World Literature

A bored aristocrat rejects a young woman’s love, kills his best friend in a pointless duel, and years later realises exactly what he threw away — told entirely in verse.

A jealous husband murders his wife over a piece of music in Tolstoy’s ferocious, autobiographical attack on marriage, lust, and himself.

A desperate miners’ strike in northern France spirals into violence and starvation, in Zola’s brutal, still-shocking portrait of industrial poverty.

A pious fraud worms his way into a wealthy household and nearly makes off with the wife, the daughter, and the family fortune, in Molière’s most notorious comedy.