Mark Twain's first novel about Tom and Huck, one of the world's best-known and best-loved books, is published here with all the original True W. Williams illustrations.

Published to coincide with the 2011 centennial of The Secret Garden's publication, this Penguin Threads edition of the classic children's tale includes cover art by Jillian Tamaki and deluxe french flaps.Commissioned by award-winning Penguin art director Paul Buckley, the Penguin Threads series debuts with cover art by Jillian Tamaki for three gift-worthy Penguin Classics. Sketched out in a traditional illustrative manner, then hand stitched using needle and thread, the final covers are sculpt embossed for a tactile, textured, and beautiful book design that will appeal to the Etsy(tm)-loving world of handmade crafts.The Penguin Classics Deluxe series has been celebrated for its unique packaging and innovative design. The books of the Penguin Threads series will make truly special gifts and will be welcome additions to any craft or literature lover's collection.

An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimed fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. See the other titles in the couture-inspired collection: Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. The Picture of Dorian Gray was a succès de scandale. Early readers were shocked by its hints at unspeakable sins and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, where he is able to indulge his desires while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only Dorian's picture bears the traces of his decadence. A knowing account of a secret life and an analysis of the darker side of late Victorian society. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a disturbing portrait of an individual coming face to face with the reality of his soul.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The most perfect of Jane Austen’s perfect novels begins with twenty-one-year-old Emma Woodhouse comfortably dominating the social order in the village of Highbury, convinced that she has both the understanding and the right to manage other people’s lives–for their own good, of course. Her well-meant interfering centers on the aloof Jane Fairfax, the dangerously attractive Frank Churchill, the foolish if appealing Harriet Smith, and the ambitious young vicar Mr. Elton–and ends with her complacency shattered, her mind awakened to some of life’s more intractable dilemmas, and her happiness assured.Jane Austen’s comic imagination was so deft and beautifully fluent that she could use it to probe the deepest human ironies while setting before us a dazzling gallery of characters–some pretentious or ridiculous, some admirable and moving, all utterly true.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright plagiarisms which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818, Mary Shelley produced English Romanticism's finest prose fiction.

This Third Edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles introduces the highly praised 1983 Clarendon text edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell.The text is fully annotated and includes a separate table of contents for the novel to assist readers in locating specific episodes or passages. Hardy's hand-drawn map of Wessex and the manuscript title page for the first edition of his novel are also included. Hardy and the Novel includes seven poems by Hardy that provide greater insight into his ethos; selections from Michael Millgate's biography of Hardy that depict the relationship between episodes in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and events in the author's life; and excerpts from Grindle and Gatrell's introduction to the 1983 edition that discuss Hardy's revision process in both manuscripts and early printed editions of the novel. Criticism features three contemporary reviews of the novel not printed in the earlier Norton editions, including the first feminist review of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Also new are "A Chat with Mr. Hardy," a hitherto unprinted post-publication interview with the author about his new novel, and five carefully selected critical interpretations. Essays by Elliot B. Gose, Jr., Peter R. Morton, and Gillian Beer address Hardy's debt to Charles Darwin, perhaps the single most important influence on Hardy's thought and imagination; Raymond Williams's essay presents a Marxist perspective; and Adrian Poole discusses the significance of Hardy's wisdom concerning "the trouble men's words have with women and the trouble women have with men's words." A Chronology, new to this edition, and a Selected Bibliography are included.

View our feature on Jane Austen. Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne's family on the brink of financial ruin and his own sister a tenant in Kellynch Hall, the Elliot estate. Al the tension of the novel revolves around one question: Will Anne and Wentworth be reunited in their love? Jane Austen once compared her writing to painting on a little bit of ivory, 2 inches square. Readers of Persuasion will discover that neither her skill for delicate, ironic observations on social custom, love, and marriage nor her ability to apply a sharp focus lens to English manners and morals has deserted her in her final finished work.

H.G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine, first published in 1895, is one part fairy tale, one part love story, one part science fiction, and one part utopia. Readers can enjoy the story on multiple levels and take away something unique to themselves upon finishing the novel. With every turn of the page, we become as little children being read a good night story; for in effect, we are being read to rather than reading ourselves. The story is told through an unnamed narrator, a young member of an informal group of men who meet occasionally at the Time Traveler's house for dinner, drinks, cigars, and conversation. It is no accident that the narrator who tells us the story is the least skeptical, indeed the most credulous of the group, in response to the Time Traveler's claim to have built a Time Machine. We need an optimistic and trusting narrator, for he represents the audacity of hope, the possibility of human endeavor leading to improvement and progress, at a time when the specter of social Darwinism and scientific fatalism had fallen over the western world. The narrator is the one who exclaims, in response to the prospect of traveling into the future, "To discover a society erected on a strictly communistic basis." As humorous and naïve as such a statement sounds to us today, communism was a synonym for utopia in the late nineteenth century. And so we are supposed to identify with the narrator, to suspend our disbelief in the absurd hypothesis of time as the fourth dimension and the fantastical invention of a time machine. During the time when we submit to the power of the story and allow ourselves to be swept away by the fantasy, time machine does exist and time travel is possible.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation–through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes–of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its author’s most loved works. This edition reprints the original Everyman’s introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.