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The political awakening of a migrant worker in northern France leads to a coal-mining strike in this masterpiece of nineteenth-century French literature.

Former railway worker Étienne Lantier has come to the bleak town of Montsou in search of work. Befriending a coal miner, he soon takes a job pushing carts into the Voreux mine. Though he finds a place of respect among his fellow workers, Lantier begins to see how unacceptable their life of poverty, illness, and hunger truly is. As his political idealism takes shape, he inspires a strike that will bring both suffering and hope to Montsou.

First published in 1885, Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s celebrated Les Rougon-Macquart sequence. It combines an uncompromising depiction of working conditions in northern France with an inspiring evocation of love, community, and the human spirit.

The creator of Winnie-the-Pooh shares his musings on some of the matters of his day in this delightful collection of essays, short stories, and poems.

Not That It Matters is “a collection of essays from the end of that extraordinary silver age of English belles-lettres at the turn of the last century, when men such as Shaw and Belloc earned their daily bread by scribbling in newspapers and magazines about anything they could scrape a thousand or so words out of: socialism, dogs, the weather, how they celebrated Christmas, capital punishment, Wagner. For those who like this sort of thing, this volume is very nearly perfect. There are pieces on snobbery, oranges, cricket, bad fiction, ‘Smoking as a Fine Art’ (‘My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight’), chess, thermometers, Holy Writ (‘Isaiah was the ideal author. . . . He kept to one style’), and—prophetically—those bores who fetishize ‘good brown ale’” (National Review).

Following Ten Years Later, the fifth volume of this adventure saga chronicles a tale of intrigue and romantic rivalry in the court of Louis XIV.

With The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas introduced the world to the immortal hero D’Artagnan and the inseparable trio of king’s musketeers: Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. Their many escapades—full of swordfights, derring-do, and chivalry—came to define the swashbuckler genre of adventure fiction.

In Louise de la Vallière, Dumas continues the suspense following the wedding of the Duke of Orleans to Princess Henrietta of England. Raoul de Bragelonne seeks to marry Henrietta’s maid of honor, Louise. But the king has his own designs for the young maid. Meanwhile, as court rivalries escalate, Aramis learns of a secret prisoner held in the Bastille whose identity could change the course of history.

The author of Sea and Sardinia and Mornings in Mexico shares essays on his travels to Germany, Austria, and Italy.

D. H. Lawrence first left England in 1912 and almost immediately began recording his reaction to foreign cultures. Many of those writings became a series of travel articles intended to be published in newspapers; two of them are published here for the first time, deemed too anti-German at the time. Other essays were modified and added to even more observations for Lawrence’s first travel book, Twilight in Italy, published in 1916. Shaped by the atmosphere of the War, and its rampant anxieties, these essays are imbued with Lawrence’s intellectual daring and confidence, which raise them above a conventional travel book.