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Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house,...
2) My 'Antonia
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JJim and Antonia meet as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Antonia stays at home, dedicating herself to her farm and family. As the years roll by, Jim will come to view Antonia as the embodiment of the prairie itself - tough, spirited and enduring, despite the hardness and loneliness of pioneer life. Willa Cather's beautiful novel is a celebration...
4) Rebecca
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The unassuming young heroine of Rebecca finds her life changed overnight when she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome and wealthy widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Rescuing her from an overbearing employer, de Winter whisks her off to Manderley, his isolated estate on the windswept Cornish coast--but there things take a chilling turn. Max seems haunted by the memory of his glamorous first wife, Rebecca, whose legacy is...
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Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that was now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...
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While on a trip in 1928 to visit her son, Mrs. Moore, accompanied by her son's fiancée, becomes appalled at the treatment of the Indians by the ruling British government. Later, they befriend a native Indian who, over-stepping the accepted norms of his culture, invites the two ladies on an excursion. In a strange turn of events, he is accused of attempting to rape the young girl.
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Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and,...
8) Roughing it
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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...
9) Kim
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Kimball O?Hara grows up an orphan in the walled city of Lahore, India. Deeply devoted to an old Tibetan lama but involved in a secret mission for the British, Kim struggles to weave the strands of his life into a single pattern. Kim and the holy man roam about India. Kim?s intimate knowledge of India makes him a valuable asset to the English Secret Service, in which he wins renown while still a boy. Charged with action and suspense, yet profoundly...
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Originally written in the 1880s and published posthumously in 1903, a semiautobiographical novel examines the complex relationships that exist in the Pontifex family as they reflect the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Victorian England. Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex...
13) Twice-told tales
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The stunning collection of short fiction that established Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the most powerful and provocative artists in nineteenth-century America Dr. Heidegger invites four friends to witness an experiment. As the impoverished merchant Mr. Medbourne, the gout-ridden sinner Colonel Killigrew, the ruined politician Mr. Gascoigne, and the aged widow Wycherly watch, Heidegger places an old rose in a vase filled with water drawn from the...
14) Adam Bede
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The stern and highminded hero, Adam Bede, loves the vain and selfish Hetty Sorrel, but their happiness is ruined when Hetty is seduced by a young squire.
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"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The...
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As a boy Amory Blaine never has to think much about his future. Born into wealth, he spends his childhood traveling the country with his beloved socialite mother, relying on his intelligence and good looks to open doors. As Amory drifts from a pleasant if aimless childhood to a pleasant if aimless adulthood, he begins to crave something more than idle intellectual pursuits and love affairs; but determining what this something is amidst the bright,...
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In Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days", Phileas Fogg, a solitary British gentleman of the Victorian era wagers that he can circumnavigate the globe in under 80 days. With his french manservant, Passepartout, Fogg embarks on a great adventure taking him through Egypt, India, the South Pacific, San Francisco and the Great Plains of the United States. But will he succeed and collect on his bets? One of the best-loved works by the French adventure...
18) The sea - wolf
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Jack London's 1904 novel "The Sea Wolf" is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". However his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to do...
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As Moll Flanders struggles for survival amid the harsh social realities of seventeenth-century England, there is but one snare she is determined to avoid--the deadly snare of poverty. On the twisting path that leads from her birth in Newgate Prison to her final prosperous respectability, love is regarded as worth no more than its weight in gold; and such matters as bigamy, incest, theft, and prostitution occasion but a brief blush before they are...
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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...