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James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the fictional account of the life of a young American man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With his bi-racial heritage, the Ex-Colored Man is faced with the choice of embracing his black culture and its ragtime music, or passing as a white man and living a mediocre middle-class existence. While not actually an autobiography, Johnson based the book on his
...The itinerant sailor Ishmael begins a voyage on the whaling ship Pequod whose captain, Ahab, wishes to exact revenge upon the whale Moby-Dick, who destroyed his last ship and took his leg. As they search for the savage white whale, Ishmael questions all aspects of life. The story is woven in complex, lyrical language and uses many theatrical forms, such as stage direction and soliloquy. It is considered the exemplar of American Romanticism,
...The Metamorphosis begins almost comically. A man wakes up to find he has turned into an insect. But the claustrophobic, dirty room and the increasingly distressed narrator soon turn this into a tale of slow horror. Most horrifying of all is his family's reaction to his metamorphosis and their final solution to the problem.
Margaret's safe existence is turned upside down when she has to move to the grim northern town of Milton. Not only does she have her eyes opened by the poverty and hardship she encounters there, but she is thrown into confusion by stern factory owner John Thornton - whose treatment of his workers brings them into fierce opposition.
As men and women, workers and masters come into violent conflict, it seems opposites can never meet. But do John
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is exactly what it claims. Its multiple plots center around the inhabitants of a fictitious Midlands town and their evolving relationships to each other. It is critical of social class, ambition and marriage, and religion. It is commonly considered one of the masterpieces of English writing, and Virginia Woolf described it as "the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few
...7) Siddhartha
Siddhartha, written by Hermann Hesse was born on July 2nd 1877 and was an accomplished poet and, painter. However his fame more easily rests on his novels which include The Glass Bead Game and Steppenwolf amongst many others. Here we publish Siddhartha, a powerful inspirational novel that traces the spiritual journey of its protagonist, Siddhartha, in his quest for truth and eventual enlightenment. It is concise and lyrical and does not preach
...The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first twelve short stories about his famous London detective. It begins with the first meeting of Holmes and his sidekick Watson, who narrates the stories. Doyle was the first to employ the sidekick technique, thereby creating a character in just as much suspense and awe as his readership at the mental escapades of the erratic, terrifyingly intelligent Holmes.
9) My Antonia
An Ode to a Vanished Way of Life on the Nebraska Plains
"I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." ― Willa Cather, My Antonia
In Willa Cather's My Antonia, thoughts of home and homesickness
...As in many of Dostoyevsky's novels, the plot centers on a murder. Three brothers, different in character but bound by their ancestry,...
11) Bleak house
A enthralling story about the inequalities of the 19th-century English legal system Bleak House is one of Charles Dicken's most multifaceted novels. Bleak House deals with a multiplicity of characters, plots and subplots that all weave in and around the true story of the famous case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a case of litigation in England's Court of Chancery, which starts as a problem of legacy and wills, but soon raises the question
...12) Of Mice and Men
A Penguin Classic
Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they...
13) As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME
Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenance—a golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the...
#1 New York Times Bestseller
"Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades." — New York Times
A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—"Scout"—returns home to Maycomb,
...16) Ulysses
Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book in their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and...
Begin your journey into Middle-earth...
The inspiration for the upcoming original series on Prime Video, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic adventure The Lord of the Rings.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Sauron, the Dark
...19) Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is the fictional autobiography of the title character. As a young man, Crusoe sets out from England on a disastrous sea voyage. His passion for seafaring remains undiminished and so he sets out again, only to be shipwrecked a third time. His journey takes him to Brazil where he becomes a plantation owner. A third and final shipwrecking, however, leaves him stranded for 28 years on a remote island. There he becomes a devout
...20) The Moonstone
The Moonstone is a 19th-century novel by the master of sensation fiction, Wilkie Collins. It is considered, with The Woman in White, to be his best work, and is also commonly seen as the first English detective novel. Many of the standard ground rules for detective fiction can be found in this work, as well as examples of Collins' forward-thinking approach to the treatment of Indians and servants.
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