Herman Melville Elizabeth Hardwick List: $19.95 | Your Price: $15.96 add to cart | read more

Hardwick's superb critical interpretation and award-winning novelistic flair reveal a former whaleship deckhand whose voyages were the stuff of travel romances that seduced the public.

		Dante R.W.B. Lewis List: $19.95 | Your Price: $15.96 add to cart | read more

Only R.W.B. Lewis—the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence—could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son.  

		Charles Dickens Jane Smiley List: $19.95 | Your Price: $15.96 add to cart | read more

With the delectable wit, unforgettable characters, and challenging themes that have won her a Pulitzer Prize and national bestseller status, Jane Smiley naturally finds a kindred spirit in the author of classics such as Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. As "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels," Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life.  

		Joseph Smith Robert Remini List: $19.95 | Your Price: $15.96 add to cart | read more

Robert Remini's work on the Jacksonian epoch has won him acclaim as well as the National Book Award. In Joseph Smith, he employs his keen insight and rich storytelling gift to explore one of the period's major figures.  

		Simone Weil Francine du Plessix Gray List: $19.95 | Your Price: $15.96 add to cart | read more

Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality.