Best of
Novels

1864

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1864
    From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying life to the anxious antihero of Notes from Underground—who both craves and despises affection—the writer's often-tormented characters showcase his evolving outlook on our fate.Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as "an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul" and Notes from Underground as "an awe- and terror- inspiring example of this sympathy."

Notes from Underground


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1864
    One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.

Notes from the Underground & The Gambler


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1864
    The Gambler explores the compulsive nature of gambling, one of Dostoevsky's own vices and a subject he describes with extraordinary acumen and drama. Both works are new translations, specially commissioned for the World's Classics series.

Notes from Underground/Poor People/The Friend of the Family


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1864
    1846–Bednye lyudi/Бедные люди/Poor Folk 1859–Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli/Село Степанчиково и его обитатели/The Village of Stepanchikovo/The Friend of the Family/The Friend of Stepanchikovo 1864–Zapiski iz podpolya/Записки из подполья/Notes from Underground

Enoch Arden


Alfred Tennyson - 1864
    Excerpt: Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm ;And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands ;Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharfIn cluster ; then a moulder'd church ; and higherA long street climbs to one tall-tower'd mill ;And high in heaven behind it a gray downWith Danish barrows ; and a hazelwood,By autumn nutters haunted, flourishesGreen in a cuplike hollow of the down.[...]

The Small House at Allington, Volume 2


Anthony Trollope - 1864
    He wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day. In 1867 Trollope left his position in the British Post Office to run for Parliament as a Liberal candidate in 1868. After he lost, he concentrated entirely on his literary career. While continuing to produce novels rapidly, he also edited the St Paul's Magazine, which published several of his novels in serial form. His first major success came with The Warden (1855) - the first of six novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire. The comic masterpiece Barchester Towers (1857) has probably become the best-known of these. Trollope's popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a good reputation. In particular, critics generally acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece. In all, Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, as well as dozens of short stories and a few books on travel.