Catalog Search Results
1) Hedda Gabler
Author
Summary
Henrik Ibsen's 1890 drama Hedda Gabler is one of the Norwegian playwright's best-known works and boasts one of the greatest female lead roles in the history of theatre. A new bride, Hedda is bored and disillusioned with her marriage. The reappearance of Eilert, her former lover and recovering alcoholic writer creates havoc in her own marriage to George, a sober academic. When Hedda and George come into possession of the only copy of Eilert's explosive...
Author
Summary
A native woman working in the little cultivated patch just outside the palisade which surrounded the mission was the first to see them. Her scream penetrated to the living room of the little thatched bungalow where the Rev. Sangamon Morton sat before a table. He had heard such screams before. The one thing always uppermost in his mind and the one, great, abiding terror of their lives there in the midst of the savage African jungle was the Wakandas....
Author
Formats
Summary
The Worm Ouroboros (1922) is a high fantasy novel by E. R. Eddison. Inspired by the Norse sagas and medieval history, Eddison crafted an epic story of magic, adventure, romance, and war. Praised by New York Times critic Edwin Clark as a novel that "transcends all ordinary life," The Worm Ouroboros is frequently named among the greatest works of fantasy fiction ever produced. At their palace in Demonland, Lord Juss, his brothers Goldry and Spitfire,...
4) The Vampyre
Author
Summary
Noted as one of the first pieces of literature to feature vampirism effectively, The Vampyre follows the adventures of a wealthy young man named Aubrey who befriends a mysterious, suave nobleman named Lord Ruthven. As Aubrey begins to realize just how dangerous Lord Ruthven is, he discovers that his beloved sister is in the monster's sights. A product of a competition that also produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this classic gothic novella became...
Author
Formats
Summary
Brother Cadfael discovers a murder amid the wreckage of Shrewsbury Castle in this mystery series featuring “a colorful and authentic medieval background” (Publishers Weekly).
In the summer of 1138, war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud takes Brother Cadfael from the quiet world of his garden into a battlefield of passions, deceptions, and death. Not far from the safety of the abbey walls, Shrewsbury Castle falls,...
In the summer of 1138, war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud takes Brother Cadfael from the quiet world of his garden into a battlefield of passions, deceptions, and death. Not far from the safety of the abbey walls, Shrewsbury Castle falls,...
Author
Series
Summary
James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, Wormold must at least pretend to know what he's doing. Soon, he's apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country...
Author
Summary
A novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, featuring some of Faulkner's most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horesemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancentry.
Author
Series
Chronicles of Brother Cadfael volume 1
Summary
The "irresistible" and "compelling" first novel in the historical mystery series featuring a Welsh Benedictine monk in the twelfth century (The Washington Post).
A Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in western England, Brother Cadfael spends much of his time tending the herbs and vegetables in the garden—but now there's a more pressing matter. Cadfael is to serve as translator for a group of monks heading to...
A Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in western England, Brother Cadfael spends much of his time tending the herbs and vegetables in the garden—but now there's a more pressing matter. Cadfael is to serve as translator for a group of monks heading to...
Author
Summary
A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South." The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American...
Author
Summary
A collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino's approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature
Reading, writing, translating, the avant-garde and tradition, the fate of the novel: these are just some of the themes of The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, forewords, articles, interviews, notes, and other occasional pieces, this work displays Calvino's remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp...
Author
Series
Summary
Presents a satirical drama about Satan's visit to Moscow, where he learns that the citizens no longer believe in God. He decides to teach them a lesson by perpetrating a series of horrific tricks. Combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem.
Author
Summary
Driven by an insatiable thirst for power, Doctor Faustus chooses to make the ultimate sacrifice to become an all-knowing practitioner of traditional and supernatural arts. He enters an agreement with Lucifer, trading his soul for unbridled access to a catalog of mystical spells.
Doctor Faustus signs a contract ensuring 24 years of service from the demon Mephastophilis. In exchange, Lucifer will own his soul for all of eternity. Faustus immediately...
Author
Summary
Never, even in his most optimistic moments, had he visualised a scene of this nature himself in one arm-chair, a police officer in another, and between them ... a mystery. The Reverend Dodd, vicar of the quiet Cornish village of Boscawen, spends his evenings reading detective stories by the fireside but heaven forbid that the shadow of any real crime should ever fall across his seaside parish. But the vicar s peace is shattered one stormy night when...
15) The Landlady
Author
Summary
Generally considered something of a departure for Dostoyevsky, The Landlady was first published in 1847, when most of the author's classic novels were still in his future. Set in Saint Petersburg, the novella tells of a brooding, reclusive scholar, Vasily Mikhailovich Ordynov, who develops an obsession with a young woman, Katerina. After encountering Katerina and her much-older husband at a church service, Ordynov contrives to become a lodger at their...
16) Address unknown
Author
Summary
A rediscovered classic and international bestseller that recounts the gripping tale of a friendship destroyed at the hands of Nazi Germany
In this searing novel, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor brings vividly to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler is coming to power.
Originally...
Author
Series
Summary
Ingersoll Lockwood invented the fictional character Baron Trump in 1890 for a two-part sci-fi/fantasy series about a privileged boy who undertakes a sequence of fantastic voyages. The style of the Baron Trump series-a mix of fantasy and young-reader-oriented science fiction-anticipated and may have influenced L. Frank Baum's Oz series. The second in that series, Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey, describes Baron's trip to the earth's interior...