Orem Library

Plautus was the single greatest influence on Western comedy. The comedies printed here show him at his best, and Professor Segal's translations keep their fast, rollicking pace intact, making these the most readable and actable versions available.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power...

The struggle which Plato has Socrates recommend to his interlocutors in Gorgias - and to his readers - is the struggle to overcome the temptations of worldly success and to concentrate on genuine morality. Ostensibly an enquiry into the value of rhetoric, the dialogue soon becomes an investigation into the value of these two contrasting ways of life. In a series of dazzling and bold arguments, Plato attempts to establish that only morality can bring...

Overview: The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world. Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable 'appetites' unleashed by the Second Empire (1852-70) and the transformation of the city by Baron Haussmann, the novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for...

When it appeared in 1874, Lady Anna met with little success, and positively outraged the conservative - 'This is the sort of thing the reading public will never stand...a man must be embittered by some violent present exasperation who can like such disruptions of social order as this.' (Saturday Review) - although Trollope himself considered it 'the best novel I ever wrote! Very much! Quite far away above all others!!!' This tightly constructed and...

This sourcebook provides a complete history of Greek myth, telling the story of each of the great families of heroic mythology, and the various adventures associated with the main heroes and heroines, from Jason and Perseus to Heracles and Helen of Troy. Robin Hard's accessible and fluent translation is supplemented by comprehensive notes, a map and full genealogical tables. The introduction gives a detailed account of the Library's sources and situates...

James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of his aunt Jane Austen was published in 1870, over fifty years after her death. Together with the shorter recollections of James Edward's two sisters, Anna Lefroy and Caroline Austen, the Memoir remains the prime authority for her life and continues to inform all subsequent accounts. These are family memories, the record of Jane Austen's life shaped and limited by the loyalties, reserve, and affection of nieces...

This unique volume brings together four of greatest verse comedies covering the best years of the prolific writing career of actor, director, and playwright Molière (1622-73).

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the...