Three of the finest of the author's numerous short stories include the romantic title tale, the comic "The Distracted Preacher," and "The Three Strangers," a tribute to community life.

A personal crisis jars a middle-aged real estate agent from his complacency in this satire of middle-class American life. Sinclair Lewis' great novel offers a scathing portrait of the consequences of clinging to conventional values.

Based on the author's own life, this epic traces David's progress from his mother's sheltering arms to boarding-school and sweatshop to the rewards of friendship, romance, and self-discovery in his vocation as a writer.

Hardy's novel about the trials of a poor stonemason excoriates convention — particularly the institutions of marriage, religion, and education — in a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought.

DIVPolitical turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia as an assassination, government intrigue, and betrayal force a young student to come to terms with accountability and human integrity. /div

Compact and affordable, this collection of 43 deliciously dark fairy and folk tales features "Rapunzel," "Hänsel and Grethel," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Cinderella," "Little Snow-White," "The Golden Goose," "The Frog-King, or Iron Henry," and "The Twelve Brothers."

Suspense, humor, and romance abound in this 1868 mystery, in which a gem stolen from a Hindu shrine resurfaces in an English country home — with a trio of watchful Brahmins hot on its trail.