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The Grapes of Wrath
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl
migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma
farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and
forced to travel west to the promised land of California.
Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against
the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and
Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet
majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet
plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human
dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and
the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice,
and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the
horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very
nature of equality and justice in America. At once a
naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and
transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel
is perhaps the most American of American Classics. Here is
an article of
The Grapes of Wrath.
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Dead Souls
Dead Souls is one of the most unusual works of
nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on
social hypocrisy. Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives
in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners
to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names
of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their
owners from paying tax on them, and to use these “souls” as
collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this
ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of
human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the
insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con
man Chichikov. Here is an article of Dead Souls. |
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The Good Earth (Oprah's Book Club)
Though more than seventy years have passed since this
remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its
popularity and become one of the great modern classics. In
The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible
portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor
reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the
twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving,
classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his
selfless wife O-Lan is must reading for those who would
fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in
the lives of the Chinese people during the last century.
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Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era
Miyamoto
Musashi was Japan's most renowned swordsman. Musashi fought
and won over 60 duels by killing his opponents. This book is
a story of such a Japanese swordsman's life.
Here is an article of
Miyamoto
Musashi. |
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics)
After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and
Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in
The Idiot
to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old
Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss
sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and
“be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the
dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with
the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three
of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince
finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money,
power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as
Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively
beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final
scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world
literature. |
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War and Peace (Vintage Classics)
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion
of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known
characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate
son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and
yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky,
who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against
Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter
of a nobleman who intrigues both men.
A s Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows
characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility,
civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems
unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And
as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their
specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and
human—figures in world literature. |
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Great Expectations
Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel. It
is his second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully
narrated in the first person. Great Expectations is a
bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, and it is a classic
work of Victorian literature. It depicts the growth and
personal development of an orphan named Pip.
Dickens felt Great Expectations was his best work, calling
it "a very fine idea," and was very sensitive to compliments
from his friends: "Bulwer, who has been, as I think you
know, extraordinarily taken by the book." Great Expectations
has a colourful cast that has entered popular culture: the
capricious Miss Havisham, the cold and beautiful Estella,
Joe the kind and generous blacksmith, the dry and
sycophantic Uncle Pumblechook, Mr. Jaggers, Wemmick with his
dual personality, and the eloquent and wise friend, Herbert
Pocket. Throughout the narrative, typical Dickensian themes
emerge: wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the
eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations has
become very popular and is now taught as a classic in many
English classes. It has been translated into many languages
and adapted many times in film and other media. |
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the
civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge
from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the
International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla
unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and
courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal.
In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria
and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his
brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to
believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement
in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a
work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal,
compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a
writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote
Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so
completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in
scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's
previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of
all time. |
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Moby Dick
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by Herman Melville, in
which Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab,
captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on the albino
sperm whale Moby Dick, which on a previous voyage destroyed
Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the
novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time
of the author's death in 1891, its reputation grew immensely
during the twentieth century. D. H. Lawrence called it "one
of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world," and
"the greatest book of the sea ever written." Moby-Dick is
considered a Great American Novel and an outstanding work of
the Romantic period in America and the American Renaissance.
"Call me Ishmael" is one of world literature's most famous
opening sentences. The product of a year and a half of
writing, the book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in
token of my admiration for his genius," and draws on
Melville's experience at sea, on his reading in whaling
literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare
and the Bible. The detailed and realistic descriptions of
whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life
aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with
exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and
the existence of God. |
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Les Miserables
Tolstoy is said to have called Les Miserables the greatest
novel ever written, and it exerted a powerful influence on
the creation of War and Peace. At one level a detective
story in which the relentless Inspector Javert obsessively
pursues the escaped convict Jean Valjean, culminating in a
dramatic chase through the sewers of Paris, at another level
Hugo's masterpiece is a drama of crime, punishment and
rehabilitation set against a panoramic description of French
society in the years after Napoleon's fall from power. But
this book is also about the metaphysical struggle between
good and evil in the soul of every man and every community.
Coloured by Hugo's distinctive philosophy, it is a plea for
social justice, political enlightenment and personal charity
which continues to speak with the undiminished authority
more than a century after its first appearance. |
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Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of
Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann
was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem
literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy
bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill,
Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births
and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes
and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically
the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding
generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually
succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that
are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall
becomes certain.
In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of
humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family
chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them.
Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it
is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. |
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Gone with the Wind, 75th Anniversary Edition
Since its original publication in 1936, Gone With the
Wind—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one of the
bestselling novels of all time—has been heralded by readers
everywhere as The Great American Novel.
Widely considered The Great American Novel, and often
remembered for its epic film version, Gone With the Wind
explores the depth of human passions with an intensity as
bold as its setting in the red hills of Georgia. A superb
piece of storytelling, it vividly depicts the drama of the
Civil War and Reconstruction.
This is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled,
manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, who
arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War
forever change her way of life. A sweeping story of tangled
passion and courage, in the pages of Gone With the Wind,
Margaret Mitchell brings to life the unforgettable
characters that have captured readers for over seventy
years. |
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