Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin. The story was first serialized in Revue de Paris, where prosecutors tried to have it censored for obscenity, arguing that not only is the story immoral, but that realism as a literary style is an offence against art and decency. The trial only served to increase the story’s fame, and when it was published as a single novel it quickly became a bestseller. The novel is groundbreaking in its emphasis on the psychological and emotional lives of its characters. Literature up to then had mostly focusing on the external events that make characters react, instead of focusing on the internal thought processes of those characters. Madame Bovary changed that forever. It was also revolutionary in its criticism of the middle class, which at the time was a still-new social class vying for elbow room between the working poor and hereditary aristocracy. Flaubert critiqued the middle class as being ambitious, shallow, greedy, materialistic, and totally without culture; Emma’s burning desire to reach even higher social strata, contrasted against that satisfaction being fundamentally denied to her by her middle-class nature, is an early echo of Marx’s theory of alienation in industrial societies. Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.

Dmitri Karamazov and his father Fyodor are at war over both Dmitri’s inheritance and the affections of the beautiful Grushenka. Into this feud arrive the middle brother Ivan, recently returned from Moscow, and the youngest sibling Alyosha, who has been released into the wider world from the local monastery by the elder monk Zossima. Through a series of accidents of fate and wilful misunderstandings the Karamazovs edge closer to tragedy, while the local townspeople watch on. The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, and was originally serialised in The Russian Messenger before being published as a complete novel in 1880. This edition is the well-received 1912 English translation by Constance Garnett. As well as earning wide-spread critical acclaim, the novel has been widely influential in literary and philosophical circles; Franz Kafka and James Joyce admired the emotions that verge on madness in the Karamazovs, while Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Satre found inspiration in the themes of patricide and existentialism.

Walking along a mountain path towards a remote hot springs hotel, our unnamed protagonist muses on his theory of “unhumanity” and his hopes that it will break him out of his creative block. On arrival, the town itself has plenty of unhumanity on display, but while poems on those subjects spring easily to mind, painting still eludes him. Will the mysterious Nami-san, the daughter of the hotel owner, be the catalyst that unlocks that frustratingly out-of-reach art? Natsume Sōseki was already a household name in Japan after his previous novels I Am a Cat and Botchan, but it was the success of Kusamakura that allowed him to give up his role as a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University to focus on writing. Kusamakura translates to English directly as “grass pillow,” which for the Japanese reader has a connotation of a poetic wandering; for this edition Takahashi Kazutomo added the subtitle “Unhuman Tour” to bring the same feeling to the translation.

D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, the United State’s first spaceship. A life of calculations and equations in the United State leaves little room for emotional expression outside of the pink slips that give one private time with another Number. The façade however starts to crack when I-330, a mysterious she-Number with a penchant for the Ancients, enters the picture. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s fourth novel, was written in 1920–21, but remained unpublished until its English release in 1924 due to conditions in the Soviet Union at the time (it was eventually published there in 1988). Its dystopian future setting predates Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, and it’s now considered a founding member of the genre. It has been translated into English and other languages many times; presented here is the original 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg.

The wealthy Bengali zamindar Nikhil has spent his last nine years of marriage trying to modernize and westernize his wife Bimala. But when he invites his friend Sandip, a fiery pro-Swadeshi activist fighting for Indian independence, to his home, Bimala becomes enraptured by the nationalist cause—and by the fascinating figure himself. The Home and the World is a complex exploration of the contradictions of the anti-British Swadeshi movement in the early 1900s. Rabindranath Tagore was himself active in the early days of the movement, but later became disillusioned, for reasons this novel examines in depth. The novel is also an examination of the traditional organization of wealthy Bengali households, in which women are kept separate from the outside world. The Home and the World was adapted into a 1984 Golden Palm nominated film by Satyajit Ray.

During her brief career as a writer, Nella Larsen published two novels and three short stories. The most famous of her short works, the short story “Sanctuary” and the novella “Passing,” focus on the perspectives of African-American and mixed-race people in the United States, and handle themes of solidarity and prejudice based on both race and class. Though Larsen’s literary reputation rests mainly upon her treatment of these issues, her other stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom,” concern infidelity and marriage. Larsen was born in Chicago to a mother and father who had immigrated to the United States from Denmark and the Danish West Indies respectively. She published her first stories in the 1920s, when she was living with her husband in Harlem and working as a librarian. During these years she became active in the literary community of the Harlem Renaissance, but her career was cut short after some accused her of plagiarizing “Sanctuary.” This alienated publishers despite Larsen’s denying any wrongdoing in print. Her short fiction draws on her experiences of not belonging and of the African-American middle class into which she had married. It is noted for the acuity of its psychological insight, its use of suspense and plot twists, and the simplicity and elegance of its prose. Larsen’s novella “Passing” concerns the possibility of moving between the highly race-conscious social groups of 1920s New York, and explicitly mocks the idea that ancestry is straightforwardly deducible from behavior. The concept of “passing” had already been featured in American fiction for several decades before, but “Passing” presented the issue in a new way, alongside questions of social class and morality. The novella was positively received by critics, including W. E. B. Du Bois, and was instrumental in Larsen’s receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930. “Sanctuary” is set along a desolate strip of the Southern coast. A desperate man named Jim Hammer seeks refuge at Annie Poole’s isolated cottage. When Jim reveals he’s shot a man—possibly white—Annie reluctantly agrees to hide him, not from kindness but because of her son Obadiah’s inexplicable fondness for this man she considers “no ’count trash.”

Crime and Punishment tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, an ex-student who plans to murder a pawnbroker to test his theory of personality. Having accomplished the deed, Raskolnikov struggles with mental anguish while trying to both avoid the consequences and hide his guilt from his friends and family. Dostoevsky’s original idea for the novel centered on the Marmeladov family and the impact of alcoholism in Russia, but inspired by a double murder in France he decided to rework it around the new character of Raskolnikov. The novel was first serialized in The Russian Messenger over the course of 1866, where it was an instant success. It was published in a single volume in 1867. Presented here is Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation.

Returning from Liverpool, Mr. Earnshaw brings with him a dirty, ragged, black-haired child called Heathcliff, and sets into motion a tale of destructive passions. The book’s two locations, the genteel Thrushcross Grange and the wild Wuthering Heights, serve as matching backgrounds to the characters of their occupants, as they struggle to gain the upper hand in marriage and power. All the while, the ghosts of the past seem to drive revenge more than inspire forgiveness. Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s sole published novel before her early death at the age of 30. Published under the pen name of Ellis Bell, a shared surname with the pen names of her sisters, many assumed that such a book could only have been written by a man. Reviewers of the time praised its emotional power but were also shocked at the actions of its characters, and most agreed that it was impossible to put down. After the novel’s original publication in 1847 it was revised into a single volume in 1850, and over time has become a classic of English literature. The story has been reworked into plays, operas, films, TV dramatisations and a ballet, and has inspired many further works of art, music and literature.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published as a serial in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, and the publishers thought it would so offend readers that they removed nearly 500 words without Wilde’s approval. Wilde soon expanded it and republished it as a novel, including a short preface justifying his art. Even though his contemporaries considered it so offensive that some argued for his prosecution, Dorian Gray today survives as a classic philosophical novel that explores themes of aestheticism and double lives. Couched in Wilde’s trademark cutting wit, Dorian Gray is still being adapted today, with Dorian and his moldering portrait remaining cultural touchstones.

Mary Shelley (then Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley were visiting their friend Lord Byron in Geneva one rainy summer. With the weather against them, they decided to spend their time writing ghost stories for each other. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s submission to their contest, later published anonymously in 1818. Victor Frankenstein, a strange but brilliant scientist, discovers a method of imparting life to inanimate matter. The Monster is thus born: a hideous, 8-foot-tall creature of muscle, speed, and intellect. Frankenstein’s rejection of his appalling creation sends it into a spiral of despair, and Frankenstein’s life is never the same. Considered by many to be the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein is a powerful narrative that explores complex themes of belonging, morality, and the consequences of the power over life and death. This edition is based on Shelley’s revised 1831 edition.