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As energetic and diverse as the American life it describes, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has been loved by generations for its celebration of a brash young nation and one man's exuberant spirit. First published at the author's expense in 1955, this collection of poems was revised and enlarged throughout Whitman's lifetime, and is presented here in the final or "Deathbed edition" of 1892.
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This novel, originally written in 1916, published in 1921, explores the lives of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their developing love affairs with Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist. The despair of one sister's relationship contrasts with the happiness of the other's as the four clash in thought, passion, and belief, in their search for a life that is truly complete. The novel is the sequel to The Rainbow....
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Young Henry Fleming had always dreamt of performing heroic deeds in battle. But as a raw recruit in the American Civil War, the reality if one of mental and physical torment. Throughout his first ordeal in action, Henry experiences both fear and self-doubt, and has no idea whether war will make him a coward - or a hero.
5) Dubliners
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Fifteen stories evoke the character, atmosphere, and people of Dublin at the turn of the century.
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Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that was now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there, " wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...
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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.
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This is the story of the savage, tormented foundling Heathcliff, who falls wildly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other. A book of great power and strength, it is filled with the raw beauty of the moors and an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women. It is an understanding made even more extraordinary by the fact that...
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Absalom! Absalom! is William Faulkner’s major work—his most important and ambitious contribution to American literature. In the dramatic texture of this story of the founding, flourishing and decay of the plantation of Sutpen's Hundred, and of the family that demonic Stephen Sutpen brought into the world a generation before the Civil War, there rises the lament of the South for its own vanished splendor. From its magnificent and bold...
10) Anna Karenina
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"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...
11) A bell for Adano
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In 1943, the American Major Victor Joppolo finds himself the civil affairs officer-the mayor-of a small town in Sicily. Equipped with the rulebook, How to Bring American Democracy to Liberated Territories, he sets about bringing choices to a people whose every recent activity had been dictated. Asking them what the town needs most, he is answered: give the town back its spirit-a bell to replace the 700-year-old one that was melted down for bullets....
12) Emma
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"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to...
13) Invisible man
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Summary
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...