An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!

Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions. Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions. Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

Moving away from the explicitly political content of his previous novels, Victor Hugo turns to social commentary in The Man Who Laughs, an 1869 work that was made into a popular film in the 1920s. The plot deals with a band of miscreants who deliberately deform children to make them more effective beggars, as well as the long-lasting emotional and social damage that this abhorrent practice inflicts upon its victims.

The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) is a short novel by Victor Hugo. Having witnessed several executions by guillotine as a young man, Hugo devoted himself in his art and political life to opposing the death penalty in France. Praised by Dostoevsky as “absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote,” The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a powerful story from an author who defined nineteenth century French literature. If you knew when and where you would die, how would you spend your final moments? For Hugo’s unnamed narrator, such an existential question is made reality. Sentenced to death for an unspecified crime, he reflects on his life as its last seconds wane in the shadows of a cramped prison cell. Recording his emotional state, observations, and conversations with a priest and fellow prisoner, the condemned man forces us to not only recognize his humanity, but question our own. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.