Bantam imprint: 1922 books

This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass*, An American Slave*...

For everyone who’s ever wondered what it really takes to be a spy, legendary author Graham Greene (The Third Man, The Quiet American) and his brother Hugh have compiled this irresistible selection of fiction, memoir, and tricks of the trade straight from the all-time masters of espionage. Here is...

These four landmark novels of nineteenth-century American literature have gained a permanent place in our culture as great classics. They are not only part of our national heritage, but masterpieces of world literature whose deep and lasting influence is felt to this day. The Scarlet Letter...

Written almost a century before the daring flights of the astronauts, Jules Verne’s prophetic novel of man’s race to the stars is a classic adventure tale enlivened by broad satire and scientific acumen. When the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find themselves lacking any urgent...

To read a story by Henry James is to enter a fully realized world unlike any other—a rich, perfectly crafted domain of vivid language and splendid, complex characters. Devious children, sparring lovers, capricious American girls, obtuse bachelors, sibylline spinsters, and charming Europeans populate...

To Build A Fire and Other Stories is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging collection of Jack London's short stories available in paperback. This superb volume brings together twenty-five of London's finest, including a dozen of his great Klondike stories, vivid tales of the Far North were rugged...

When Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to the village of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object of suspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including the theft of his gold and the appearance...

Jane Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey—published posthumously in 1818—tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen’s fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her...

Goethe’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest work in German literature, Fausthas made the legendary German alchemist one of the central myths of the Western world. Here indeed is a monumental Faust, an audacious man boldly wagering with the devil, Mephistopheles, that no magic, sensuality, experience,...

“Facts alone are wanted in life.” The children at Mr. Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped...

Widely regarded as Dickens’s masterpiece, Bleak House centers on the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, through which “whole families have inherited legendary hatreds.” Focusing on Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel traces Esther’s romantic coming-of-age and,...

An American frigate, tracking down a ship-sinking monster, faces not a living creature but an incredible invention -- a fantastic submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo.  Suddenly a devastating explosion leaves just three survivors, who find themselves prisoners inside Nemo's death ship...

A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict, and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most...

Unique and beautiful, Beowulf brings to life a society of violence and honor, fierce warriors and bloody battles, deadly monsters and famous swords. Written by an unknown poet in about the eighth century, this masterpiece of Anglo-Saxton literature transforms legends, myth, history, and ancient songs...