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Mormon elders in the town of Cottonwoods pressure the widow Jane Withersteen to remarry so that her lands and herds will remain in their control. Gradually they frighten away most of her cowboys, and rustlers steal away her cattle, but the gunfighter Lassiter stands by her as the inevitable confrontation draws near.
2) Ethan Frome
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A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...
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The story is that of the first thirty years of Philip Carey's life. Through Philip's intelligent and remarkably clear eyes one sees an English school, a German University, a colony of artistic failures in Paris, a dreary business house in London, a large hospital and a village on the British coast. All these places, and many more, come as close to the reader as they did to Philip. It is an intensely personal story. One suffers with the sensitive boy...
5) Summer
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Originally born in an impoverished community, Charity's parents sought out the most educated man in the nearby New England town to raise their daughter. After being surrendered to a lawyer named Royall, Charity was raised comfortably by Mr. Royall and his wife. However, when Mrs. Royall tragically passes away, Charity's relationship with Royall is threatened. After his wife's death, Royall begins to feel sexually attracted to Charity, and when she...
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This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the...
7) Dubliners
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Fifteen stories evoke the character, atmosphere, and people of Dublin at the turn of the century.
10) Of mice and men
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Tells a story about the strange relationship of two migrant workers, who are able to realize their dreams of an easy life until one of them succumbs to his weakness for soft, helpless creatures and strangles the farmer's wife. Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.
11) Finnegans wake
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This early work by James Joyce was originally published in 1939 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Finnegans Wake' is a an experimental novel of comic fiction. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses',...
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First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet...
13) Cannery row
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Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his...
14) The red pony
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The classic story of a boy's journey to manhood under the joys and hardships of ranch life, focused around the life and death of his red pony.
15) The pearl
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Terrible events follow the discovery of a magnificent pearl by a poor Mexican fisherman.
17) East of Eden
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
18) Lucky Jim
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First published in 1954, this book is a hilarious satire of British university life. It is a young man's book, in fact a book of two young men. They are not exactly angry young men, but they are extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they graduated from both Oxford University and World War II to find themselves in an England in terminal decline. It has lost overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in...
19) Sweet Thursday
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"In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that is just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of "Cannery Row", the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears - from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter....