Shakespeare's best known play and the most quoted work of the English language.

Hamlet's father is dead and he struggles with the desire for revenge. The play uses this backdrop to explore intrigue, incest, desire, and what is important in life.

Regularly included in lists of the greatest works of all time.

A seminal work of Realism, and one of the most influential novels ever written.

"What is remarkable in Madame Bovary is that its mediocre beings, with their earthbound ambitions and pedestrian problems, impress us, by virtue of the structure and the writing that create them, as beings who are out of the ordinary within their ordinary manner of being." - Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Perpetual Orgy

The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, as she spirals out of control trying to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

An heroic epic poem where Beowulf, a hero of a Germanic tribe from southern Sweden, travels to Denmark to help defeat a monster named Grendel. It is sometimes called "England's national epic". J. R. R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame was a Beowulf scholar and many parallels can also be drawn between Beowulf and The Hobbit. The work has served as the inspiration for many books and films including Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead.

Although Stoker did not invent the vampire, the novel's influence on the popularity of vampires has been singularly responsible for scores of theatrical and film interpretations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Three of the most famous are Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

English seaman Charlie Marlow recounts a journey to his shipmates, a journey up river to the heart of the Congo. Marlow had been tasked to find what had happened to Kurtz who had been an inexplicably productive procurer of ivory until contact was lost. Respected and feared, Kurtz has an aura of mystery and danger that lures Marlow closer and closer until ...