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Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils...
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1030L
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Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a...
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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts...
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Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined...
5) Lord Jim
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When "Lord Jim" first appeared in 1900, many took Joseph Conrad to task for couching an entire novel in the form of an extended conversation - a ripping good yarn, if you like (one critic in The Academy complained that the narrator 'was telling that after-dinner story to his companions for eleven solid hours'). Conrad defended his method, insisting that people really do talk for that long, and listen as well. In fact his chatty masterwork requires...
7) Candide
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In this philosophical fantasy, naive Candide sees and suffers such misfortune that he ultimately rejects the philosophy of his tutor Doctor Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Candide and his companions--Pangloss, his beloved Cunegonde, and his servant Cacambo--display an instinct for survival that provides them hope in an otherwise somber setting. When they all retire together to a simple life on a...
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The Sound and the Fury is the story of the Compson family, a bourgeois Jackson, Mississippi family in the early 1900's. The novel is divided into four sections, each told by a different character. The three Compson sons, Benjy, Quentin and Jason Compson, and the family's black servant, Dilsey Gibson, each have their own section in which they tell their collective story.
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You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", but that ain't no matter.' So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in America's deep South before the Civil War, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of Huck's escape from his brutal father and the relationship that grows between him and Jim, the slave who is...
10) Anna Karenina
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Anna Karenina is a beautiful and intelligent woman, whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties--to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. Her love affair with Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance between Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical...
11) Victory
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Raised by a single Swedish philosopher, Axel Heyst inherits his father's pessimistic view of society. As a child, he is taught about all the dark inclinations of humankind, warping his mind. Axel struggles with these beliefs and the atmosphere of the environment in which he grew up. Because of this, he has a mix of complicated feelings when his father passes away. He decides to leave London and travel the world, which lead him to both adventures and...
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Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.
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Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...
14) Of mice and men
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"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...
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"A swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, it is set in France during the 1620s and richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a whirl of adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance, love, scandal, and suspense. Dumas transforms major and minor historical figures into larger-than-life characters: the brave d'Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the...
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Many critics consider "The Portrait of a Lady" Henry James's finest achievement and Isabel Archer one of the greatest heroines in all literature. An American heiress just arrived in Europe, Isabel is high-spirited and independent. Two eligible suitors, an English aristocrat and an aggressive American, both woo her. She refuses them, but finds herself captivated by the chrarms of Gilbert Osmond, a worthless, tyrannical dilettante. "The Portrait...
18) Nine stories
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The Modern library of the world's best books volume 301
Description
"'...Here are nine of [J.D. Salinger's] stories, and one further reason that they are so interesting, and so powerful seen all together, is that they are paradoxes. From the outside, they are often very funny: inside, they are about heartbreak, and convey it; they can do this because they are pure...'" --
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