In the back streets of nineteenth-century London, a group of revolutionaries plot an incident intended to turn English complacency on its ear. Their objective: the destruction of one of the nation's proudest monuments of scientific achievement, the Greenwich Observatory. Unbeknownst to the schemers, however, their ringleader is an agent provocateur, driven by a complex array of ambiguous motives and conflicting loyalties.As this masterpiece ...
An "A" for «adultery» marks Hester Prynne as an outcast from the society of colonial Boston. Although forced by the puritanical town fathers to wear a badge of shame, Hester steadfastly resists their efforts to discover the identity of her baby's father. Masterful in its symbolism and compelling in its character studies, Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of punishment and reconciliation examines the concepts of sin, guilt, and pride. The Scar ...
Hailed by critics as one of the greatest sea stories ever written, this rousing adventure offers a fascinating combination of gritty realism and sublime lyricism in its portrayal of an elemental conflict. Jack London began his career at sea, and his shipboard experiences imbue The Sea-Wolf with flavorful authenticity.In the story, the gentleman narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden, is pitted against an amoral sea captain, Wolf Larsen, in a clash of ide ...
W. Somerset Maugham led many lives, including that of a doctor in London's slums, a successful playwright and novelist, an agent for British Intelligence during World War I, and a world traveler. In 1917, he took the first of many voyages to the Pacific Islands and the Far East, where his keen sense of observation found inspiration for some of his finest writing.Rain and Other South Sea Stories features one of Maugham's most famous tal ...
First published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels. Its themes of sin, guilt, and redemption, woven through a story of adultery in the early days of the Massachusetts Colony, are revealed with remarkable psychological penetration and understanding of the human heart. Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast ...
This sparkling tale of one of literature's most famous courtships focuses on a spirited family of sisters and their marriage-minded mother's attempts to see them well settled. Jane Austen's wit and shrewd observations elevate her tale of rural romance to the heights of the world's great literature. A timeless satire of nineteenth-century English country life and manners, Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen' ...
Helga's mother is white, and her father is black–and absent. Ostracized throughout her lonely childhood for her dark skin, Helga spends her adult life seeking acceptance. Everywhere she goes — the American South, Harlem, even Denmark–she feels oppressed. Socially, economically, and psychologically, Helga struggles against the «quicksand» of classism, racism, and sexism.One of the most acclaimed and influential writers of the Harle ...
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia’s greatest poet and a versatile writer whose great gifts and profoundly Russian sensibility influenced all of modern Russian literature, produced short stories that are masterpieces of the craft.Besides the brilliant title story, a cunningly wrought narrative of romance and murder in the haute bourgeoisie of St. Petersburg, this volume includes all five stories originally collected as The Tales of ...
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings," declared Gustave Flaubert, who envisioned «a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive.» First published in 1869, this novel fulfills Flaubert's conception with a realistic, ironic portrait of bourgeois lives played out against France's tumultu ...
