wreaking vengeance on mankind for their wickedness....

Twenty-two fairy tales for adults by a German writer (1877-1962). In A Man by the Name of Ziegler, the protagonist can talk to animals and finds them just as wicked as humans, Augustus is on a man who loses a fortune but gains happiness, and A Dream of the Gods contrasts the hopes and the reality of World War I. By the author of Steppenwolf.