Books in the Vintage Classics series

Rediscover the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry. The pair met when Clare was just six and Henry thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty.Impossible but true.Now adapted into the major Sky TV series, The Time Traveler's Wife is the international bestselling novel of a time-altering love. Henry is a librarian who suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets, finding himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. Meanwhile, Clare is an artist waiting all her life for her great love Henry to appear. In the face of this force neither can prevent nor control, Henry and Clare's struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.'Dark, unpredictable, incredibly clever and a modern romance' Grazia

Ford Madox Ford's novel about the doomed Katharine Howard, fifth queen of Henry VIII, is a neglected masterpiece.Kat Howard-intelligent, beautiful, naively outspoken, and passionately idealistic-catches the eye of Henry VIII and improbably becomes his fifth wife. A teenager who has grown up far from court, she is wholly unused to the corruption and intrigue that now surround her. It is a time of great upheaval, as unscrupulous courtiers maneuver for power while religious fanatics-both Protestant and Catholic-fight bitterly for their competing beliefs. Soon Katharine is drawn into a perilous showdown with Thomas Cromwell, the much-feared Lord Privy Seal, as her growing influence over the King begins to threaten too many powerful interests. Originally published in three parts (The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and The Fifth Queen Crowned), Ford's novel serves up both a breathtakingly visual evocation of the Tudor world and a timeless portrayal of the insidious operations of power and fear in any era.

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na•ve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky's translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy.

Twenty-four of the best short stories by one of the early masters of the form, in the definitive collection edited by acclaimed scholar Newton Arvin.Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century, and some of his most powerful work was in the form of fable-like tales that make rich use of allegory and symbolism. The dark beauty and moral force of his imagination are evident in such enduring masterpieces as "Young Goodman Brown," in which a young man who believes he has witnessed a satanic initiation can never see his pious neighbors the same way again; "Rappaccini's Daughter," about a lovely young girl who has been raised in isolation among dangerous poisons; and "The Birthmark," in which a scientist obsessed with perfection destroys the flaw that makes his otherwise flawless wife both beautiful and human.

A new translation of the ancient Chinese military classic that is widely admired by military and business strategists—with an introduction that provides sweeping historical context, and notes featuring contemporary commentary on Sun Tzu''s wisdom over the centuries.For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has provided leaders with essential tactical and management advice. An elemental part of Chinese culture, it has also become a touchstone in the West for achieving success, whether on the battlefield or in business. This Vintage Classics edition features a brilliant translation by Peter Harris, first published by Everyman''s Library in 2018. Alongside the pithy and powerful ancient text, Harris includes:     • Notes     • A bibliography     • A chronology of Chinese dynasties     • A map     • Extracts from the canon of classical Chinese commentators     • An illuminating introduction on the warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu and the role of The Art of War in history and today

In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for participating in a socialist discussion group. The novel he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, not only brought him fame, but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) depicts brutal punishments, feuds, betrayals, and the psychological effects of confinement, but it also reveals the moments of comedy and acts of kindness that Dostoevsky witnessed among his fellow prisoners. To get past government censors, Dostoevsky made his narrator a common-law criminal rather than a political prisoner, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky's narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. His story is, finally, a profound meditation on freedom: "The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being."

Tolstoy's final work-a gripping novella about the struggle between the Muslim Chechens and their inept occupiers-is a powerful moral fable for our time. Inspired by a historical figure Tolstoy heard about while serving in the Caucasus, this story brings to life the famed warrior Hadji Murat, a Chechen rebel who has fought fiercely and courageously against the Russian empire. After a feud with his commander he defects to the Russians, only to find that he is now trusted by neither side. He is first welcomed but then imprisoned by the Russians under suspicion of being a spy, and when he hears news of his wife and son held captive by the Chechens, Murat risks all to try to save his family. In the award-winning Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, Hadji Murat is a thrilling and provocative portrait of a tragic figure that has lost none of its relevance.

If any writer can be said to have invented the modern short story, it is Anton Chekhov. It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories. The abashed happiness of a woman in the presence of the husband who abandoned her years before. The obsequious terror of the official who accidentally sneezes on a general. The poignant astonishment of an aging Don Juan overtaken by love. Spanning the entirety of Chekhov''s career and including such masterpieces as "Surgery," "The Huntsman," "Anyuta," "Sleepyhead," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," and "The Bishop," this collection manages to be amusing, dazzling, and supremely moving—often within a single page.

The most complete collection available of Willa Cather''s remarkable short fiction, Collected Stories brings together all the stories published in book form during her lifetime along with two additional volumes compiled after her death. These nineteen stories resonate with all the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of fertile land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; and the ways the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.