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1) Bleak House
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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...
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This grand old childhood classic relates a small-town boy's pranks and escapades with humor and wisdom that appeal to readers of every age. In addition to his everyday stunts (searching for buried treasure, trying to impress the adored Becky Thatcher), Tom experiences a dramatic turn of events when he witnesses a murder, runs away, and returns to attend his own funeral and testify in court.
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1220L
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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,...
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A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.
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Story of Egdon Heath and Eustacia Vye in late nineteenth century Wessex, England. Guy Fawkes night, Diggory Venn, a reddleman dyed red from his trade, transports a young woman, Thomasin Yeobright, to her aunt's house on Egdon Heath. Despite Venn's love for the sweet-natured Thomasin, he agrees to secure the man of her choice, the fickle innkeeper Damon Wildeve, who delayed his marriage to Thomasin earlier that day. Wildeve is still enchanted by the...
6) The prince
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"The Prince" is the most controversial book about winning power - and holding on to it - ever written. Machiavelli's tough-minded, pragmatic argument that sometimes it is necessary to abandon ethics to succeed made his name notorious. Yet his book has been read by strategists, politicians and business people ever since as the ultimate guide to realpolitik. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? How do...
7) The jungle
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1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial...
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness ..." The most famous and possibly the most popular of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities shows a master of dramatic narrative extracting gold from the ore of history. If the bloody tableau of the French Revolution were...
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A tour of Italy takes young Lucy Honeychurch out of her predictable life in Edwardian England and places her into a new world that even her chaperoning spinster aunt cannot control. Encountering everything from unlikely traveling companions to street violence, Lucy faces the greatest challenge in understanding her own shifting emotions toward a most unsuitable suitor.
11) O pioneers!
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The first of Cather's renowned prairie novels--a story that expresses Cather's conviction that "the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman". When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie.
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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...
13) Ethan Frome
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On a poor farm near Starkfield in western Massachusetts, Ethan Frome struggles to wrest a living from the land, unassisted by his whining and hypochondrialcal wife Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie Silver is left destitute, and only place she can go is Ethan's farm. An embittered and man and an enchanting young woman meeting in such circumstances unleash predictable consequences as passions are aroused between the three protagonists
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"First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values, replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history.""--BOOK JACKET....
15) Dubliners
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The sisters -- An encounter -- Araby -- Eveline -- After the race -- Two gallants -- The boarding house -- A little cloud -- Counterparts -- Clay --A Painful Case -- Ivy Day in the Committee Room -- A Mother -- Grace -- and perhaps the most welL-known of all the stories (and the longest): The Dead.
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Jane Eyre (originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London, England, under the pen name "Currer Bell." The first American edition was released the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood,...
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"Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me." With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester wears a scarlet "A" upon her breast, the sign of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name, her husband begins his vindictive search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of...
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"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...
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A young man's quest for eternal youth and beauty ends in scandal, depravity and death. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The picture of Dorian Gray was a...
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Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the...
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