Classics

Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art. Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

Einer der leidenschaftlichsten und gefühlvollsten Romane, die je geschrieben wurden: Sturmhöhe erzählt von der Beziehung zwischen Catherine Earnshaw und Heathcliff, dem Waisenjungen, den ihr Vater adoptierte und als sie Kinder waren nach Wuthering Heights brachte. Während Catherine eine tiefe Bindung zu Heathcliff entwickelt, verachtet ihr Bruder Hindley ihn als Rivalen. Heathcliff wird zwischen seiner Liebe zu Catherine und der Wut und Demütigung, die er erleidet, zerrissen. Schließlich hält er es nicht länger aus und verlässt die Heights in der Gewalt eines Sommersturms für drei Jahre. Während seiner Abwesenheit hat Catherine geheiratet, doch ihr gequältes Herz gehört für immer Heathcliff, der nun bereit ist, seine tyrannische Rache zu nehmen. Mit seiner Freiheit von gesellschaftlichen Konventionen und seiner unvergleichlichen emotionalen Intensität ist Sturmhöhe ein höchst originelles und zutiefst tragisches Werk.

The only one of Sinclair Lewis' later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to "save the nation." Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.