The Collected Stories by Eudora Welt

Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Faulkner's distinctive narrative structures--the uses of multiple points of view and the inner psychological voices of the characters--in one of its most successful incarnations here in As I Lay Dying. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members on the macabre pilgrimage, while Faulkner heaps upon them various flavors of disaster. Contains the famous chapter completing the equation about mothers and fish--you'll see.

Native Son by Richard Wright

Right 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, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The novel is one of Woolf's most successful and accessible experiments in the stream-of-consciousness style. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. A central motif of the novel is the conflict between the feminine and masculine principles at work in the universe.

With her emotional, poetic frame of mind, Mrs. Ramsay represents the female principle, while Mr. Ramsay, a self-centered philosopher, expresses the male principle in his rational point of view. Both are flawed by their limited perspectives. A painter and friend of the family, Lily Briscoe, is Woolf's vision of the androgynous artist who personifies the ideal blending of male and female qualities. Her successful completion of a painting that she has been working on since the beginning of the novel is symbolic of this unification.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

The play is introduced to the audience by Tom as a memory play, based on his recollection of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Amanda's husband left the family long ago, and she remains stuck in the past. Tom works in a warehouse, doing his best to support them. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and spends much of his spare time watching movies in cheap cinemas. Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor for Laura, who spends most of her time with her glass collection. Tom eventually brings Jim home for dinner at the insistence of his mother, who hopes Jim will be the long-awaited suitor for Laura. Laura realizes that Jim is the man she loved in high school and has thought of ever since. He dashes her hopes, telling her that he is already engaged, and then leaves. Tom leaves too, and never returns to see his family again. However, Tom still remembers his sister, Laura.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde brings his enormous gifts for astute social observation and sparkling prose to The Picture of Dorian Gray, his dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. This dandy, who remains forever unchanged—petulant, hedonistic, vain, and amoral—while a painting of him ages and grows increasingly hideous with the years, has been horrifying, enchanting, obsessing, even corrupting readers for more than a hundred years.

Taking the reader in and out of London drawing rooms, to the heights of aestheticism, and to the depths of decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not only a melodrama about moral corruption. Laced with bon mots and vivid depictions of upper-class refinement, it is also a fascinating look at the milieu of Wilde’s fin-de-siècle world and a manifesto of the creed “Art for Art’s Sake.”

The ever-quotable Wilde, who once delighted London with his scintillating plays, scandalized readers with this, his only novel. Upon publication, Dorian was condemned as dangerous, poisonous, stupid, vulgar, and immoral, and Wilde as a “driveling pedant.” The novel, in fact, was used against Wilde at his much-publicized trials for “gross indecency,” which led to his imprisonment and exile on the European continent. Even so, The Picture of Dorian Gray firmly established Wilde as one of the great voices of the Aesthetic movement, and endures as a classic that is as timeless as its hero.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Inspired by transcendentalism, Whitman's immortal collection includes some of the greatest poems of modern times, including his masterpiece "Song of Myself." Shattering standard conventions of symbolism and allegory, it stands as an unabashed celebration of body and nature.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s dark view of society, the somber economics of marriage, and the powerlessness of the unwedded woman in the 1870s emerge dramatically in the tragic novel The House of Mirth. Faced with an array of wealthy suitors, New York socialite Lily Bart falls in love with lawyer Lawrence Selden, whose lack ofmoney spoils their chances for happiness together. Dubious business deals and accusations of liaisons with a married man diminish Lily’s social status, and as she makes one bad choice after another, she learns how venal and brutally unforgiving the upper crust of New York can be.

One of America’s finest novels of manners, The House of Mirth is a beautifully written and ultimately tragic account of the human capacity for cruelty.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, 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. This classic work of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans imprison him and other PoWs in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. During Allied air raids, PoWs and guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm.

For unexplained reasons, Billy has come "unstuck in time." He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with movie star Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories.

Billy travels forward and back in time, reliving occasions of his life, real and fantastic. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture; in his post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s; and in the moment of his murder.

Billy's death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary, a jingoist character who constantly chastizes him for his lack of enthusiasm toward war. At their capture, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. In his deathbed, Weary managed to convince Paul Lazzaro that Billy is to blame for; Paul vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life". Time-traveler Billy, already knows where, when, and how he will be killed: Paul Lazzaro hires someone to shoot him after a speech in a balkanized United States on February 13, 1976.

Candide: Or Optimism by Voltaire

One of the finest satires ever written, Voltaire’s Candide savagely skewers this very “optimistic” approach to life as a shamefully inadequate response to human suffering. The swift and lively tale follows the absurdly melodramatic adventures of the youthful Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunégonde, and tortured by the Inquisition. As Candide experiences and witnesses calamity upon calamity, he begins to discover that—contrary to the teachings of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss—all is perhaps not always for the best. After many trials, travails, and incredible reversals of fortune, Candide and his friends finally retire together to a small farm, where they discover that the secret of happiness is simply “to cultivate one's garden,” a philosophy that rejects excessive optimism and metaphysical speculation in favor of the most basic pragmatism.

Filled with wit, intelligence, and an abundance of dark humor, Candide is relentless and unsparing in its attacks upon corruption and hypocrisy—in religion, government, philosophy, science, and even romance. Ultimately, this celebrated work says that it is possible to challenge blind optimism without losing the will to live and pursue a happy life.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypical American maverick.

Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing "there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."

As Huck learns about love, responsibility, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment when he decides to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to slavery.

Mark Twain defined classic as "a book which people praise and don't read"; Huckleberry Finn is a happy exception to his own rule. Twain's mastery of dialect, coupled with his famous wit, has made Adventures of Huckleberry Finn one of the most loved and distinctly American classics ever written.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order.

Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality.

Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The most famous—and perhaps greatest—novel of all time, Tolstoy’s War and Peace tells the story of five families struggling for survival during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.Among its many unforgettable characters is Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud, dashing man who, despising the artifice of high society, joins the army to achieve glory. Badly wounded at Austerlitz, he begins to discover the emptiness of everything to which he has devoted himself. His death scene is considered one of the greatest passages in Russian literature.

The novel's other hero, the bumbling Pierre Bezukhov, tries to find meaning in life through a series of philosophical systems that promise to resolve all questions. He at last discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems but in the ordinary processes of daily life, especially in his marriage to the novel's most memorable heroine, Natasha.

Both an intimate study of individual passions and an epic history of Russia and its people, War and Peace is nothing more or less than a complete portrait of human existence.

Walden: An Annotated Edition by Henry David Thoreau

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace

“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life andmanners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements.

Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations, Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

The book presents itself as a simple traveler's narrative with the disingenuous title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, its authorship assigned only to "Lemuel Gulliver." The book proper then is divided into four parts where are as follows:

Part 1: A Voyage to Lilliput (big, complex, worse Government than England's)
Part 2: A Vouage to Brobdingnag (small, simple, better Government than England's)
Part 3: A Voyage to Laputa (sensible, scientific, worse Government than England's)
Part 4: A Voyage to the Country of Houyhnhnms (ignorant, natural, better Government than England)

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher

The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife, Emily Shelby, believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them — Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby’s maid Eliza — to a slave trader. Emily Shelby hates the idea of doing this because she had promised her maid that her child would never be sold; Emily's son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he sees the man as his friend and mentor.
When Eliza overhears Mr. and Mrs. Shelby discussing plans to sell Tom and Harry, Eliza determines to run away with her son. The novel states that Eliza made this decision because she fears losing her only surviving child (she had already miscarried two children). Eliza departs that night, leaving a note of apology to her mistress.
While all of this is happening, Uncle Tom is sold and placed on a riverboat, which sets sail down the Mississippi River. While on board, Tom meets and befriends a young white girl named Eva. When Eva falls into the river, Tom saves her. In gratitude, Eva's father, Augustine St. Claire, buys Tom from the slave trader and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans. During this time, Tom and Eva begin to relate to one another because of the deep Christian faith they both share.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The most popular pirate story ever written in English, featuring one of literature’s most beloved “bad guys,” Treasure Island has been happily devoured by several generations of boys—and girls—and grownups. Its unforgettable characters include: young Jim Hawkins, who finds himself owner of a map to Treasure Island, where the fabled pirate booty isburied; honest Captain Smollett, heroic Dr. Livesey, and the good-hearted but obtuse Squire Trelawney, who help Jim on his quest for the treasure; the frightening Blind Pew, double-dealing Israel Hands, and seemingly mad Ben Gunn, buccaneers of varying shades of menace; and, of course, garrulous, affable, ambiguous Long John Silver, who is one moment a friendly, laughing, one-legged sea-cook . . .and the next a dangerous pirate leader!

The unexpected and complex relationship that develops between Silver and Jim helps transform what seems at first to be a simple, rip-roaring adventure story into a deeply moving study of a boy’s growth into manhood, as he learns hard lessons about friendship, loyalty, courage and honor—and the uncertain meaning of good and evil.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The narrative begins just after Tom Joad is paroled from prison for homicide. On his journey home, he meets a now-former preacher, Jim Casy, whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two travel together. When they arrive at his childhood farm home, they find it deserted. Disconcerted and confused, he and Casy go to his Uncle John's home nearby where he finds his family loading a converted Hudson truck with what remains of their possessions; the crops were destroyed in the Dust Bowl and as a result, the family had to default on their loans. With their farm repossessed, the Joads seek solace in hope; hope inscribed on the handbills which are distributed everywhere in Oklahoma, describing the beautiful and fruitful country of California and high pay to be had in that state. The Joads, along with Jim Casy, are seduced by this advertising and invest everything they have into the journey. Although leaving Oklahoma would be breaking parole, Tom decides that it is a risk, albeit minimal, that he has to take.
While en route, the Joad family discovers that all of the roads and the highways are saturated with other families who are also making the same trek, ensnared by the same promise. As the Joads continue on their journey and hear many stories from others, some coming from California, they are forced to confront the possibility that their prospects may not be what they hoped. This realization, supported by the deaths of Grandpa and Grandma and the departure of Noah (the eldest Joad son) and Connie (the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon), is forced from their thoughts: they must go on because they have no choice--there is nothing remaining for them in Oklahoma.
Upon arrival, they find little hope of finding a decent wage, as there is an oversupply of labor and a lack of rights, and the big corporate farmers are in collusion. The tragedy lies in the simplicity and impossibility of their dream: a house, a family, and a steady job. A gleam of hope is presented at Weedpatch, in one of the clean, utility-supplied camps operated by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that tried to help the migrants, but there is not enough money and space to care for all of the needy.
In response to the exploitation of laborers, the workers begin to join unions. The surviving members of the family unknowingly work as strikebreakers on an orchard involved in a strike that eventually turns violent, killing the preacher Casy and forcing Tom Joad to kill again and become a fugitive. He bids farewell to his mother, promising that no matter where he runs, he will be a tireless advocate for the oppressed. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn; however, Ma Joad remains steadfast and forces the family through the bereavement. In the end, Rose of Sharon commits the only act in the book that is not futile: she breast feeds a starving man, still trying to show hope in humanity after her own negative experience. This final act is said to illustrate the spontaneous mutual sharing that will lead to a new awareness of collective values.

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Antigone by Jean Anouilh

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzheritsyn

The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.

Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions -- despair.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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 "bestowinganimation upon lifeless matter," Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises rofound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion follows the adventures of phonetics professor Henry Higgins as he attempts to transform cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a refined lady. The scene in which Eliza appears in high society with the correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is considered one of the funniest in English drama. Like most of Shaw’s work, Pygmalion wins over audiences with wit, a taut morality, and an innate understanding of human relationships.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The play starts with a street brawl between Montagues and Capulets. The Prince of Verona intervenes and declares that further breach of the peace will be punishable by death. Later, Count Paris talks to Lord Capulet about marrying his daughter, but Capulet is wary of the request because Juliet is still only thirteen. Capulet asks Paris to wait another two years and invites him to attend a planned Capulet ball. Lady Capulet and Juliet's nurse try to persuade Juliet to accept Paris' courtship. After the brawl, Benvolio talks with his cousin Romeo, Lord Montague's son, about Romeo's recent depression. Benvolio discovers that it stems from unrequited love for a girl named Rosaline, one of Lord Capulet's nieces. Persuaded by Benvolio and Mercutio, Romeo attends the ball at the Capulet house in hopes of meeting Rosaline. However, Romeo instead meets and falls in love with Juliet. After the ball, in what is now called the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet courtyard and overhears Juliet on her balcony vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of the Montagues. Romeo makes himself known to her and they agree to be married.
With the help of Friar Laurence, who hopes to reconcile the two families through their children's union, they are married secretly the next day. Juliet's cousin Tybalt, offended that Romeo had sneaked into the Capulet ball, challenges him to a duel. Romeo, now considering Tybalt his kinsman, refuses to fight him. Mercutio is incensed by Tybalt's insolence, as well as Romeo's "vile submission", and accepts the duel on Romeo's behalf. Mercutio is fatally wounded and Romeo, angered by his friend's death, pursues and slays Tybalt. The Prince exiles Romeo from Verona for the killing. He also adds that if Romeo returns, "that hour is his last". Lord Capulet, misinterpreting Juliet's grief, agrees to marry her to Count Paris and threatens to disown her when she refuses to become Paris's "joyful bride". When she then pleads for the marriage to be delayed, her mother rejects her. Romeo secretly spends the night in Juliet's chamber, where they consummate their marriage.
Juliet visits Friar Laurence for help, and he offers her a drug that will put her into a death-like coma for "two and forty hours". The Friar promises to send a messenger to inform Romeo of the plan, so that he can rejoin her when she awakens. On the night before the wedding, she takes the drug and, when discovered apparently dead, she is laid in the family crypt.
The messenger, however, does not reach Romeo and, instead, he learns of Juliet's apparent death from his servant Balthasar. Grief-stricken, Romeo buys poison from an apothecary and goes to the Capulet crypt. He encounters Paris who has come to mourn Juliet privately. Believing Romeo to be a vandal Paris confronts him and, in the ensuing battle, Romeo kills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, he drinks the poison. Juliet then awakens and, finding Romeo dead, stabs herself with his dagger. The feuding families and the Prince meet at the tomb to find all three dead. Friar Laurence recounts the story of the two "star-cross'd lovers". The families are reconciled by their children's deaths and agree to end their violent feud. The play ends with the Prince's elegy for the lovers: "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare. It was suggested by "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and written around 1594 to 1596. It portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, their interactions with the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta, and with the fairies who inhabit a moonlit forest.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The first-person narrative follows Holden's experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in Pennsylvania.
Holden shares encounters he has had with students and faculty of Pencey, whom he criticizes as being superficial, or as he would say, "phoney." After being expelled, Holden packs up and leaves the school in the middle of the night following an altercation with his roommate. He takes a train to New York, but does not want to return to his family's apartment immediately, and instead checks into the derelict Edmont Hotel. There he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute; he refuses to do anything with her and tells her to leave, although he pays her for her time. She demands more money than was originally agreed upon and when Holden refuses to pay he is struck by her pimp.
Holden spends a total of two days in the city, characterized largely by drunkenness and loneliness. At one point he ends up at a museum, where he contrasts his life with the statues of Eskimos on display. For as long as he can remember, the statues have been fixed and unchanging. It is clear to the reader, if not to Holden, that the teenager is afraid and nervous about the process of change and growing up. These concerns may largely have stemmed from the death of his brother, Allie. Eventually, he sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are away to visit his younger sister Phoebe, who is nearly the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. Holden shares a fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns's Comin' Through the Rye): he pictures himself as the sole guardian of numerous children running and playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if they wander close to the brink; to be a "catcher in the rye"so to say...
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden drops by to see his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, in the middle of the night, and is offered advice on life and a place to sleep. During his speech on life, Mr. Antolini has a number of "highballs," an alcoholic drink popular at the time. Holden's comfort is upset when he wakes up in the night to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a way that seems "perverty." There is much speculation on whether or not Mr. Antolini was making a sexual advance on Holden, and it is left widely up to the reader whether or not this is true. Holden leaves and spends his last afternoon wandering the city. He later wonders if his interpretation of Mr. Antolini's actions was correct.
Holden intends to move out west, and relays these plans to his sister, who decides she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, instead telling her that he himself will no longer go. Holden then takes Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo, where he watches with a melancholy joy as she rides a carousel, happily reaching for the gold ring on each turn. At the close of the book, Holden decides not to mention much about the present day, finding it inconsequential. He does mention that he'll be attending another school in September, and that he has found himself missing Stradlater, Ackley, and the others--warning the reader that the same thing could happen to them.

Call It Sleep: A Novel by Henry Roth

Call It Sleep is the story of an Austrian-Jewish immigrant family in New York in the early part of the twentieth century. Six-year-old David Schearl has a close and loving relationship with his mother Genya, but his father Albert is aloof, resentful and angry toward his wife and son. David's development takes place between fear of his father's potential violence and the degradation of life in the streets of the tenement slums. After the family has begun settling into their life in New York, Genya's sister Bertha arrives from Austria to stay with them. Bertha's coarse and uninhibited nature offends Albert, and her presence in the home renews and exacerbates the tension in the family's relations.
Listening to conversations between Genya and Bertha, David begins to pick up hints that his mother may have had a passionate affair with a non-Jewish Austrian man before marrying Albert. David imagines the romantic setting "in the corn fields" where the pair would secretly meet. Bertha leaves the Schearl household when she marries her dentist, Nathan. She and Nathan open a candy store where they live with Nathan's two daughters, Polly and Esther.
David begins his religious education and is quickly identified by his rabbi teacher, Reb Yidel, as an exceptional student of Hebrew. David becomes fascinated with the story of Isaiah 6 after he hears the rabbi translate the passage for an older student; specifically, the image of an angel holding a hot coal to Isaiah's lips and cleansing his sin.
During the Passover holiday, David encounters some older truant children who force him to accompany them and drop a piece of zinc onto a live trolley-car rail. The electrical power released from this becomes associated in David's mind with the power of God and Isaiah's coal.
Meanwhile, Albert has taken a job as a milk delivery man. David, accompanying his father one day, sees Albert brutally whip a man who attempts to steal some of the milk bottles, possibly killing him.
David meets and becomes infatuated with an older Catholic boy named Leo. Leo takes advantage of David's friendship, and offers him a rosary - which David believes to have special powers of protection - in exchange for the chance to meet David's step-cousins, Polly and Esther. Leo takes Esther into the basement of the candy store and rapes her.
David is thrown into an agitated state. He goes to Reb Yidel and fabricates a story, telling him that Genya is actually his aunt, his true mother is dead, and that he is the son of her affair with the non-Jewish man. Meanwhile, Polly tells Bertha and Nathan about what Leo did with Esther. As the rabbi goes to the Schearl household to inform Genya and Albert of what David told him, Bertha begs Nathan not to confront Albert about David's role in Leo's actions. Nathan goes anyway, although he fears Albert's wrath as well.
After Reb Yidel relates David's story to Genya and Albert, David arrives at the apartment. Albert begins to reveal what he has suspected about David's birth. He tells Genya that their marriage is a sham, arranged to make one sin cover up the other - her affair, which was kept secret - against his sin, allowing his abusive father to be gored by a bull, widely known in the Austrian village they left. Despite Genya's denials, Albert reaffirms his belief in his version of the story. He declares that David is not his son but the product of Genya's affair.
At that moment, Nathan and Bertha arrive. Nathan hesitates at the moment of speaking his mind under Albert's cold fury, but David steps forward to confess to his parents of his part in what took place. He gives his father the whip that was used on the would-be milk thief. As Albert reaches the height of his enraged frenzy, he discovers the rosary that David possesses, believing it to be a sign that proves his suspicions. Albert makes as if to kill his son with the whip.
As the others restrain Albert, David flees the apartment and returns to the electrified rail. This time, he touches the rail with his foot and receives an enormous electric shock. Incapacitated, he is discovered by nearby tavern patrons and returned home by a policeman. When his parents are informed what happened, Albert appears remorseful and compassionate toward his son for the first time. As his mother takes him into her arms, David experiences a feeling such that "he might as well call it sleep".

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

One of the most beloved heroes of the stage, Cyrano de Bergerac is a magnificent wit who, despite his many gifts, feels that no woman can ever love him because of his enormous nose. He adores the beautiful Roxanne but, lacking courage, decides instead to help the tongue-tied but winsome Christian woo the fair lady by providing him with flowery sentiments andsoulful poetry. Roxanne is smitten—but is it Christian she loves or Cyrano?

A triumph from the moment of its 1897 premiere, Cyrano de Bergerac has become one of the most frequently produced plays in the world. Its perennial popularity is a tribute to the universal appeal of its themes and characters.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Considered one of the greatest war stories ever written -- and one of the classics of antiwar literature -- Remarque's 1929 masterpiece tells the story of young Paul Baumer, who enlists in the German Army in World War I and takes place with his comrades in the trenches.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern fiction.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Following Charles Swann’s opening ruminations about the nature of sleep is one of twentieth-century literature’s most famous and influential scenes:the eating of the madeleine soaked in a “decoction of lime-flowers,” the associative act from which the remainder of the narrative unfurls. After elaborate reminiscences about Swann’s childhood in Paris and rural Combray, Proust describes his protagonist’s exploits in nineteenth-century privileged Parisian society and his obsessive love for young socialite Odette de Crécy.

Filled with searing, insightful, and humorous criticisms of French society, this novel showcases Proust’s innovative prose style, characterized by lengthy, intricate sentences that elongate, stop, and reverse time. With narration that alternates between first and third person, Swann’s Way unconventionally introduces Proust’s recurring themes of memory, love, art, and the human experience—and for nearly a century readers have deliciously savored each moment.

Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction, and as the inventor of the modern mystery, Poe created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new selection of twenty-four tales places the most popular--"The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Purloined Letter"--alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays, and political satires.

The Bell Jar: A Novel by Sylvia Plath

This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother and the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her 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 rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

A 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and poet. The word zhivago shares a root with the Russian word for life (жизнь), one of the major themes of the novel. It tells the story of a man torn between two women, set primarily against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War of 1918-1920. More deeply, the novel discusses the plight of a man as the life that he has always known is dramatically torn apart by forces beyond his control.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The short novel is dystopian allegory in which animals play the roles of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and overthrow and oust the human owner of a farm (Manor Farm), renaming it Animal Farm and setting it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are equal; however, class and status disparities soon emerge between the different animal species (the pigs being the "greater species"). The novel describes how a society's ideologies can be manipulated and twisted by those in positions of social and political power, including how Utopian society is made impossible by the corrupting nature of the very power necessary to create it.
The novel addresses not only the corruption of revolution by its leaders but also highlights how wickedness in human nature (indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia) destroys any possibility of Utopia. While this novel deigns poor leadership as the flaw in revolution (and not the revolution of itself), it also shows how ignorance and indifference to problems within a revolution let the horrors happen.

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.
One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. They all constantly conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding book transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a play based on the actual events that, in 1692, led to the Salem Witch Trials, a series of hearings before local magistrates to prosecute over 150 people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693.
The play was written in the early 1950s as a response to McCarthyism, when the US government blacklisted accused communists. Miller himself was to be questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of "contempt of Congress" for failing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

On a previous voyage, a mysterious white whale had ripped off the leg of a sea captain named Ahab. Now the crew of the Pequod, on a pursuit that features constant adventure and horrendous mishaps, must follow the mad Ahab into the abyss to satisfy his unslakeable thirst for vengeance. Narrated by the cunningly observant crew member Ishmael,Moby-Dick is the tale of the hunt for the elusive, omnipotent, and ultimately mystifying white whale—Moby Dick.

On its surface, Moby-Dick is a vivid documentary of life aboard a nineteenth-century whaler, a virtual encyclopedia of whales and whaling, replete with facts, legends, and trivia that Melville had gleaned from personal experience and scores of sources. But as the quest for the whale becomes increasingly perilous, the tale works on allegorical levels, likening the whale to human greed, moral consequence, good, evil, and life itself. Who is good? The great white whale who, like Nature, asks nothing but to be left in peace? Or the bold Ahab who, like scientists, explorers, and philosophers, fearlessly probes the mysteries of the universe? Who is evil? The ferocious, man-killing sea monster? Or the revenge-obsessed madman who ignores his own better nature in his quest to kill the beast?

Scorned by critics upon its publication, Moby-Dick was publicly derided during its author’s lifetime. Yet Melville’s masterpiece has outlived its initial misunderstanding to become an American classic of unquestionably epic proportions.

Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville

The narrator is an elderly lawyer who helps his clients with mortgages, titles and bonds. The lawyer's office has two employees Nippers and Turkey. Turkey is a drunk and Nippers has indigestion. The office is able to function because Nippers's indigestion is at a time when Turkey is sober and Turkey is hung over when Nippers is feeling better. Bartleby is hired in the hopes that his temperament will calm down the office. As the story progresses Melville brings a sense of the human condition as seen through the eyes of a lowly employee.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.

Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Buck, the main character, is a 145lb Saint Bernard/Scotch Shepherd cross, which gives him the appearance of an exceptionally large dog that looks similar to a wolf. Buck leads a comfortable life as the pet of Judge Miller in the 'sun-kissed' Santa Clara Valley of Northern California. Judge Miller's gardener's assistant, Manuel, along with a friend, abducts the dog and sells him to a trainer of sled dogs, which were in great demand due to the discovery of "a yellow metal" in the frozen lands of the Yukon, Alaska. Slowly introduced to the brutality of his new life, Buck is forced to survive and adapt to conditions in Alaska and the Yukon. He works pulling sleds with other dogs, learns to steal food, and engages in power struggle with other dogs for the lead position in the sled team. His owners soon learn that even though his enemy, Spitz, fights like a devil, Buck is "two devils". He becomes the leader of the sled team after defeating Spitz in a battle. He then is exchanged to a mail carrier. He changes hands to a trio of incompetent owners, and is nearly starved and beaten to death. Eventually acquired by a kind and loving owner, John Thornton. When Thornton is killed by "Yeehat" native Americans, Buck goes into a beastly rage and kills several members of the native tribe. Buck returns to the wild and becomes the alpha male of a wolf pack he met a few days before the death of Thornton. Of the world Buck enters, London writes "the salient thing of this other world seemed fear." It is a world of dream that Buck enters, when he becomes something of a legend, The Ghost Dog.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis’s prominence as a social commentator.

Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt’s secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The story takes place during three years of the Great Depression in the fictional "tired old town" of Maycomb, Alabama. The narrator, six-year-old Scout Finch, lives with her older brother Jem and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt for the summer. The three children are terrified of, and fascinated with, their neighbor, the reclusive "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo and for many years, few have seen him. The children feed each other's imaginations with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. Following two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone is leaving them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times, the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, never appears in person.
Atticus is appointed by the court to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. Although many of Maycomb's citizens disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom to the best of his ability. Other children taunt Jem and Scout for Atticus' actions, calling him a "nigger-lover". Scout is tempted to stand up for her father's honor by fighting, even though he has told her not to. For his part, Atticus faces a group of men intent on lynching Tom. This danger is averted when Scout, Jem, and Dill shame the mob into dispersing by forcing them to view the situation from Atticus's and Tom's points of view.
Because Atticus does not want them to be present at Tom Robinson's trial, Scout, Jem, and Dill watch in secret from the colored balcony. Atticus establishes that the accusers—Mayella and her father, Bob Ewell, the town drunk—are lying. It also becomes clear that the friendless Mayella was making sexual advances towards Tom and her father caught her in the act. Despite significant evidence of Tom's innocence, the jury convicts him. Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken, as is Atticus', when a hopeless Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.
Humiliated by the trial, Bob Ewell vows revenge. He spits in Atticus' face on the street, tries to break into the presiding judge's house, and menaces Tom Robinson's widow. Finally, he attacks the defenseless Jem and Scout as they walk home from the school Halloween pageant. Jem's arm is broken in the struggle, but amid the confusion, someone comes to the children's rescue. The mysterious man carries Jem home, where Scout realizes that he is the reclusive Boo Radley.
Maycomb's sheriff arrives and discovers that Bob Ewell has been killed in the struggle. The sheriff argues with Atticus about the prudence and ethics of holding Jem or Boo responsible. Atticus eventually accepts the sheriff's story that Ewell simply fell on his own knife. Boo asks Scout to walk him home, and after she says goodbye to him at his front door, he disappears again. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines life from Boo's perspective and regrets that they never repaid him for the gifts he had given them.

Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

The book is divided into five interconnected stories. In the first story, "No Name Woman", Kingston's narrator describes the suicide of her aunt, as told by her mother, after she gave birth to an illegitimate child. The narrator is warned to never again speak of her un-named aunt, but still creates a history for her in her memoir. In the second story, "White Tigers", the narrator creates a fantastic allegory to describe her childhood. She imagines herself as a version of the legendary Chinese woman warrior, Fa Mulan, who, having learned the warrior's arts from an elderly couple who are hundreds of years old, raises an army and overthrows the corrupt government. After her battles, she takes up the traditional woman's roles of mother and wife. In "Shaman", the third story, the narrator describes her mother's experience in Chinese medical school. Mixing fantasy and autobiography, she details her mother's physical and mental battles with spirits and ghosts. In the fourth chapter, "At the Western Palace", she describes her aunt Moon Orchid's mental breakdown after she emigrates to the United States from China in order to find her estranged husband. In the final story, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe", she describes her childhood experiences in the California public school system, and her parents' attitudes toward her. She closes the book with a reinterpretation of the story of early third century Chinese poet Ts'ai Yen, who, like the narrator, had to learn to sing in a foreign tongue.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Gregor Samsa awakes one morning in his family's apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic insect. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, "How am I going to get to work?" and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed-ridden state. Gregor works as a traveling salesman, and, as it is usual for traveling salesmen to move constantly from place to place, he is accustomed to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and various circumstances. The true reality of his metamorphosis is complete when he sees his many legs waving in the air. But from then on he resists any conscious recognition regarding his change or the fact that a change indeed happened—everything but the recognition of his separation from the others. The problem Gregor has at the beginning of the story is that his family and a messenger from his boss are knocking at the door, concerned for him, and he's unable to flip off his back onto the floor.
The weight on Gregor’s life is that he is the financial head of the household; nobody else apparently works in his family (or is able to work); their whole present and comfortable existence relies upon Gregor’s employment at the "firm." Most of the weight is the debt which his father owes to the employer for whom Gregor now works.
Gregor is unable to speak in his insect form, and never successfully communicates with his family at all after his physical appearance is revealed to them. He is alienated by being suffered the usage of a voice of some other thing. However, he seems to retain his cognitive faculties, which are unknown to his family.
Curiously, his condition does not arouse a sense of surprise or incredulity in the eyes of his family, who merely despise it as an indication of impending burden. However, most of the story revolves around his interactions with his family, with whom he lives, and their shock, denial, and repulsion whenever he reveals his physical condition. Horrified by his appearance, they take to shutting Gregor into his room, but do try to care for him by providing him with food and water. Grete, the sister, takes charge of caring for Gregor, initially working hard to make him comfortable. Nevertheless, they seem to want as little to do with him as possible. Grete and the mother shrink back whenever he reveals himself, and Gregor's father pelts him with apples when he emerges from his room one day. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection.
Time passes while he is confined to his room. Gregor's only activities are looking out of his window and crawling up the walls and on the ceiling. Financial hardship befalls the family, and Grete's caretaking deteriorates. Gregor’s perception diminishes throughout the course of the story. It is apparent that Gregor’s physical size is getting smaller and smaller (small enough to cover a picture frame), and so too the size of his personal identity seems to shrink. Due to his infection and his hunger, he is no longer able to crawl up the walls and is soon barely able to move at all.
Aside from being an untouchable entity in his new state, Gregor decides to hide underneath a sheet when somebody has to come into his room. As much as he tries to imprison himself within his room, his family become the jailers, locking Gregor in from the outside. Devoid of human contact, Gregor alternates between concern for his family and anger at them for neglecting him. One day Gregor emerges to the sound of his sister's violin with the hope of getting his much-loved sister to join him in his room and play her violin for him. He has a fantasy about him telling Grete that he plans to send her to the conservatory to study violin. But her rejection of him is total when she says to the family, We must try to get rid of it. We've done everything humanly possible to take care of it and to put up with it, no one can reproach us in the slightest.
The sister then determines with finality that the insect is no longer Gregor, since Gregor would have left them out of love and taken their burden away. Gregor returns to his room and collapses, finally succumbing to his wound and to his self-induced starvation.
The point of view shifts as, upon discovery of his corpse, the family feels an enormous burden has been lifted from them, and start planning for the future again. Fantastically, the family suddenly discovers that they aren't doing badly at all, both socially and financially, and the brief process of forgetting Gregor and shutting him from their lives is quickly accomplished. The final sentence echoes the first: while the opening lines document Gregor's physical metamorphosis, the novella ends with mention that Grete too has changed, having become a "good looking, shapely" girl who will soon be old enough to marry.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

James Joyce's semi-autobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life. It is a richly detailed, amusing, and moving coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique, and a profound examination of the Irish psyche and society.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the latter claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest in raising the children. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex. She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. The governess's new employer gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to her new employer's country house and begins her duties.
Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears that there is some horrid secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue. Shortly thereafter, the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. She learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel's illicit lover Peter Quint both died under curious circumstances. Prior to their death, they spent most of their time with Flora and Miles, and this fact takes on grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Widely regarded as Henry James's greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the author's most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.

As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabel's life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.

Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.

Ibsen: A Doll's House by Egil Tornqvist

The play was controversial when first published, as it is sharply critical of 19th century marriage norms. It follows the formula of well-made play up until the final act, when it breaks convention by ending with a discussion, not an unravelling. It is often called the first true feminist play, although Ibsen denied this. The play is also an important work of the naturalist movement, in which real events and situations are depicted on stage in a departure from previous forms such as romanticism.
A Doll's House opens as Nora Helmer is telling Helene, the maid, to hide the Christmas tree from the children. Nora, who is treated as a silly, childish woman by her husband, Torvald, is the protagonist of the play. Her friend Christine Linde, recently widowed and short of money, has heard about Torvald's recent promotion at the bank and comes to ask Nora for help in persuading Torvald to give her (Christine) a job. Nora promises to ask Torvald to give Christine a position as secretary. Nora confides to Christine that she once secretly borrowed money to save Torvald's life when he was very ill, but she has not told him in order to protect his pride. She then took secret jobs copying papers by hand, which she carried out secretly in her room, and learned to take pride in her ability to earn money "as if she were a man." Torvald's promotion promises to finally liberate her from having to scrimp and save in order to be able to pay off her debt. However, she has continued to play the part of the frivolous, scatter-brained child-wife for the benefit of her husband
Meanwhile, Dr. Rank, a family friend, flirts with Nora before revealing that he is terminally ill with Tuberculosis of the spine, the more socially polite way of saying Syphilis at the time, with only a month to live, and that he has been secretly in love with her.
After being fired by Torvald, Krogstad approaches Nora, declaring he no longer cares about the remaining balance of her loan but will preserve the bond to blackmail Torvald into keeping him employed. Krogstad informs Nora that he has written a letter detailing her crime and puts it in Torvald's mailbox, which is locked.
Nora tells Christine of her predicament. Christine says that she and Krogstad were in love before she married, and promises she will convince him to relent.
Torvald tries to check his mail before he and Nora go to a New Year's party, but Nora distracts him by showing him the dance she has been rehearsing for the party. Torvald declares that he will postpone reading his mail until the evening. Alone, Nora contemplates suicide to save her husband from the shame of the revelation of her crime, and more important to pre-empt any gallant gesture on his part to "save" her.
Christine tells Krogstad that she only married her husband because she had no other means to support her sick mother and young siblings, and that she has returned to offer him her love again. Krogstad is moved and offers to take back his letter to Torvald. However, Christine decides that Torvald should know the truth for the sake of his and Nora's marriage.
Back from the party, Doctor Rank gives his letters of death to the Helmers, at the same time, interrupts Torvald from having sex with Nora who refuses to do so. She forces Torvald to check his mailbox. Torvald goes to read his letters and Nora prepares to take her life. Before she has the opportunity, Torvald intercepts her, confronting her with Krogstad's letter. In his rage, he declares that he is now completely in Krogstad's power—he must yield to Krogstad's demands and keep quiet about the whole affair. He berates Nora, calling her a dishonest and immoral woman and telling her she is unfit to raise their children. He says that their marriage will be kept only to maintain appearances.
A maid enters, delivering a letter to Nora. Krogstad has returned the incriminating papers, saying that he regrets his actions. Torvald is jubilant, telling Nora he is saved as he burns the papers. He takes back his harsh words to his wife and tells her that he has forgiven her. He also explains to her that her mistake makes her all the more precious to him because it reveals an adorable helplessness, and that when a man has forgiven his wife it makes him love her all the more since she is the recipient of his generosity.
By now Nora has realized that her husband is not the man she thought he was, and that her whole existence has been a lie. Her fantasy of love is just that—a fantasy. Torvald's love is highly conditional. She has been treated like a plaything, first by her father and then by her husband. She decides that she must leave to find out who she is and what to make of her life. Torvald insists she must fulfill her duty as a wife and mother, but Nora believes she also has duties to herself. From Torvald's reaction to Krogstad's letters, Nora sees that she and Torvald are strangers to each other. When Torvald asks if there is still any chance for them to rebuild their marriage, she replies that it would take "the greatest miracle of all": they would have to change so much that their life together would become a real marriage.
The play ends with Nora leaving, while Torvald hopefully ponders the possibility of "the greatest miracle of all."

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is a living embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby can tell Janie's story to the nosy community on her behalf . Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men.
Nanny, Janie's grandmother, was a slave who became pregnant by her master and gave birth to a daughter, Leafy. Though Nanny tries to create a good life for her daughter, Leafy is raped by her school teacher and she becomes pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy begins to drink and stay out at night. Eventually, she runs away leaving Janie with Nanny. Nanny transfers all the hopes she had for Leafy to Janie. When Janie is sixteen, Nanny sees her kissing a neighborhood boy, Johnny Taylor, and fears that Janie will become a "mule" to some man, so she arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older man and farmer who is looking for a wife to keep his home and help on the farm. Janie has the idea that marriage must involve love, forged in a pivotal early scene where she sees bees pollinating a pear tree, and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. Logan Killicks, however, wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner, and after he tries to force her to help him with the hard labor of the farm, Janie runs off with the glib Joe (Jody) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville.
Starks arrives in Eatonville (the United States's first all-black community) to find the residents devoid of ambition, so he arranges to buy more land from the neighboring landowner, hires some local residents to build a general store for him to own and run, and has himself appointed mayor. Janie soon realizes that Joe wants her as a trophy wife. He wants the image of his perfect wife to reinforce his powerful position in town, as he asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store's front porch.
After Starks passes away, Janie finds herself financially independent and beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, but she falls in love with a drifter and gambler named Vergible Woods who goes by the name of Tea Cake throughout the story. She falls in love with Tea Cake after he plays the harmonica for her. She sells the store and the two head to Jacksonville and get married, only to move to the Everglades region soon after for Tea Cake to find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy, Janie now has the marriage with love that she had wanted.
The area is hit by the great Okeechobee hurricane, and while Tea Cake and Janie survive it, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning. He contracts the disease himself. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, but she shoots him with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder. At the trial, Tea Cake's black, male friends show up to oppose her, while a group of local white women arrive to support her. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she gives Tea Cake a lavish funeral. Tea Cake's friends forgive her, and they want her to remain in the Everglades. However, she decides to return to Eatonville, only to find the residents gossiping about her.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

One of the first great novels of the Romantic era, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame has thrilled generations of readers with its powerfully melodramatic story of Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback who lives in the bell tower of medieval Paris’s most famous cathedral.
Feared and hated by all, Quasimodois looked after by Dom Claude Frollo, a stern, cold priest who ignores the poor hunchback in the face of his frequent public torture. But someone steps forward to help—the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, whose single act of kindness fills Quasimodo with love. Can the hunchback save the lovely gypsy from Frollo’s evil plan, or will they all perish in the shadows of Notre Dame?
An epic tale of beauty and sadness, The Hunchback of Notre Dame portrays the sufferings of humanity with compassion and power.

The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation by Homer

The Iliad of Homer by Homer

A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. The title is taken from a poem by 16th century English dramatist George Peele.
The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Henry meets and attempts to seduce Catherine Barkley and their relationship begins. While on the Italian front, Henry is wounded in the knee by a mortar shell and sent to a hospital in Milan. The second book shows the growth of Henry and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Henry falls in love with Catherine and by the time he is healed, Catherine is three months pregnant. In the third book, Henry returns to his unit, but not long after, the Austro-Germans break through the Italian lines and the Italians retreat. Henry kills an engineering sergeant for insubordination. After falling behind and catching up again, Henry is taken to a place by the "battle police" where officers are being interrogated and executed for the "treachery" that supposedly led to the Italian defeat. However, after hearing the execution of a Lt.Colonel, Henry escapes by jumping into a river. In the fourth book, Catherine and Henry reunite and flee to Switzerland in a rowing boat. In the final book, Henry and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains until she goes into labor. After a long and painful labor, their son is stillborn. Catherine begins to hemorrhage and soon dies, leaving Henry to return to their hotel in the rain.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.

At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane — a masterpiece of our time.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

America's first psychological novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a dark tale of love, crime, and revenge set in colonial New England. It revolves around a single, forbidden act of passion that forever alters the lives of three members of a small Puritan community: Hester Prynne, an ardent and fierce woman who bears the punishment of her sin in humble silence; the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a respected public figure who is inwardly tormented by long-hidden guilt; and the malevolent Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband'a man who seethes with an Ahab-like lust for vengeance.

The landscape of this classic novel is uniquely American, but the themes it explores are universal'the nature of sin, guilt, and penitence, the clash between our private and public selves, and the spiritual and psychological cost of living outside society. Constructed with the elegance of a Greek tragedy, The Scarlet Letter brilliantly illuminates the truth that lies deep within the human heart.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Highly controversial because of its frank look at the sexual hypocrisy of Victorian society, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles was nonetheless a great commercial success when it appeared in 1891. It is now considered one of the finest novels in English.

Using richly poetic language to frame a shattering narrative of love,seduction, betrayal, and murder, Hardy tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful young woman living with her impoverished family in Wessex, the southwestern English county immortalized by Hardy. After the family learns of their connection to the wealthy d'Urbervilles, they send Tess to claim a portion of their fortune. She meets and is seduced by the dissolute Alec d'Urberville and secretly bears a child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer Tess love and salvation, but he rejects her on their wedding night after learning of her past. Emotionally bereft, financially impoverished, and victimized by the self-righteous rigidity of English social morality, Tess escapes from her vise of passion through a horrible, desperate act.

With its compassionate portrait of a young rural woman, powerful criticism of social convention, and disarming consideration of the role of destiny in human life, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and memorable of Hardy's novels.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Faust I and II by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford

Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal "good soldier" and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society's core. Beneath Ashburnham's charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts ofdeception, hypocrisy, and betrayal. Throughout the nine years of his friendship with an equally privileged American, John Dowell, Ashburnham has been having an affair with Dowell's wife, Florence. Unlike Dowell, Ashburnham's own wife, Leonora, is well aware of it.

When The Good Soldier was first published in 1915, its pitiless portrait of an amoral society dedicated to its own pleasure and convinced of its own superiority outraged many readers. Stylistically daring, The Good Soldier is narrated, unreliably, by the na've Dowell, through whom Ford provides a level of bitter irony. Dowell's disjointed, stumbling storytelling not only subverts linear temporality to satisfying effect, it also reflects his struggle to accept a world without honor, order, or permanence. Called the best French novel in the English language, The Good Soldier is both tragic and darkly comic, and it established Ford as an important contributor to the development of literary modernism.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The publication in 1857 of Madame Bovary, with its vivid depictions of sex and adultery, incited a backlash of immorality charges. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife bored and unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. She embarks upon a series of affairs in search of passion and excitement, but is unable to achieve the splendid life for which sheyearns. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral that inexorably leads to ruin and self-destruction.

A brilliant portrayal of infidelity, an incisive psychological portrait of a woman torn between duty and desire. Written with acute attention to telling detail, Madame Bovary not only exposes the emptiness of one woman's bourgeois existence and failure to fill that void with fantasies, sex, and material objects. Emma's thirst for life mirrors the universal human impulse for idealized fulfillment.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The mysterious Jay Gatsby embodies the American notion that it is possible to redefine oneself and persuade the world to accept that definition. Gatsby's youthful neighbor, Nick Carraway, fascinated with the display of enormous wealth in which Gatsby revels, finds himself swept up in the lavish lifestyle of Long Island society during the Jazz Age. Considered Fitzgerald's best work, The Great Gatsby is a mystical, timeless story of integrity and cruelty, vision and despair.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Reacting against the sentimentality and moralism of the earliest English novels, Henry Fielding chose to create a work whose main character contains all the complexities of a real human being: the foundling Tom Jones. Tom has been raised by the Squire Allworthy to love virtue, and he truly wants to do good. But Tom's inability to control his temper and his heartyappetite for food, drink, and the opposite sex get him kicked out of Allworthy's estate and separated from his one real love, Sophia Western. So he begins a journey from the English countryside to the teeming city of London. Along the way he meets a parade of colorful characters, enjoys a series of bawdy, comic adventures, eventually discovers his true parentage, triumphs over the villainous Blifil, and rejoins the beautiful Sophia.

Soon after its 1749 publication, Tom Jones was condemned for being "lewd", and even blamed for several earthquakes. But what really riled its critics was its supremely funny satirical attack on eighteenth-century British society and its follies and hypocrisies' which, of course, are very much like our own.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.

Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts.

The Selected Writings of Ralph Wald Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

The novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up on the river Floss near the village of St. Oggs, evidently in the 1820s, after the Napoleonic Wars but prior to the first Reform Bill (1832). The novel spans a period of 10-15 years, from Tom and Maggie’s childhood up until their deaths in a flood on the Floss. The book is fictional autobiography in part, reflecting the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself had while in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes.
Maggie Tulliver holds the central role in the book, as both her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem, a hunchbacked, but sensitive and intellectual, friend, and with Stephen Guest, a vivacious young socialite in St. Oggs and assumed fiancé of Maggie’s cousin Lucy Deane, constitute the most significant narrative threads.
Tom and Maggie have a close yet complex bond, which continues throughout the novel. Their relationship is colored by Maggie's desire to recapture the unconditional love her father provides prior to his death. Tom’s pragmatic and reserved nature clashes with Maggie’s idealism and fervor for intellectual gains and experience. Various family crises, including bankruptcy, Mr. Tulliver’s rancorous relationship with Philip Wakem’s father, which results in the loss of the mill, and Mr. Tulliver’s untimely death, serve both to intensify Tom and Maggie’s differences and to highlight their love for each other. To help his father repay his debts, Tom leaves his desultory schooling to enter a life of business. He eventually finds a measure of success, restoring the family’s prior estate. Meanwhile Maggie languishes in the impoverished Tulliver home, her intellectual aptitude wasted in her socially isolated state. She passes through a period of intense spirituality, during which she renounces the world, spurred by Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.
This renunciation is tested by a renewed friendship with Philip Wakem, with whom she had developed an affinity while he was a fellow pupil with Tom. Against the wishes of Tom and her father, who both despise the Wakems, Maggie secretly meets with Philip, and together they go for long walks through the woods. The relationship they forge is founded partially in Maggie’s heartfelt pity for broken and neglected human beings, as well as an outlet for her intellectual romantic desires. Philip and Maggie’s attraction is, in any case, inconsequential due to the family antipathy. Philip manages to coax a pledge of love from Maggie. When Tom discovers the relationship between the two, however, he forces his sister to renounce Philip, and with him her hopes of experiencing the broader, more cultured world he represents.
Several more years pass, during which Mr. Tulliver dies. Lucy Deane invites Maggie to come and stay with her and experience the life of cultured leisure that Lucy enjoys. This includes long hours conversing and playing music with Lucy's suitor, Stephen Guest, a prominent St. Ogg’s resident. Stephen and Maggie, against their rational judgments, become attracted to each other. The complication is further compounded by Philip Wakem’s friendship with Lucy and Stephen; he and Maggie are reintroduced, and Philip’s love for her is rekindled, while Maggie, no longer isolated, enjoys the clandestine attentions of Stephen Guest, putting her past professions for Philip in question. In the event, Stephen and Maggie, though they try to forswear each other, allow themselves to elope, almost by accident – Lucy conspires to throw Philip and Maggie together on a short rowing trip down the Floss, but when Stephen unwittingly takes a sick Philip’s place, and Maggie and Stephen find themselves floating down the river, negligent of the distance they’ve covered, he proposes they board a passing steamer to the next substantial city, Mudport, and get married. Maggie struggles between her love for Stephen and her duties to Philip and Lucy, contracted as it were in her past, when she was poor and isolated, and dependent on either of them for what good her life contained. Upon arrival in Mudport she rejects Stephen and makes her way back to St. Oggs, where she lives for a brief period as an outcast, Stephen having fled to Europe. Although she immediately goes to Tom for forgiveness and shelter, he roughly sends her away, telling her that she will never again be welcome under his roof. Both Lucy and Philip forgive her, she in a moving reunion, he in an eloquent letter.
Maggie’s brief exile ends when the river floods. The flood is considered by some to be a deus ex machina. It is kind of a way of getting out of the corner the author wrote herself into. Those who do not support this view cite the frequent references to flood as a foreshadowing which makes this natural occurrence less contrived. Having struggled through the waters in a boat to find Tom at the old mill, she sets out with him to rescue Lucy Deane and her family. In a brief tender moment, the brother and sister are reconciled from all past differences. When their boat capsizes, the two drown in an embrace, thus giving the book its Biblical epigraph, “In death they were not divided.”

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Mixing a bit of seventeenth-century French history with a great deal of invention, Alexandre Dumas tells the tale of young D'Artagnan and his musketeer comrades, Porthos, Athos and Aramis. Together they fight to foil the schemes of the brilliant, dangerous Cardinal Richelieu, who pretends to support the king while plotting to advance his ownpower. Bursting with swirling swordplay, swooning romance, and unforgettable figures such as the seductively beautiful but deadly femme fatale, Milady, and D'Artagnan's equally beautiful love, Madame Bonacieux, The Three Musketeers continues, after a century and a half of continuous publication, to define the genre of swashbuckling romance and historical adventure.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slage Wirtten By Himself by Frederick Douglass

No book except perhaps Uncle Tom's Cabin had as powerful an impact on the abolitionist movement as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. But while Stowe wrote about imaginary characters, Douglass's book is a record of his own remarkable life.

Born a slave in 1818 on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published Narrative, the first of three autobiographies. This book calmly but dramatically recounts the horrors and the accomplishments of his early years, the daily, casual brutality of the white masters; his painful efforts to educate himself; his decision to find freedom or die; and his harrowing but successful escape.

An astonishing orator and a skillful writer, Douglass became a newspaper editor, a political activist, and an eloquent spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. He lived through the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the beginning of segregation. He was celebrated internationally as the leading black intellectual of his day, and his story still resonates in ours.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Few authors have been as personally familiar with desperation as Fyodor Dostoevsky, and none have been so adept at describing it. Crime and Punishment,the novel that heralded the author's period of masterworks, tells the story of the poor and talented student Raskolnikov, a character of unparalleled psychologicaldepth and complexity. Raskolnikov reasons that men like himself, by virtue of their intellectual superiority, can and must transcend societal law. To test his theory, he devises the perfect crime, the murder of a spiteful pawnbroker living in St. Petersburg.

In one of the most gripping crime stories of all time, Raskolnikov soon realizes the folly of his abstractions. Haunted by vivid hallucinations and the torments of his conscience, he seeks relief from his terror and moral isolation, first from Sonia, the pious streetwalker who urges him to confess, then in a tense game of cat and mouse with Porfiry, the brilliant magistrate assigned to the murder investigation. A tour de force of suspense, Crime and Punishment delineates the theories and motivations that underlie a bankrupt morality.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ." With these famous words, Charles Dickens plunges the reader into one of history's most explosive eras, the French Revolution. From the storming of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly captures the terror and upheaval of that tumultuous period. At the center is the novel's hero, Sydney Carton, a lazy, alcoholic attorney who, inspired by a woman, makes the supreme sacrifice on the bloodstained streets of Paris.

One of Dickens's most exciting novels, A Tale of Two Cities is a stirring classic of love, revenge, and resurrection.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Widely regarded as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular and influential adventure stories of all time. This classic tale of shipwreck and survival on an uninhabited island was an instant success when first published in 1719 and has inspired countless imitations.

In his own words, Robinson Crusoe tells of the terrible storm that drowned all his shipmates and left him marooned on a deserted island. Forced to overcome despair, doubt, and self-pity, he struggles to create a life for himself in the wilderness. From practically nothing, Crusoe painstakingly learns how to make pottery, grow crops, domesticate livestock, and build a house. His many adventures are recounted in vivid detail, including a fierce battle with cannibals and his rescue of Friday, the man who becomes his trusted companion.

Full of enchanting detail and daring heroics, Robinson Crusoe is a celebration of courage, patience, ingenuity, and hard work.

Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Widely acknowledged as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote features two of the most famous characters ever created: Don Quixote, the tall, bewildered, and half-crazy knight, and Sancho Panza, his rotund and incorrigibly loyal squire. The comic and unforgettable dynamic between these two legendary figures has served as the blueprint for countless novels written since Cervantes's time.

An immediate success when first published in 1604, Don Quixote tells the story of a middle-aged Spanish gentleman who, obsessed with the chivalrous ideals found in romantic books, decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. Seated upon his lean nag of a horse, and accompanied by the pragmatic Sancho Panza, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain seeking glory and grand adventure. Along the way the duo meet a dazzling assortment of characters whose diverse beliefs and perspectives reveal how reality and imagination are frequently indistinguishable.

Profound, powerful, and hilarious, Don Quixote continues to capture the imaginations of audiences all over the world.

The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

The Inferno remains literature's most hallowed and graphic vision of Hell. Dante plunges readers into this unforgettable world with a deceptively simple and now legendary tercet:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

With these words, Dante plunges readers into the unforgettable world of the Inferno, one of the most graphic visions of Hell ever created. In this first part of the epic The Divine Comedy, Dante is led by the poet Virgil down into the nine circles of Hell, where he travels through nightmare landscapes of fetid cesspools, viper pits, frozen lakes, and boiling rivers of blood and witnesses sinners being beaten, burned, eaten, defecated upon, and torn to pieces by demons. Along the way he meets the most fascinating characters known to the classical and medieval world, the silver-tongued Ulysses, lustful Francesca da Rimini, the heretical Farinata degli Uberti, and scores of other intriguing and notorious figures.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Young Henry Fleming dreams of finding glory and honor as a Union soldier in the American Civil War. Yet he also harbors a hidden fear about how he may react when the horror and bloodshed of battle begin. Fighting the enemy without and the terror within, Fleming must prove himself and find his own meaning of valor.

Unbelievable as it mayseem, Stephen Crane had never been a member of any army nor had taken part in any battle when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage. But upon its publication in 1895, when Crane was only twenty-four, Red Badge was heralded as a new kind of war novel, marked by astonishing insight into the true psychology of men under fire. The Red Badge of Courage unleashed Crane's deeply influential impressionistic style.

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

During the fierce French and Indian wars, an adroit scout named Hawkeye and his companion Chingachgook weave through the spectacular and dangerous wilderness of upstate New York, fighting to save the beautiful Munro sisters from the Huron renegade Magua.

The Last of the Mohicans is the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales. With its death-defying chases and teeth-clenching suspense, this American classic established many archetypes of American frontier fiction.

An engrossing "Western" by America's first great novelist, The Last of the Mohicans is a story of survival and treachery, love and deliverance.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Horror awaits Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat and one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz who is stranded in the heart of the Africa, deep in the Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the brooding dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has become a savage. His compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. The demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific dominion.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation, "The Awakening" tells of a woman in search of self-discovery who turns away from convention and society and toward the primal, becoming irresistibly attracted to nature and the senses.
An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are despatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows—gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake. But it takes a death for them to make their mark on the landscape forever.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Wuthering Hights by Emily Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Immediately recognized as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1847, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is an extraordinary coming-of-age story featuring one of the most independent and strong-willed female protagonists in all of literature. Poor and plain, Jane Eyre begins life as a lonely orphan in the household of her hateful aunt. Despite the oppression she endures at home, and the later torture of boarding school, Jane manages to emerge with her spirit and integrity unbroken. She becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she finds herself falling in love with her employer, the dark, impassioned Mr. Rochester. But an explosive secret tears apart their relationship, forcing Jane to face poverty and isolation once again.

One of the world's most beloved novels, Jane Eyre is a startlingly modern blend of passion, romance, mystery, and suspense.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

This National Book Award-winning novel takes place in Depression-era Chicago and is not only a testimony on human nature but also of the drive to succeed. The novel follows the adventures of a lifelong dreamer named Augie March, who only through failure after failure finally succeeds in the end. The novel recreates life during the Depression and is filled with memorable characters.

In writing a long, crowded picaresque narrative of ups and downs of fortune, letting the hero tell his own life history in the first person, Mr. Bellow goes back to the earliest and most generic form of the novel. It is a form which has always been congenial to observant humorists who relish human variety, who are fertile in creating characters and who are not afraid to seem more interested in life than in art.

Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett

A seminal work of twentieth century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone — or something — named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.