Roxana, Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own wicked life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. View More...
E. M. Forster's exquisitely observed novel about the clash of cultures and the consequences of perception, set in colonial India Among the greatest novels of the twentieth century and the basis for director David Lean's Academy Award-winning film, A Passage to India unravels the growing racial tension between Indians, uneasy at best with colonial power, and the British, largely ignorant and dismissive of the society they're infiltrating. A sudden moment of confusion results in a devastating series of events that threatens to ruin a man's life, revealing just how deeply--and swiftly--prejudice... View More...
A literary sensation when it was published by Scribners in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century. The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a heartless society in which, ultimately, she has no part. View More...
A sensitive and moving portrait of a Victorian town, captured at a transitional period in English society, Cranford first appeared serially in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words from 1851 to 1853, and in book form in 1853. Author Elizabeth Gaskell situated her stories in a hamlet very like the one in which she grew up, and her affectionate but unsentimental portraits of the residents of Cranford offer a realistic view of life and manners in an English country village during the 1830s.Cranford recounts the events and activities in the loves of a group of spinsters and widows who struggl... View More...
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. View More...
The youngest of the three great Greek tragedians, following Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides (ca. 484-406 B.C.) is reputed to have written ninety-two plays, nineteen of which survive. The Bacchae, a late play staged posthumously, concerns the cult of Dionysus, god of wine, whose worship hinged largely on orgiastic and frenzied nature rites.When Dionysus (in disguise) attempts to spread his cult among the people (especially the women) of Thebes, their king, Pentheus, imprisons Dionysus and tries to suppress his cult. The king's misguided attempt to thwart the will of a god leads to catastroph... View More...
'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.' After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighte... View More...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea?sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiri... View More...
A PLEA TO STOP THE SLAUGHTER NOW...When an 80-ton Fin Whale became trapped in a Newfoundland lagoon, conservationist Farley Mowat rejoiced: here was the first chance to study at close range one of the most magnificent animals in creation. Some local villagers thought otherwise. They blasted the whale with rifle fire and hacked open her back with a motorboat propeller. Mowat appealed desperately to the police, to marine biologists, finally to the Canadian press. But it was too late. Ravaged by an infection resulting from her massive wounds, the whale died. World-renowned for his passionate tale... View More...
A CHILDHOOD ADVENTUREIn the summer of 1933 Angus Mowat, a soldier, sailor, beekeeper, and librarian, packed his family into a homemade camper dubbed the " Ark" and set off from Windsor, Ontario, to Saskatoon. For twelve-year-old Farley the trip through the prairie, with its teeming wildlife and big-sky beauty, would have a lasting effect on his life, giving birth to his love of the outdoors. In "Born Naked" Mowat tells the story of his unusual childhood, from sailing trips on Lake Ontario to explorations of Point Pelee, Vancouver Island, and Hudson Bay. It is the story of an eccentri... View More...
