Classics With Stunning New Covers

First published in 1930, Langston Hughes’s award-winning debut novel draws from the author’s childhood in the rural Midwest to paint a moving account of the trials and joys of life in Black communities that, until the novel’s publication, had not seen themselves reflected in American literature. A groundbreaking work, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as a gifted novelist as well as a beloved poet.

The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez’s classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. The most famous horror story in world literature — the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster — is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.

Volume I includes the novels and stories that introduced the brilliant and unflappable Sherlock Holmes and his partner, Dr. Watson, to the world. A Study in Scarlet is a drama of long-simmering revenge that ranges from the fog-bound streets of London to the pioneer settlements of Utah. The Sign of Four weaves together a stolen treasure from India, poison darts, and double-crossing thieves, while The Hound of the Baskervilles sets the legend of a diabolical hellhound and an old family curse against the backdrop of a moonlit moor. Discover tales that have thrilled generations of readers with Holmes’s astounding powers of deduction.

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young 16th-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey — a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or woman? Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a “writer’s holiday” that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

Hemingway’s classic novel of postwar disillusionment is the emblematic novel of the Lost Generation — the jaded, decadent youth who gave up trying to make sense of a senseless world in the disaffected postwar era. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s beloved first novel, is a masterpiece of modernist literature and one of the finest examples of the distinctly spare prose that would become his legacy to American letters.

In 1962, five-year-old Olivia meets the half-sister she never knew existed, eighteen-year-old Kwan from China. Decades later, Olivia describes her complicated relationship with her sister and her failing marriage, as Kwan reveals her story, sweeping the reader into the splendor and violence of mid-nineteenth century China. With her characteristic wisdom, grace, and humor, Tan conjures up a story of the inheritance of love, its secrets and senses, its illusions and truths.

After several years of seclusion in the Black quarter of Beetlecreek, West Virginia, in the precarious 1930s, a retired carnival worker named Bill Trapp strikes up a chance friendship with Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager transplanted into his uncle’s home. Bill is white. Johnny is Black. Both are searching for something that will give meaning to their lives beyond the bounds of Beetlecreek. But as the church society’s Fall Festival approaches, the battle between the repressive town and the aspirations of its trapped inhabitants comes to a nail-biting head.

The Sound and the Fury traces the decline of the American South through three generations of the once-powerful Compson family. A kaleidoscopic narrative punctuated by haunting interior monologues, The Sound and the Fury brings to life Faulkner’s aristocratic South as a land of decadence and despair, gallantry and greed in the face of financial and moral ruin. What Faulkner once considered his “most splendid failure” was also his favorite of his novels; it now ranks among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and as one of the cornerstones of American fiction.

Maugham’s 1915 masterpiece — hailed by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time — is the coming-of-age story of a sensitive young man consumed by an unrequited passion. The most autobiographical of Maugham’s works, Of Human Bondage is a brilliant and deeply moving portrayal of the price of passion and the universal desire for connection.

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance — and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

Set in rural Japan shortly after World War II, this gripping novel tells the story of a strange and utterly absorbing love triangle that leads to psychological self-entrapment, seduction, and murder. “A compelling tale of love and violence” (The Washington Post).

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. The novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women — their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully reimagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.

Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. The sparkling Elizabeth Bennet, the taciturn Fitzwilliam Darcy, and an array of characters that range from irrepressible to almost irredeemable, move through this comedy of manners about the danger of first impressions. Set in a provincial world away from London, Austen’s novel pokes fun at the machinations of courtship rituals while celebrating the importance of friendship and sisterhood.

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything at his mansion on Long Island. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick’s cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby’s just across the bay. A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of a postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century.

Junichirō Tanizaki’s magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately before World War II is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the 20th century and a classic of international literature. Filled with vignettes of a vanishing way of life, The Makioka Sisters is a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family — and an entire society — sliding into the abyss of modernity. It possesses in abundance the keen social insight and unabashed sensuality that distinguish Tanizaki as a master novelist.

When Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves embark upon a dangerous quest to reclaim the hoard of gold stolen from them by the evil dragon Smaug, Gandalf the wizard suggests an unlikely accomplice: Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming Hobbit dwelling in peaceful Hobbiton. The stirring adventure that begins The Lord of the Rings, the greatest fantasy epic of all time.