Ultimate Literature Collection (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics)

Overview

The Ultimate Literature Collection features ten literary masterpieces for an incredible value! Each title in the series presents a classic work in an attractively designed edition bound in genuine bonded leather. These books make elegant, eye-catching additions to any home library. The collection includes:

• Jane Austen: Seven Novels
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Charles Dickens: Five Novels
• The Arabian Nights
• Ernest Hemingway: Four Novels
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

In a publishing career that spanned less than a decade, Jane Austen revolutionized the literary romance, using it as a stage from which to address issues of gender politics and class-consciousness rarely expressed in her day. The novels included in this beautiful leatherbound collection—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan—represent all of Austen's mature work as a novelist, and provide the reader with an introduction to the world she and her memorable characters inhabited.

Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. Henry V. Macbeth. A Midsummer Night's Dream. King Lear. Lovers of literature will immediately recognize these as signature works of William Shakespeare, whose plays still rank as the greatest dramas ever produced in the English language four centuries after they were written. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare collects all thirty-seven of the immortal Bard's comedies, tragedies, and historical plays in a collectible leatherbound edition. This volume also features Shakespeare's complete poetry, including the sonnets. With this beautiful leatherbound edition, you can enjoy Shakespeare's enduring literary legacy again and again.

A master of deductive logic who can solve the most difficult crimes by spotting obscure clues overlooked by others, dilettante sleuth Sherlock Holmes was the hero of sixty stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. With the help of his loyal friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, Holmes brought countless crooks, thieves, swindlers, and murderers to justice. He even rose from the dead after Doyle tried to dispatch him in his twenty-fourth adventure, and readers protested. Some Sherlock Holmes stories rank among the most famous in detective fiction, among them "A Study in Scarlet," "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Here, in one volume are all four full-length novels and fifty-six short stories about the colorful adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about Baker Street's most famous resident. Also included is an introduction by lifetime Sherlockians, Christopher and Barbara Roden.

Homer's two epics of the ancient world, The Iliad & The Odyssey, tell stories as riveting today as when they were written between the eighth and ninth century B.C. The Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy by the Greeks, is an unforgettable tale of nations at war and of the courage and compassion heroic soldiers show upon the field of battle. The Odyssey is the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and the many marvels and challenges he encounters during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. This edition employs Samuel Butler's classic translations of both texts.

A landmark of world literature, The Divine Comedy tells of the poet Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in search of salvation. Before he is redeemed by his love for the heavenly Beatrice, he learns the meaning of evil, sin, damnation, and forgiveness through a series of unforgettable experiences and encounters. This edition of The Divine Comedy features Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's renowned and 135 full-page reproductions of Gustave Dore's classic engravings from the 1867 edition.

Many readers know Victorian England through the writings of Charles Dickens. Not only did Dickens put a face on the era through his memorable characters, he also captured the spirit of his age in entertaining fiction spun from its social concerns and historical events. This literary omnibus brings together five of Dickens's best-known novels: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities. Prolific, energetic, and committed to social change, no other novelist of the time did so much as Charles Dickens to rally his readers to action, and no other writer at any time has created such an extraordinary collection of well-loved novels.

It's a story that has enthralled readers for centuries. The Arabian Nights are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Shahrazad always withheld the ending. A thousand and one nights later, her life was spared forever.

The preeminent American writer of his time, Ernest Hemingway wrote provocative fiction steeped in the experiences of the "lost generation" that came of age during World War I. His tales of American expatriates aimlessly adrift in postwar Europe and people struggling with dignity to persevere in a world marked by violence, cruelly, and senseless death capture the disillusionment and cynicism that were part of the spirit of the age. This literary omnibus collects Hemingway's four best-known novels—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea. Written with Hemingway's trademark economy of style, but evocative in their delineations of individuals seeking purpose in lives shaped by futility, frustration, and disappointment, these tales pay tribute to a writer who changed the way that fiction was written and read in the twentieth century.

Desperate to escape his abusive father and the constraints of the civilized life, young Huck Finn fakes his death and, with the help of his slave friend Jim, embarks on a vagabond life rafting down the Mississippi River. Yet life is anything but carefree for Huck and Jim. Their travels bring them into contact with scores of rogues, rascals, ruffians, hucksters, and law-abiding citizens who would as soon seen Jim returned to his owners and Huck to his Pa. Looking out for each other, Huck and Jim forge a bond that protects them from the prejudices and bigotry of their time and place, and a society whose rules and regulations seem as perplexing as they are inflexible. By turns hilarious and heartwarming, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, is considered Mark Twain's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels written on the nineteenth-century American experience.

First published in 1919, Tales of Mystery and Imagination matched Edgar Allan Poe's best tales of horror and suspense with the expressive artwork of Harry Clarke. This beautifully designed volume reproduces more than thirty full-color and black-and-white illustrations that give substance to the terrifying imagery of "The Tell-Tale Heat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and twenty-five other masterpieces of the macabre. As Neil Gaiman writes in his introduction, Clarke's art perfectly captures the perversity, madness, and delight in horror that were the hallmarks of Poe's dark genius.