A collection of tales told by Scheherazade to amuse the cruel sultan and stop him from executing her as he had his other daily wives.

Stories deal with an unusual garden, an enormous library, authorship, language, memory, philosophy, and the art of writing.

Embittered by a false accusation, disappointed in friendship and love, the weaver Silas Marner retreats into a long twilight life alone with his loom ... and his gold. Silas hoards a treasure that destroys his spirit until fate steals it from him and replaces it with a golden-haired child. Where she came from, who her parents were, and who really stole the gold are the secrets that fill this moving tale of guilt and innocence. A moral allegory of...

Often considered the foundation of political liberalism, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was first published anonymously in 1689, in the wake of England's Glorious Revolution. In The First Treatise of Government, Locke refutes the idea of divine monarchy, while The Second Treatise of Government articulates Locke's philosophy of government, which he based upon his theories of natural rights and the social contract. In Locke's view, governments'...

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature - the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each...