First, a warning: If you haven't read any Trollope, start with The Warden; it's the first in a series of which Barchester is second. Next, a rather shocking warning: Trollope may be as addictive as a soap opera. It has plenty of the right ingredients-archly drawn characters and plots that enmesh the listener in the daily ups and downs of those characters' lives. Of course, the great crevasse that divides your average daytime soap from Barchester Towers is the elegance and skill of the writer and the witty invention from which he draws his charming and classic fantasies.
A collection of Voltaire's ideas and thoughts that were too short for pamphlets but worth saving for later development-wise and witty entries on subjects as diverse as atheism and kissing.
The plague of 1665 was followed by the Great Fire of London in 1666: great disasters evoking great responses. Those events re-fashioned the London landscape, and Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year re-fashioned English literature.
Handsome and ambitious, Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble peasant origins and make something of his life-by adopting the code of hypocrisy by which his society operates. Julien ultimately commits a crime-out of passion, principle, or insanity-that will bring about his downfall. The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical picture of French Restoration society after Waterloo, riddled with corruption, greed, and ennui. The complex, sympathetic portrayal of Julien, the cold exploiter whose Machiavellian campaign is undercut by his own emotions, makes him Stendhal's most brilliant and human creation-and one of the greatest characters in European literature.
Lady Chatterley's husband returns from the War paralysed from the waist down. Frustrated by his attitudes as much as his disability, she begins a love-affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. She realises that to be fully alive she must live the life of the body as well as the mind, but in doing so she angers the conventions of her day. Banned for over 30 years for the explicit nature of its language and descriptions of sex, Lady Chatterley's Lover also exposes the dehumanisation of the mechanical age, and underlines the profound power of tenderness.
Two short novellas brimming with Lawrence's famous power and passion. In the first, an injured German prisoner-of-war awakens a grieving woman's passion; in the second, Maurice and Geoffrey are brothers, farmers and virgins until a rainy night when Paula and Lydia chance along.
A meandering ode to the simple act and accomplished art of taking a walk. Profound and humorous, companionable and curmudgeonly. Walking, by America's first nature writer, is your personal and portable guide to the activity that, like no other, awakens the senses and soul to the 'absolute freedom and wildness' of nature.
"When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir," wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had.
The unnamed narrator of Henry James' novella is an editor and literary critic obsessed with the life and work of Jeffrey Aspern, a long-deceased American poet, who died at an appropriately Romantic and tragic young age. No one is going to prevent him from bringing the secrets hidden in the paper to light for a curious public, least of all an old world spinster living out her last days in Venice, and her mousy young niece, Miss Tina. This cat-and-mouse game continues, detailed in James' inimitable manner, until it culminates in a single withering glance.
Does the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville really exist? And if he does, will he meet his match in the Otis family? Or will the rambunctious Otis children be the very death of him? The answers lie in these witty, hilarious tales.
Written in the winter of 1849, The Scarlet Letter unfolds the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman branded as an adulteress in the harsh Puritan world of seventeenth-century New England. As Hester calls on her inner strength to transcend her shame, the scarlet letter ceases to be a stigma and finally becomes Hester's symbol of self-affirmation. This dramatic reading heightens the sense of lyric poetry that permeates every line of Nathaniel Hawthorne's great novel.
Well over a century has passed since the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, but time has done little to diminish the appeal and enjoyment of this classic story of growing up in midwestern America. The world Mark Twain envisioned for his precocious hero is a "boy-perfect" one, where life is perpetual vacation, where good and evil are clearly defined, awe-inspiring contradictions, and where the joys of independent discovery always outweigh the severity of punishment. "Although my book is intended for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in."-Mark Twain
