Meet the charming and cunning Becky Sharp, insinuating upward through the social ranks with the fervor of Napoleon plowing through Europe, and the subtlety of a butterfly. More so than any other picaresque character, Becky Sharp's name has become synonymous with a gold-digging, amoral, opportunistic social charmer who is also shrewd and strong-a portrait of a complex woman of her time. She is the anti-heroine you love to hate, and yet at the same...

A little farm girl named Dorothy and her pet dog, Toto, get swept away into the Land of Oz by a Kansas cyclone. Upon her arrival, she is hailed as a sorceress, liberates a living Scarecrow, meets a man made entirely of tin, and a Cowardly Lion. But all Dorothy really wants to know is how she can return home. The ruler of Oz, the great Wizard, who resides in an Emerald City, may be the only one powerful enough to help her.

A classic of American realism, A Son of the Middle Border (1917) is the true coming-of-age odyssey of a farm boy who—informed by the full brute force of a homesteaders' life on the vast unbroken prairie—would become a preeminent American writer of the early twentieth century. Pulitzer Prize winner Hamlin Garland's captivating autobiography recounts his journey from a rural childhood to the study of literature and the sciences in Boston,...

When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017-revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)-critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other great...

A refugee of the Great War, Poirot is settling in England near Styles Court, the country estate of his wealthy benefactress, the elderly Emily Inglethorp. When Emily is poisoned and the authorities are baffled, Poirot puts his prodigious sleuthing skills to work. Suspects are plentiful, including the victim's much younger husband, her resentful stepsons, her longtime hired companion, a young family friend working as a nurse, and a London specialist...

Michael Fontaine is professor of classics at Cornell University. His books include How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing (Princeton) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy. Timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audience Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome's greatest politicians,...

How you can learn to focus like a monk without living like one Distraction isn't a new problem. We're also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons of distraction at bay. But rather than surrender to the meandering of their minds, they developed powerful strategies to improve their attention and engagement....