Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of...

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-l...

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men", th...

What sets Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" apart from so many other famous works of fiction? What special combination of creativity and vision made possible the drafting of "Magna Carta"? When describing exceptional accomplishments like these – and the...

In the centuries since it was first performed, Euripides's "Medea" has established itself as one of the most influential of the Greek tragedies. The story of the wronged wife who seeks revenge against her unfaithful husband by murdering their childre...

Not for sale in selected countries! Every aspiring comic book creator wants to know: what separates the beloved comics of major publishers like Marvel, DC, Valiant and Image from all the rest? Fan-favourite comic book writers Greg Pak and Fred Van...

For sale in CIS only! Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In "Men at War" Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creation...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...

Lydia Huntley was born in 1791 in Norwich, CT, the only child of a poor Revolutionary war veteran. But her father's employer, a wealthy widow, gave young Lydia the run of her library and later sent her for visits to Hartford, CT. After teaching at he...

In these three short books – "Servabo: A Fin De Siecle Memoir", "Miss Kirchgessner", and "The Medlar Tree", collected in one volume in English for the first time – Luigi Pinto retraces a life marked, often in spite of itself, by politics. At once int...