The House of Mirth

A lonely dreamer meets a woman who is waiting for someone else, and four white nights decide the rest of his life. This edition collects the novella together with several of Dostoyevsky's other short works.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The letters of a young man whose love for a woman promised to someone else turns into something he cannot survive. The novel that made heartbreak a literary subject and set the tone for two centuries of tragic romance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Hester Prynne raises her daughter alone under the mark her Puritan town forces her to wear, while the child's father stays silent. A study of guilt, shame and public punishment that still reads as modern.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Newland Archer is engaged to the right woman and in love with the wrong one, and old New York will not let him choose. Wharton won the Pulitzer for this portrait of a life spent obeying other people's rules.

Edith Wharton

One June day in London, a woman plans a party while a shell shocked veteran comes apart across the city. Woolf lets the two lives touch only once, and that is the point.

Virginia Woolf