Marco Polo’s voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China. Afterward, he served Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions in the Far East. His subsequent account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions; new customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation, and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with color and immediacy, Marco Polo’s book revolutionized Western ideas about the then-unknown East and remains one of the greatest travel accounts of all time.
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift (with explanatory notes)
A consumately skillful blend of fantasy and realism makes Gulliver's Travels by turns hilarious, frightening, and profound. Swift's alter ego plays tricks on us, and our gullibility uncovers one of the world's most disturbing satires of the human condition.
'Today you can go round the world in eighty days,' says Phileas Fogg. 'Do it, and I pay you 20,000 pounds,' says his friend Stuart. This is the beginning of one of Jules Verne's most exciting stories. Phileas Fogg must get back to London by December 21st or lose all his money. And with the help of his servant, Passepartout, Fogg travels in many ways - from train to elephant - and has some surprising adventures on the way.
A playful literary mystery set in the 1930s and 1990s, Ninochka tells the double tale of two women exiles who are both homesick and sick of home. Tanya, a Russian immigrant living in New York, travels to Paris in an attempt to reconstruct the secret life of Nina B., who was murdered there almost sixty years ago, on the eve of World War II.