Edmond Dantès is a young man about to be made captain of a cargo vessel and marry his sweetheart. But he is arrested at his pre-wedding feast, having been falsely accused of being a Bonapartist. Thrown into the notorious Château d’If prison, he eventually meets an ancient inmate who teaches him language, science, and passes hints of a hidden fortune. When Edmond makes his way out of prison, he plots to reward those who stood by him (his old employer, for one), and to seek revenge on the men who betrayed him: one who wrote the letter that denounced him, one that married his fiancée in his absence, and one who knew Dantès was innocent but stood idly by and did nothing. The Count of Monte Cristo is another of Alexandre Dumas’ thrilling adventure stories, possibly more popular even than The Three Musketeers. Originally serialized in a French newspaper over the course of a year-and-a-half, it was enormously popular after its publication in book form, and has never been out of print since. Its timeless story of adventure, historical drama, romance, revenge, and Eastern mystery has been the source of over forty movies and TV series.

“Call me Ishmael” says Moby Dick’s protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook, and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbor in Nantucket, he signs up for a three-year term without meeting the captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It’s only well into the voyage that Ahab’s thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dick—and the consequences—become clear. The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years traveling the world in the early 1840s. Melville used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopedic quality. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships’ provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted. Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.