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Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West?s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly...
4) Herzog
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Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness. Like the protagonists of most of Bellow's novels—Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King,...
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Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann...
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"In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that is just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of "Cannery Row", the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears - from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter....
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A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker-Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that...
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Known for its advances in literature, industrialization, politics, and science, the Victorian era was a prominent time in British history. However, author Lytton Strachey remembers Queen Victoria as a person instead of just focusing on her accomplishments. First starting with a brief history of her predecessors and origins, Victoria was crowned just as she came of age. Having only been eighteen, Queen Victoria was widely unfamiliar to her subjects...
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"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history, " Arthur Miller wrote in an introduction to The Crucible, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women...
11) Ethan Frome
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A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...
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"The Return of the Soldier" is British author Rebecca West's remarkable 1918 novel of the struggle of a World War I veteran and the three women who love him as he returns home and tries make sense of the life that he had before he went to war. Told from the perspective of his cousin Jenny, who lives with him and his wife Kitty, it is the story of British soldier Chris Baldry, who has just returned home from fighting in France. Chris has amnesia and...
13) East of Eden
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
14) Summer
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Originally born in an impoverished community, Charity's parents sought out the most educated man in the nearby New England town to raise their daughter. After being surrendered to a lawyer named Royall, Charity was raised comfortably by Mr. Royall and his wife. However, when Mrs. Royall tragically passes away, Charity's relationship with Royall is threatened. After his wife's death, Royall begins to feel sexually attracted to Charity, and when she...
16) The red pony
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The classic story of a boy's journey to manhood under the joys and hardships of ranch life, focused around the life and death of his red pony.
17) Finnegans wake
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This early work by James Joyce was originally published in 1939 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Finnegans Wake' is a an experimental novel of comic fiction. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses',...
18) Lucky Jim
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First published in 1954, this book is a hilarious satire of British university life. It is a young man's book, in fact a book of two young men. They are not exactly angry young men, but they are extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they graduated from both Oxford University and World War II to find themselves in an England in terminal decline. It has lost overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in...
19) The pearl
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Terrible events follow the discovery of a magnificent pearl by a poor Mexican fisherman.
20) Of mice and men
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Tells a story about the strange relationship of two migrant workers, who are able to realize their dreams of an easy life until one of them succumbs to his weakness for soft, helpless creatures and strangles the farmer's wife. Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.
