This enduring classic tells of the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship’s surgeon who becomes a castaway in strange and faraway lands. Shipwrecked upon the shores of Lilliput, he encounters the six-inch-high Lilliputians, whose petty wars, civil strife, and vanities are human follies so reduced in scale as to be rendered ridiculous. From there he travels on to Brobdingnag, where he finds himself surrounded by crude giants who cannot appreciate his abstract intellect and prefer to display him as a curiosity. Further voyages take Gulliver to the floating island of Laputa, a land of intellectuals who are ignorant of practical life, and to the Island of Sorcerers, who share with him the lies of history. Finally, he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and gentle horses served by degenerate humanlike creatures. Gulliver’s travels are entertaining adventures that also offer him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Both an amusing fantasy and a devastating satire of society, Gulliver’s Travels is as witty and relevant in our own age of hypocrisy and irony as it was in Swift’s eighteenth century.

Beneath the surface of this enchanting fantasy lurks a devastating critique of human malevolence, stupidity, greed, vanity, and short-sightedness. A brilliant combination of adventure, humor, and philosophy,Gulliver’s Travelsis one of literature’s most durable masterpieces.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell’s great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold. Here are the characters that have become symbols of passion and desire: darkly handsome Rhett Butler and flirtatious Scarlett O’Hara. Behind them stand their gentler counterparts: Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton. As the lives and affairs of these absorbing characters play out against the tumult of the Civil War, Gone With the Wind reaches dramatic heights that have swept generations of fans off their feet. Having lived in Atlanta for many years, narrator Linda Stephens has an authentic ear for the dialects of that region. Get ready to hear Gone With the Wind exactly as it was written: every word beautifully captured in a spectacular unabridged audio production.

Published in 1948, this cautionary tale follows a lone protagonist who struggles under the rule of a repressive totalitarian government. Set in a future version of England, called Airstrip One, the novel is famous for its imagined language that conjures a cruelly cynical authoritarian regime. One of the most popular novels in the English language, it is part political thriller and part science fiction, and it established the word Orwellian to describe official deception, unwarranted surveillance, and revisionist history by the state.

First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.

This Pulitzer Prize–winning classic tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers, but they will soon meet their own downfall.

Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls.

Allan Quatermain and a group of fellow adventurers set out to find a missing member of their party. This is the beginning of their adventures in an unfamiliar and unexplored region of inner Africa. The first adventure novel to take place in Africa, King Solomon’s Mines achieved wide-spread popularity as soon as it was published in 1885.

An English scientist, known only as the Time Traveler, constructs a machine that allows him to move back and forth through different periods of time. Testing this machine, the man travels forward to AD 802,701. Here he discovers a lazy, non disciplined group of people who do not seem interested in anything. Thinking he has seen all he needs for his research, he decides to travel back home. Upon returning to where he left his time machine, he discovers an intelligent, violent group of people called the Morlocks, have stolen it. Seeing that this futuristic society has more secrets than he realized, the Time Traveler must find his machine and travel back to his time before an untimely end at the hands of the Morlocks.