The Praise of Folly is considered one of the most influential works of literature in Western civilization and one of the catalysts of the Protestant Reformation. It starts as a piece of virtuoso foolery but then moves into some darker orations praising self-deception and madness. Published in 1511, Folly's influence echoed down the subsequent centuries and in part spawned the art of adoxography, the praise of worthless subjects.

1859 Best Seller.

The novel follows the orphaned Beulah from childhood in the Antebellum South through a troubled and stormy struggle for independence.

1867 Best Seller.

A young girl wins the heart of a dissipated man.

Thirty years later reviewers looked back on the book as though it was from an earlier culture altogether.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1911.

Farnol developed the Regency Romance genre. Books in this style invoked the literature and language of the English Regency period, more or less around the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French revolution.

Farnol's first novel, a swashbuckling story of the highroads of Kent in the Regency era, is still regarded as a classic and catapulted him to fame.

The three works presented here are Masterpieces of the art of the short story. The stories range from intimate portrait of a simple servant girl, through to tragic tale of a boy foretold to be a great emperor and cursed to kill his parents.

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.