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Author
Summary
In the most seminal slave narrative ever written, Frederick Douglass writes, "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom." Reading this narrative is to witness...
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Paradise Lost is the greatest epic poem in English literature, and Milton's Satan one of its most compelling figures. The controversy has been exceeded only by its tremendous influence: countless masters of English verse have paid homage to Milton and Paradise Lost. A profound meditation on the role of man under God, Pardise Lost is essential reading.
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A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...
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"Two Years Before the Mast is a remarkable book, part travelogue and part seafaring adventure. A great look at what life was really like on the merchant sailing ships of the first half of the 19th century, Two Years Before the Mast is also part suspense yarn, with the hero's return to his native land in serious doubt due to events beyond his control. Seen through the eyes of young man in his late teens who looks for both a cure for his measles and...
5) Utopia
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"In his most famous and controversial book, Utopia, Thomas More imagines a perfect island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and all property is communal. Through dialogue and correspondence between the protagonist Raphael Hythloday and his friends and contemporaries, More explores the theories behind war, political disagreements, social quarrels, and wealth distribution and imagines the day-to-day lives...
6) The inferno
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"Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang has translated the Inferno at a moment when popular culture is so prevalent that it has even taken Dante, author of the fourteenth-century epic poem The Divine Comedy, and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. She?s matched...