Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Description
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...
Author
Series
Description
In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the...
3) East of Eden
Author
Appears on list
Description
Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel 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. Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink...
4) The pearl
Author
Series
Description
"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems" -- P. 4 of cover.
Author
Series
Description
Classic tale of moral degradation concerns the sinister transformation of two innocent children into flagrant liars and hypocrites. The story begins when a governess arrives at an English country estate to look after Miles, aged ten, and Flora, eight. At first, everything appears normal but then events gradually begin to weave a spell of psychological terror. One night a ghost appears before the governess. It is the dead lover of Miss Jessel, the...
6) Vanity fair
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley become friends at Miss Pinkerton's school for girls. Apparently destined to rise to no higher a station in life than as a governess, Becky's beauty, cleverness, and heartlessness cause her fortunes to improve.
Author
Description
In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution, Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence...
Author
Formats
Description
From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of...
Author
Series
Description
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...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
Few works in literature have received as much popular and critical attention as Nobel Laureate William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Since its publication in 1954, it has amassed a cult following, and has significantly contributed to our dystopian vision of the post-war era. When responding to the novel's dazzling power of intellectual insight, scholars and critics often invoke the works of Shakespeare, Freud, Rousseau, Sartre, Orwell, and Conrad....
Author
Series
Description
"On board a ship bound for Natal, adventurer Allan Quatermain meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good. His new friends have set out to find Sir Henry's younger brother, who vanished while seeking King Solomon's legendary diamond mines in the African interior. By strange chance, Quatermain has a map to the mines, drawn in blood, and agrees to join the others on their perilous journey. The travellers face many dangers on their quest - the baking...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination--fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about ...
Author
Series
Description
The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Books
Description
Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Phillips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and envisioning instead mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. Love craft's preeminent interpreter S. T. Joshi presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" and "Rats in the Walls,"...
Author
Formats
Description
Siddhartha's life takes him on a journey toward enlightenment. Afire with youthful idealism, the Brahmin joins a group of ascetics, fasting and living without possessions. Meeting Gotama the Buddha, he comes to feel this is not the right path, though he also declines joining the Buddha's followers. He reenters the world, hoping to learn of his own nature, but instead slips gradually into hedonism and materialism. Surfeited and disgusted, he flees...
Author
Series
Description
"Charles Marlow's journey into the heart of Africa is an odyssey into corruption, absurdity, and folly. He sees rapacious Europeans exploiting the Africans and conspiring against each other. He voyages upstream on a paddle-streamer that comes under lethal attack. He encounters the great idealist, Mr. Kurtz, the genius who seems to represent the best of Europe. But Mr. Kurtz has 'taken a high seat among the devils of the land' and Marlow returns...
18) The moonstone
Author
Series
Description
The Moonstone was published in 1868 and concerns the huge yellow diamond of the title that was once stolen from an Indian shrine. Rachel Verrinder receives the stone as a gift and does not realize that it has been passed to her in a sinister form of revenge by John Herncastle who, it transpires, acquired the moonstone by means of murder and theft. The jewel also brings bad luck. The stone disappears on the very night it is given to Rachel, though,...
19) Persuasion
Author
Series
Description
"Persuasion by Jane Austen. What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she maneuvers in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love...
Author
Series
Description
"Assembling at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a group of pilgrims begin their journey to Canterbury Cathedral. To entertain themselves on the long road, their host suggests that they regale each other with stories, with the teller of the best tale set to earn a free supper. The pilgrims correspond to all sections of medieval society, from the crusading knight to the drunken cook, and their tales span a range of genres, including the comic ribaldry and...