Based on actual events, this sweeping historical romance, considered to be Dumas' finest work, recounts the story of Edmond Dantès, a gallant young sailor whose life takes a bitter turn when, during the final days of Napoleon's reign, he is falsely accused of treason and condemned to lifelong imprisonment. After languishing for many years in a fetid dungeon, he makes his dramatic escape. In a labyrinthine tale plump with themes of justice, vengeance,...

While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a treasure map that leads to a pirate fortune as well as great danger.

A story of a family fued between the Capulets and the Montagues continuing through the ages, as one generation picked up where the last one left off and of the forbidden love between two teenagers, Romeo, the son of the Montagues and Juliet, the daughter of the Capulets. This is a story of two young people in love, but the families do not approve.

A remarkably handsome youth, Dorian Gray, meets Lord Henry Wotton and is corrupted into a life of terrible evil. Granted eternal youth, Dorian Gray lives a wild, dissipated life while his portrait grows old and haggard. Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations,...

This Applause edtiion allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare,...

Retells the adventures of the orphan boy who is forced to practice thievery and live a life of crime in nineteenth-century London. Illustrated notes throughout the text explain the historical background of the story.

In 1751 in Scotland, cheated out of his inheritance by a greedy uncle who has him kidnapped and put on a ship to the Carolinas, seventeen-year-old David Balfour escapes to the Highlands with the help of the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart and there encounters further danger and intrigue as he attempts to clear his name and regain his property.