Catalog Search Results
1) Main street
Author
Language
English
Description
"Introduction and notes by Brooke Allen. A fiercely satiric portrait of small-town America, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street created a sensation when it first appeared in 1920. 'If it was not the most important revelation of American life ever made,' wrote Lewis's biographer Mark Shorer, 'it was the most infamous libel upon it.' The story's heroine is Carol Kennicott, a naive college graduate who leaves St. Paul, Minnestoa, to marry a country doctor...
2) Ethan Frome
Author
Language
English
Description
A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The third part of Shakespeare's impressive "Henriad", this play follows "Richard II" and "Henry IV, Part I", and precedes the final play of the tetralogy, "Henry V". Following the events of "Henry IV, Part I", Prince Hal is once again out of favor with his father, the king, who is in his last months of life. In contrast to their relationship in "Part I", Falstaff, the comical criminal, is rejected by Prince Hal. Falstaff and Prince Hal only share...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A masterwork of science fiction that imagines the world not just how it could be, but how it should be. In Boston in the year 1887, Julian West is hypnotized and falls into a deep sleep. He awakens at the dawn of a new millennium in an America where war, crime, and inequality no longer exist. In this brave new world, goods are delivered in the blink of an eye, public kitchens ensure that no one goes hungry, and the retirement age is forty-five. It...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,'...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar as the first of his plays to be performed at the Globe, in 1599. For it, he turned to a key event in Roman history: Caesar's death at the hands of friends and fellow politicians. Renaissance writers disagreed over the assassination, seeing Brutus, a leading conspirator, as either hero or villain. Shakespeare's play keeps this debate alive.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Heart of Darkness: The story of the civilized, enlightened Mr. Kurtz who embarks on a harrowing "night journey" into the savage heart of Africa, only to find his dark and evil soul.
The Secret Sharer: The saga of a young, inexperienced skipper forced to decide the fate of a fugitive sailor who killed a man in self-defense. As he faces his first moral test the skipper discovers a terrifying truth and comes face to face with the secret itself.
12) The idiot
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...
13) Bleak house
Author
Language
English
Description
With their estate entangled in an interminable legal case, the young wards of the court Richard Carstone and Ada Clare are taken into the benevolent care of the kindly John Jarndyce. Ada's companion, the gentle and good-hearted Esther Summerson, is devoted to the old man and, although she loves another, becomes betrothed to him. But behind Esther's supposed orphan past lies a dark secret that leads tragically to deceit, blackmail and murder. And as...
14) Doctor Faustus
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The great Elizabethan tragedy based on the classic German legend of worldly ambition, black magic, and surrender to the devil.
Christopher Marlowe's dramatic interpretation of the Faust legend remains one of the most famous plays of the English Renaissance. It tells the tragic tale of Dr. John Faustus, a brilliant but dissatisfied scholar who conjures the demon Mephistopheles in pursuit of limitless knowledge and power. Through this satanic messenger,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Shakespeare loved to use the device of mistaken identity, and nowhere does he use this convention more skilfully than in Twelfth Night. Viola, surviving a shipwreck, walks ashore at Illyria, and immediately embarks on a gambit to allow her to make her way in a world of men. Dressed as a man, Viola, now Cesario, insinuates herself into the service of the Duke of Illyria, Orsino. Orsino longs for the love of a neighbouring countess, Olivia , who as...
16) Jane Eyre
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Featuring the images of some of the world's most famous stage and film actors, these additions to the all-new Oxford School Shakespeare introduce--and enthrall--young people to one of the greatest writers of all time. This season brings revised editions of five of the Bard's most famous plays--As You Like It, Othello, Hamlet, Love's Labour Lost and The Taming of the Shrew. Designed specifically for students unfamiliar with Shakespeare's rich literary...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties...
19) Villette
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and to be loved." "Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is coloured by her sadness and isolation after the deaths...
20) Dead souls
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Russia's first major novel, and still one of the most popular works of Russian fiction, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls is a comic epic of greed and gluttony that is admired not only for its colorful cast of characters and devastating satire, but also for its moral fervor.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request