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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...
2) Bleak House
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Summary
Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
Author
Summary
A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's great historical novel, set against the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author's novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores...
Author
Summary
"Silas Marner is a weaver who lives in a small English village. After being betrayed by a close friend, Silas moves to the village of Raveloe and becomes a recluse. He spends his days weaving and working to save money, until he finds a little girl in his house one night. As he comes to love her as his own daughter, he discovers the joys of family and friendship, despite the trials and tribulations that ensue."-- Amazon.com.
6) Roughing it
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Summary
Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. A hilarious account of how the author tried finding wealth in the rocks of Nevada, it was published before his most famous works and shows why he would grow to become one of the most beloved American writers of all time. The story follows many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to...
Author
Summary
Henry James' story of a pair of adulterous lovers who are married, respectively, to a rich American collector of European art and to his inexperienced daughter provides--beyond its expensive, burnished, beautifully appointed exteriors--an understanding of the rises and betrayals inherent in society that is unparalleled in literature.
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Series
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"'As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream.'" "So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. An acknowledged classic of the heroic Puritan tradition, and a founding text in the development of the English novel, The Pilgrim's Progress has inspired readers for over three centuries. The...
Author
Series
Everyman's library. Fiction
Everyman's library volume no. 325
Everyman's library volume no. 326
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Everyman's library volume no. 325
Everyman's library volume no. 326
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Summary
Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother,...
10) The Oregon Trail
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Summary
The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. His detailed description of the journey, set against the vast majesty of the Great Plains, has emerged through the generations as...
11) The idiot
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Series
Summary
"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...
Author
Summary
A saintly Black man endures the depredations of slavery and the torments of a cruel overseer.
Mr. Shelby is a considerate master, but to pay off debts he must sell Tom to Haley, a slave trader. Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's servant, fearing that her son Harry will also be sold to Haley, escapes to Ohio taking Harry with her. St. Clare purchases Tom from Haley after Little Eva befriends the pious slave. Eva dies from an illness, and St. Clare decides to free...
Author
Summary
Dorian Gray is arrogant. He is pompous, selfish, devastatingly narcissistic, and for much of his life he has never had to think twice about the ramifications of his actions.When the arrival of artist Basil Hallard forces Gray to confront his deepest insecurities, Dorian's most vulnerable self is imminently revealed. After having traded his righteousness for riches, Dorian Gray becomes faced with many regrettable truths he must learn to tackle head...
Author
Series
Wessex novels volume I-Novels of character and environment
Barnes & Noble classics
New York Public Library collector's edition
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Barnes & Noble classics
New York Public Library collector's edition
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Summary
'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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Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfless devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the stunted, lecherous and demonic money-lender Daniel Quilp, the shop is seized and they are forced to flee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven. Dickens's portrayal of the innocent, tragic Nell made The Old Curiosity Shop an instant...
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An enduring tale of love, desire, and the universal longing both to leave one's home and to return to it, this novel is one of Hardy's greatest and most affecting works. Hardy's passionately drawn characters and his vivid rendering of their valiant but ultimately ineffective struggle in destiny's web result in a masterpiece of melancholy brilliance.
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Summary
Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....
20) Dracula
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Summary
First published in 1897, Dracula by Bram Stoker has become the standard against which all other vampire stories are compare and the inspiration for countless film and stage adaptations. Indeed, the name "Dracula" has been synonymous with the Undead for at least a century, and the original novels till has the power to chill. Come then to Castle Dracula, hidden in the forbidding peaks of the Carpathian Mountains, where an undying creature of evil casts...
