The catalog

One hundred fifty-four sonnets, first published in 1609 — meditations on beauty, time, love, and the strange immortality of verse. One a day, as they were meant to be savored.

A retired St. Petersburg civil servant — forty, friendless, and ferociously articulate — turns to the reader to explain why he will not be cured. Published in 1864 and often called the first existentialist novel, Dostoevsky's short masterpiece moves in two parts: a philosophical confession from the “underground,” then the mortifying misadventures that sent him there.

Five daughters, an entailed estate, and a rich, single newcomer at Netherfield Park: the most beloved comedy of manners in the language. Elizabeth Bennet's quick wit collides with Mr. Darcy's pride in Austen's sparkling 1813 masterpiece — by turns satirical, romantic, and endlessly quotable.

An Arctic explorer hauls a half-frozen stranger off the ice, and hears the story of his life: a young Genevese scientist, a forbidden experiment, and the being who followed him out of it. Conceived on a stormy night on Lake Geneva when Mary Shelley was eighteen, published in 1818, and often called the first science-fiction novel.

Advice on time, friendship, fear, fortune, and how to live, from Rome's most quotable Stoic — 124 letters written in his last years to his friend Lucilius. Seneca meant them to be read exactly like this: one letter at a time.

The private notebook of a Roman emperor — reminders to himself, written in camp on the Danube frontier, on how to stay calm, fair, and unafraid while running the world. Never meant for publication, and all the more piercing for it.

A stifling Petersburg summer, a pawned watch, and an ex-student with a theory: that an extraordinary man may step over the law if his ends are great enough. Raskolnikov puts the theory to the axe, then spends the rest of Dostoevsky's 1866 masterpiece finding out what it costs — hunted less by the police than by his own mind.