Within this third work of Baum's Land of Oz series, Dorothy's story is continued with her beloved companions and given further life with inventive new characters, including a talking hen named Billina and the Hungry Tiger. After being tossed from a steamship during a storm, Dorothy finds herself in the kingdom of Ev, where she becomes involved in a journey to the palace of the evil Nome King to rescue the Queen of Ev and her children. ...
"The Idiot" is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1868 novel which tells the story of Prince Lyov Nikolayevich Myshkin who, after a long absence, returns to Russia from Switzerland where he sought treatment for his epilepsy. The story is primarily a tragic tale of the struggle for the love of a woman, Nastasya Filippovna, between Myshkin and Rogozhin, a dark and impassioned man that the Prince meets on the train to St. Petersburg. «The Idiot» is a c ...
Frances Burney (1752-1840) was an English diarist, playwright and novelist. She was self-educated and began writing from what she called her «scribblings» at the young age of ten. In total, she wrote eight plays, four novels, one biography and twenty volumes of letters and journals. She is recognized as a literary forerunner to prominent authors who came after her including William Makepeace Thackeray and Jane Austen. The foundation on which Bur ...
"The Cricket on the Hearth" is Charles Dickens 1845 novella, which marks the third of five Christmas books written by the author between 1843 and 1847. It is the story of John Peerybingle and his family who are visited by a guardian angel in the form of a cricket who is constantly chirping on their hearth. A delightfully fantastic story, «The Cricket on the Hearth» was the best-selling of Dickens five Christmas books and is a perfect little ...
Gustave Flaubert's «Madame Bovary» is the classic tale of its title character, Emma Bovary, the wife of a doctor, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of her everyday life. Heralded as a seminal work of Realism, «Madame Bovary» is considered by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. Attacked for obscenity when it first appeared in Paris in 1856, «Madame Bovary» was a ...
"Cousin Bette" by Honore de Balzac is generally considered to be the writer's most famous novels, his last great work before his death. It is a classic novel of revenge, passion, and vices. Along with her friend Valerie, the title character Bette strategizes for the overwhelming destruction of men in general and her cousin-in-law Baron Hector Hulot specifically. Hulot sacrifices his family and fortune on a series of extramarital seduct ...
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), dreamed since his childhood of becoming a poet. However, he produced several popular works that cemented his reputation as a great novelist of the Victorian period, and earned him the admiration of later writers like D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Hardy's stories are noted for their nuances of Romantic and Enlightenment thinking, particularly elements of the supernatural. «A Pair of Blues Eyes», published first ...
The last of James Fenimore Cooper's «Leatherstocking tales» to be written, yet chronologically set first, «The Deerslayer» introduces us to the hero of the series, the young frontiersmen Natty Bumppo. We find him at Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, during the years 1740-1745, a time in which the advance of civilization dominates the landscape of New York State. The story revolves around the conflict that arises between Natty Bumppo ...
The native of Thomas Hardy's 1878 novel «The Return of the Native» is Clym (Clement) Yeobright, a young man who gives a successful career as a diamond merchant in Paris to return to his native Egdon Heath to become a Schoolmaster and to help educate poor and ignorant children. Clym's character is contrasted by Eustacia Vye, a beautiful young woman who longs to escape Egdon Heath for a more glamorous life elsewhere. Hearing of Clym&apos ...
