"In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend, Laurent. But their passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever.
Thérèse Raquin caused a scandal when it appeared in 1867 and brought its twenty-seven-year-old author a notoriety that followed him throughout his life. Zola's novel is not only an uninhibited portrayal of adultery, madness, and ghostly revenge but also a devastating exploration of the darkest aspects of human existence."
"The Warden is the first of the six classic Chronicles of Barsetshire novels, Trollope's best-loved and most famous work.
Anthony Trollope's classic novel centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal toward exposing what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he is in love with Mr. Harding's daughter, Eleanor.
Though the bishop and archdeacon stand behind him, the honest Reverend Harding is caught in a moral dilemma, questioning whether he truly deserves the money or should resign.
Set in the world of the Victorian professional and landed classes that Trollope portrayed so superbly, The Warden explores the complexities of human motivation and social morality."
"This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of art. Charles Strickland, a stock broker in London, seems like a good, honest man. But one day, at the age of forty, heleaves his business, his wife, and his children and goes to Paris. He has neither money nor prospects, and he knows practically nothing about art, but he is seized with a passion to paint, and for the rest of his life, nothing else matters to him. He gives up everything to which he had been accustomed for extreme poverty, social ostracism, and the freedom to paint. When he finally dies of leprosy in Tahiti, where he had gone native, the few paintings which turn up for sale bring only six to ten francs apiece. But Charles Strickland had achieved his desire to create beauty, and with the years, the world fully recognizes his blazing genius.
Based partially on the life of Paul Gauguin, this is a carefully wrought study of a private life by one of the most vivid and penetrating of contemporary literary masters."
"Free Air takes one by automobile in search of America, heading toward a West brimming with possibilities for suddenly mobile Americans at the end of a world war. Clair Boltwood and her father drive their Gomez-Dep roadster from Minnesota to Seattle, braving all the perils of early motoring. But the greatest distance to be overcome is the social one between the upper-crust Claire and a traveling mechanic named Milt.
First published in 1919, with fame just around the corner for Sinclair Lewis, Free Air foreshadowed a genre that includes John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Josh Greenfield and Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto. The character of Claire, blazing her own trail across the West, looks back to the nineteenth-century pioneer woman and ahead to the independent-minded movie heroines played by Katherine Hepburn."
"Madame de Treymes follows the fortunes of two innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, scion of a great house of the Faubourg St. Germain; and John Durham, her childhood friend, who arrives in Paris intent on persuading Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead. A scintillating picture of American and French society at the turn of the century, it is also a subtle investigation of the clash of cultures and the role of women in the social hierarchy.
This edition also includes the novellas Sanctuary and Bunner Sisters, two short works rich in the social satire and cunning insight that characterized Wharton's acclaimed novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence."
"The last novel completed by Jane Austen before her death, Persuasion is often thought to reflect on the author’s own lost love.
Sir Walter Elliot has raised his three daughters with his own sense of haughty pride. Elizabeth, at twenty-eight, has found no one good enough to marry, while Mary has, with some condescension, married the son of the local squire. The youngest, Anne, was persuaded to throw off her fiancé, Frederick Wentworth, eight years ago due to his lowly station in life.
When Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars as a captain of wealth and rank, Anne must confront her remorse and her unrequited love for him as he appears to court another woman.
This is a story of second chances, humility, and the perseverance of love."
"On New York City's Washington Square lives Catherine Sloper, a shy and plain young woman who is tyrannized by her wealthy, overbearing father. When young Morris Townsend begins to court her, Dr. Sloper distrusts his motives, believing that the young man could not possibly love his daughter. Both lovers are obstinate in their affections; but when Dr. Sloper threatens to disinherit Catherine, Townsend disappears, leaving Catherine to humiliation, heartache, and lonely spinsterhood. Years later, after her father's death, Townsend returns, and Catherine must make up her own mind about his intentions."
"Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska.
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Ántonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Ántonia.
Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My Ántonia is a deeply moving portrait of an entire community and its way of life."
"Set in New York in the 1920s, The Glimpses of the Moon details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, two high-society hangers-on with the right connections but a lack of funds. To maintain their status, they decide to marry and spend a year or so sponging off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. Both agree that they're free to dissolve the marriage if either one of them meets someone who can advance them socially. How their scheme unfolds is a comedy of Eros that will charm all fans of Wharton's work."
"Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the love-smitten Rickie leaves his natural habitat to marry the devastatingly practical Agnes Pembroke, who brings with her, as a sort of dowry, a teaching position at the abominable Sawston School.
Out of this misalliance comes Forster's most stylistically daring novel. As it follows Rickie from the comforts of Cambridge to the petty intrigues of Sawston to the lush, haunted environs of rural Wiltshire, The Longest Journey gives us a comic yet immensely moving vision of a country split between pragmatism and imagination, sober conformity and redemptive eccentricity, upright Christianity and delirious paganism.
This, the author's own favorite of his works, is an introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic."
"The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naïve and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for success. The affair becomes the reef on which four lives are in danger of foundering: two of them innocent, and two of them burdened with experience and tinged with desperation.
A challenge to the moral climate of the day, this story of the drastic effects of a casual sexual betrayal offers a clear-eyed assessment of the possibilities and limitations of human love."
"Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements, Under Western Eyes tells the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-revolutionary czarist Russia. It begins with a bomb that kills its intended target, a hated Russian minister of police, along with several innocent bystanders. A young student named Razumov hides the perpetrator, who questions his moral strength and integrity.
Set in St. Petersburg amid intrigue and espionage, this novel hauntingly speaks to the broader, timeless question of human responsibility and honor. Conrad said that his intent was to render 'the psychology of Russia,' a country being driven to anarchy by misguided revolutionaries. This masterwork, published six years before the Russian Revolution, is a chillingly accurate prophecy of what was to come."
