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1984by George Orwell · 328 pages1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia" a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny the novel's hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time. --back cover
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Hamletby William Shakespeare · 400 pagesIn this quintessential Shakespeare tragedy, a young prince's halting pursuit of revenge for the murder of his father unfolds in a series of highly charged confrontations that have held audiences spellbound for nearly four centuries. Those fateful exchanges, and the anguished soliloquies that precede and follow them, probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art. The title role of Hamlet, perhaps the most demanding in all of Western drama, has provided generations of leading actors their greatest challenge. Yet all the roles in this towering drama are superbly delineated, and each of
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Crime and Punishmentby Fyodor Dostoevsky · 448 pagesFrom [wikipedia][1]: Crime and Punishment (Russian: Преступлéние и наказáние, tr. Prestupleniye i nakazaniye; IPA: [prʲɪstʊˈplʲenʲə ɪ nəkɐˈzanʲə]) is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866.[1] It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his "mature" period of writing.[2] Crime and Punishment focuses on the
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Brave New Worldby Aldous HuxleyOriginally published in 1932, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, antiaging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media -- has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 AF (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terri
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Pride and Prejudiceby Jane Austen · 435 pagesWhen Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited, while he struggles to remain 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 to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life. --back cover
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Frankensteinby Mary ShelleyFrankenstein by Mary Shelley. A recommended summer reading selection for grade 12.
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Jane Eyreby Charlotte Bronte · 532 pagesThe novel is set somewhere in the north of England. Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; her time as the governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her time with the Rivers family, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St John Rivers, proposes to her. Will she or will she not marry him?
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The Strangerby Albert Camus*L'Étranger* est le premier roman publié d’Albert Camus, paru en 1942. Il prend place dans la tétralogie que Camus nommera « cycle de l’absurde » qui décrit les fondements de la philosophie camusienne : l’absurde. Le roman a été traduit en soixante-huit langues.
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Belovedby Toni MorrisonToni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a s
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One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 448 pages*Cien años de soledad* es una novela del escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, ganador del Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1982. Es considerada una obra maestra de la literatura hispanoamericana y universal, cumbre del denominado "realismo mágico". Es asimismo una de las obras más traducidas y leídas en español. Narra la historia de la familia Buendía a lo largo de siete generaciones en el pueblo ficticio de Macondo.
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The Handmaid's Taleby Margaret Atwood · 311 pagesOffred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her
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Slaughterhouse-Fiveby Kurt Vonnegut · 288 pagesBilly Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.
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Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad · 72 pagesHeart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written seve
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The Metamorphosisby Franz Kafka · 224 pagesMetamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, with differing interpretations being offered. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cock
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Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro · 288 pagesFrom the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kat
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The Roadby Cormac McCarthy · 287 pagesCormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head
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Things Fall Apartby Chinua Achebe · 209 pagesThings Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold an
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Wuthering Heightsby Emily Bronte · 416 pagesWuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. The novel was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.
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The Picture of Dorian Grayby Oscar Wilde · 252 pages**The Picture of Dorian Gray** is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical *Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine*. The novel-length version was published in April 1891. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray))
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Invisible Manby Ralph Ellison · 581 pagesInvisible Man is the story of a young black man from the South who does not fully understand racism in the world. Filled with hope about his future, he goes to college, but gets expelled for showing one of the white benefactors the real and seamy side of black existence. He moves to Harlem and becomes an orator for the Communist party, known as the Brotherhood. In his position, he is both threatened and praised, swept up in a world he does not fully understand. As he works for the organization, he encounters many people and situations that slowly force him to face the truth about racism and hi
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Oedipus Rexby Sophocles · Theban Plays series · 54 pagesOedipus Rex chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man that becomes the king of Thebes and was always destined from birth to murder his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. The play is an example of a classic tragedy, noticeably containing an emphasis on how Oedipus's own faults contribute to the tragic hero's downfall, as opposed to having fate be the sole cause. Over the centuries, Oedipus Rex has come to be regarded by many as the Greek tragedy par excellence.
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Othelloby William Shakespeare · 314 pagesShakespeare's tragedy of jealousy and suspicion presented scene by scene in comic book format.
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Candideby Voltaire · 94 pagesBrought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism.
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Death of a Salesmanby Arthur Miller · 139 pagesEver since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. he has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. --back cover
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Native Sonby Richard Wright · 504 pagesRight from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.
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The Poisonwood Bibleby Barbara Kingsolver · 576 pagesThe Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author
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Mrs. Dallowayby Virginia Woolf · 197 pagesMrs. Clarissa Dalloway, occupied with the last-minute details of party preparation, finds her thoughts on a very different route through the past.
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The Importance of Being Earnestby Oscar Wilde · 54 pagesSet in England during the late Victorian era, the play's humour derives in part from characters maintaining fictitious identities to escape unwelcome social obligations. It is replete with witty dialogue and satirises some of the foibles and hypocrisy of late Victorian society. It has proved Wilde's most enduringly popular play. - [*Wikipedia*][1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest
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The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevsky · 824 pagesThe Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime and Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, and profligacy. Significantly, the book was on Tolstoy’s bedside table when he died. Readers in every language have since accepted Dostoevsky’s own evaluation of
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Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston · 256 pagesA novel about black Americans in Florida that centers on the life of Janie and her three marriages.
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Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury · 256 pagesSixty years after its publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. "Fahrenheit 451- The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns." Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day w
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The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald · 180 pages<b>THE GREAT GATSBY</b>, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature. --back cover
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The Scarlet Letterby Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pagesA stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time.
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The Catcher in the Ryeby J.D. SalingerStory of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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The Color Purpleby Alice Walker · 288 pagesPublished to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters--one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South--who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life. --back cover
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The Sound and the Furyby William Faulkner · 326 pagesIn many ways this was an experimental novel, using several differing narrative styles. Divided into four parts, the author relates the same episodes from four different viewpoints, using a different style for each. The story concerns various members of a Southern family, once wealthy landowners but now struggling to maintain their reputation.
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A Clockwork Orangeby Anthony BurgessA vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?" T
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The Kite Runnerby Khaled Hosseini · 400 pagesThe unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and po
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Macbethby William Shakespeare · 223 pagesThe play concerns a trusted general who secretly lusts for power. Encouraged by the prophecies of three witches and urged on by his ambitious wife Macbeth commits regicide. Left fearful and superstitious by this desperate act he is driven to a spiralling course of murder and outrage, almost inevitably culminating in his own death. One of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies, Macbeth is ostensibly based on the Scottish king although the story represented in the play bears no relation to historical fact as the true King Macbeth was well respected by his contemporaries. This book includes the her
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Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens · 514 pagesGreat Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens
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The Grapes of Wrathby John Steinbeck · 464 pagesSteinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being forced to work for breadline wages. they begin working as fruit pickers, strike-breakers replacing the people who have been trying to establish a union but their consciences force them to leave.
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A Tale of Two Citiesby Charles DickensAfter eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There, two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine. This edition uses the text as it appeared in its
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Don Quixoteby Miguel de Cervantes · 992 pages*Don Quijote de la Mancha* es una novela escrita por el español Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Publicada su primera parte con el título de *El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha* a comienzos de 1605, es la obra más destacada de la literatura española y una de las principales de la literatura universal. En 1615 apareció su continuación con el título de *Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha.* Es la primera obra genuinamente desmitificadora de la tradición caballeresca y cortés por su tratamiento burlesco. Representa la primera novela moderna y la primera novela p
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The Iliadby Homer · 704 pagesThis long-awaited new edition of Lattimore's Iliad is designed to bring the book into the twenty-first century—while leaving the poem as firmly rooted in ancient Greece as ever. Lattimore's elegant, fluent verses—with their memorably phrased heroic epithets and remarkable fidelity to the Greek—remain unchanged, but classicist Richard Martin has added a wealth of supplementary materials designed to aid new generations of readers. A new introduction sets the poem in the wider context of Greek life, warfare, society, and poetry, while line-by-line notes at the back of the volume offer explanation
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Anna Kareninaby Leo Tolstoy · 838 pagesWhile previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.
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Lord of the Fliesby William Golding · 208 pagesThe classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own nature. Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on m
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The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath · 288 pagesThe Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. (back cover)
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King Learby William Shakespeare · 384 pagesKing Lear divides his kingdom among the two daughters who flatter him and banishes the third one who loves him. His eldest daughters both then reject him at their homes, so Lear goes mad and wanders through a storm. His banished daughter returns with an army, but they lose the battle and Lear, all his daughters and more, die.
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Catch-22by Joseph Heller · Catch-22 series · 523 pagesFifty years after its original publication, *Catch-22* remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time. In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by *Time*, *Newsweek*, the *Modern Library*, and the *London Observer*. Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the m
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The Sun Also Risesby Ernest Hemingway · 256 pages"The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters : Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bull-fighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spirit