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'I hate to be thought men's property in that way'. Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her confident presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and when tragedy ensues,...
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"In The Call of the Wild, a dog named Buck is kidnapped from this idyllic California home to work as a sled dog in the unforgiving Alaskan environment. In White Fang, a wolf dog navigates the world of wild animals and the world of humans--finding violence and loyalty in both. These two action-packed stories by Jack London depict the harshness of nature and the powerful drive to survive despite i all."-- Backcover.
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David Copperfield enjoys an idyllic life with his gentle, widowed mother and his loving nurse, Peggotty. Then tragedy strikes when Mr. Murdstone weds David's mother and drives her to an early grave. Despised by his stepfather, the boy is forced to live in misery and poverty until he runs away to throw himself upon the mercy of his eccentric aunt. Charles Dickens's classic tale of growing up.
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In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can't forget and from the man she can't afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition...
5) One of ours
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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...
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This collection, originally assembled by the author in 1922, features some of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most impressive and recognized pieces of short fiction. Divided into three parts, the tales are a diverse assortment, including the whimsical "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the visceral "May Day," and the adventurous "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
Although he is better known for novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald...
7) A lost lady
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"Written from the perspective of a male narrator, Willa Cather's classic novel is an American version of "Madame Bovary". It is a portrait of a talented woman trapped in the conventions and economic restraints of a marriage. It is the story of a woman who defies expectations, and whose personal changes coincide with the transforming American Frontier. In this work, Willa Cather expressed her profoundly modern feminist views in the life of an ordinary...
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First published in 1925, "The Professor's House" is the profound study of a middle-aged man's unhappiness by critically acclaimed American author Willa Cather. The novel tells the story of its central character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, in three parts. In the first part, the Professor feels that he is losing control over his life and resists the direction it is taking. He is displeased with his family's move to a new house, with his daughters...
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"First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness. As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her...
10) Show boat
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The story of the lives of performers associated with the Cotton Blossom, a steamboat plying the Mississippi River in the latter half of the 19th century.
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In 1851 French Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows-- gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake....
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"Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving, All Passion Spent is the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late. After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane--a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India--everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle...
14) O pioneers!
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"O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie makes her a wealthy landowner." "Willa Cather's second novel is imbued with the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, but it is not merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, O pioneers! also...
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Great Expectations is among the most masterful of Charles Dickens's novels. Displaying extraordinary tragicomic range, Dickens blends an atmosphere of brooding violence and guilt with sharp and often disturbing humor to create a drama charged with the thrilling intensity of a detective story and the poignancy of a spiritual autobiography. Much of the novel's power comes from Dickens's unequaled skill at making even the most wildly eccentric of characters...
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Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end. The Original 1897 Classic. A curious man, wearing a long coat, a wide-brimmed hat, and whose face is entirely swathed in bandages save for an obvious fake pink nose, walks into an English inn to the shock and horror of many of the townspeople. Beakers and chemicals in tow, the man demands his solitude. It’s strange enough as it is until...
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Cary Grant stars as an angel who materializes in answer to the prayers of a harried young bishop, David Niven. Niven's efforts to raise money for a new cathedral have endangered his marriage to beautiful Loretta Young. Grant enters the bishop's household hoping to end the problems plaguing the family, but instead the bishop's neglected wife becomes infatuated with him.