Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with...

In the early days of the French Revolution, a young Englishman determines to do the utmost to save the husband of the woman he loves from the guillotine. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities portrays a world on fire, split between Paris and London during the brutal and bloody events of the French Revolution. After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England....

A Russian prince returns to Saint Petersburg after a long absence in Switzerland, where he was undergoing treatment for epilepsy. On the train he meets and befriends a man of low origins. This man becomes the dark counterpart of the inherently good prince; the two can also be seen as Christ- and devil-like figures. Dostoevsky wished to portray an unspoiled man, whose goodness is plunged into the chaos of Saint Petersberg society and a passionate

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Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior décor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly...

Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket.

Thea Kronborg is born into poverty in a small desert town in the American Midwest. One of seven children, she is somehow set apart, a fact recognised by the discerning few, including Ray Kennedy, who longs to marry her but whose fate it is to set her free. With her rugged will and pioneer spirit, Thea carves her way from Moonstone, Colorado, to windy Chicago, from Dresden to New York and a triumphant debut at the Metropolitan Opera. She becomes a...

In her portrait of Myra and in her excquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. 'My Mortal Enemy' is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

Evoking the Jazz-Age world that would later appear in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, this essential Fitzgerald collection contains some of the writer’s most famous and celebrated stories. In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an extraordinary child is born an old man, growing younger as the world ages around him. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a fable of excess and greed, shows two boarding school

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You might think I'd have grown out of getting myself into scrapes now that I'm half past sixteen. But between being vexed by my freckles, taunted by a brazen Jersey cow and kept on my toes by the new twins, Dora and Davy, life at Green Gables is just as eventful as ever. I do try to be a little more grown-up now that I'm a school teacher. The other day I asked the class, 'If you had three candies in one hand and two in the other, how many would you...

Jane, a plain and penniless orphan in nineteenth-century England, accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall and soon finds herself in love with her melancholy employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a man with a terrible secret.