"Trilby opens in the Latin Quarter of nineteenth-century Paris, where Trilby O'Ferrall is working as an artist's model. Her grace and ingenuous charm make a poignant contrast to the cruel magnetism of Svengali, under whose spell she falls. Using hypnotic powers, Svengali shapes her into a virtuoso singer—Europe's most captivating soprano—but her golden voice, and even her life, become fatally tied to him.
A precursor to The Phantom of the Opera, Trilby was all the rage when it appeared in 1894, spawning songs, shoes, and most famously, the Trilby hat. This novel holds the mirror up to the art and science of the fin de si├¿cle and its darkest obsessions—to anti-Semitism, crime, sexuality and the occult, music and mesmerism, and to new investigations of hysteria and the unconscious."
"Imagine the kingdom of Asia sifted through the Celtic imagination. Messer Marco Polo is the fictionalized account of the travels of Marco Polo as told by Malichi Campbell, an Ulsterman.
Young Marco Polo meets Kubla Khan, the King of Siam, and Saint Paul, and he falls in love with the beautiful Golden Bells. After her magicians save him from death in the desert, he stays and marries her. Following her death, Polo returns to Venice as an old man.
Audiobook producer Stefan Rudnicki and acting legend Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., were reminiscing about favorite childhood books when they both recalled Messer Marco Polo as one of the best. The result is this collaborative effort for a truly charming audiobook."
"In the barren moor of Egdon Heath, a wild tract of country in the southwest of England, one native yearns to escape to city life while another has just returned from that life, unimpressed.
Clym Yeobright, a former diamond merchant in Paris, returns home to become a schoolmaster in Egdon, where he falls passionately in love with the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye. Infatuated with his seeming glamour, she marries him in hopes of greater adventure—but when her hopes are disappointed, she rekindles an affair with Clym's reckless cousin, Damon.
Injured by forces beyond their control, Hardy's characters struggle vainly in the net of destiny.In the end, only the face of the lonely heath remains untouched by fate. This masterpiece of tragic passion perfectly epitomizes the author's melancholy genius."
"First published in 1915, The Voyage Out marked the literary debut of one of the great pioneers of the modern novel, Virginia Woolf.
Woolf's witty and lyrical debut follows a group of lively, eccentric British tourists embarking on a sea voyage from London to South America. For Rachel Vinrace, a shy, motherless young lady traveling under the wing of her aunt Helen, this first voyage out into the world becomes a mythic rite of passage into emotional and intellectual maturity.
As the narrative shifts point of view among the mismatched jumble of passengers, Woolf takes the opportunity to satirize Edwardian life while sketching the evolution of her heroine's understanding.
When the ship finally arrives at the village Santa Marina on the South American coast, Rachel is introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the sensitive young Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer with whom she falls into a doomed romance."
"Set among the elegant brownstones and opulent country houses of turn-of-the-century upper-class New York, Edith Wharton’s first great novel is a precise, satiric portrayal of what the author herself called “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers.”
Her brilliantly complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object, is an incisive commentary on the status of women in that society. Lily is all too much a product of the world indicated by the title, a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” From her tragic attraction to bachelor lawyer Lawrence Seldon to her desperate relationship with the social-climbing Rosedale, it is Lily’s very specialness that threatens the fulfillment she seeks in life.
Time after time, Lily fails to make the ultimate move, to abandon the possibility of a greater love and enter into a mercenary union. This masterful novel from one of literature’s greatest voices is a tragedy of money, morality, and missed opportunity."
"This brilliant satirical novel traces the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex, a young man who survives the baleful influence of a hateful, hypocritical father, a doting mother, and a debauched wife to emerge as a decent, happy human being. A fascinating character study, it is also a stinging satire of the Victorian gentry's pomposity, sentimentality, pseudo-respectability, and refined cruelty—one still capable of delivering deathblows to the same traits in our present world. Since its original publication in 1903, The Way of All Flesh has enjoyed continuous popularity. Every new generation finds in this novel a reaffirmation of youth's admirable will for freedom of personal expression and its rightful struggle against the tyranny of harsh parents."
"With a wealth of fancy and an irrepressible high spirit, this beloved adventure story pokes fun at the exaggerated social and literary conventions of Cervantes' day. Driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, Don Quixote decks himself out in rusty armor and a cardboard helmet, determined to become a knight-errant and roam the world righting wrongs. He persuades the practical Sancho Panza to become his squire, and his inspiration on his quest is the peasant girl Aldonza, whom he idealizes as his queen of love and beauty, Dulcinea. From his first fighting encounter with a score of windmills to his climactic confrontation with a victorious enemy, Don Quixote's feeble mind and heroic heart have earned him a place as one of the best-loved characters in fiction. A work consistently ranked among the greatest in all of literature, Don Quixote de la Mancha has inspired and influenced a host of notable writers over the past four centuries."
"Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once a historical war epic, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.
Noted for its mastery of realistic detail and psychological analysis, War and Peace follows the metamorphosis of five aristocratic families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Individual stories interweave as each of Tolstoy’s memorable characters seek fulfillment, fall in love, make mistakes, and become scarred by war in different ways.
Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process.
Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers: “To be played upon by the animal keenness of this eye, the sheer power of this creative attack, the entirely clear and true greatness…of this epic, is to find one’s way home…to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”"
"This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton's money-can't-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned but now famous lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to selling the letters. His decision brings him wealth and admission to society, but a mystery contained in the missives comes back to haunt him, and it may take a madness of guilt to remind Stephen that he does, after all, have a conscience.
Betrayal, greed, and consequences faced make this sly, masterful story a deft social and psychological portrait to stand with Wharton's best."
"Swan Song is the conclusion of the second trilogy in the Forsyte Chronicles, which is called A Modern Comedy. John Galsworthy's epic story of the moneyed Forsyte family is a fascinating study of the British propertied class during the decline of the Victorian age.
The 'man of property,' Soames Forsyte, has mellowed with the passing of the years until, in his old age, he is a patient and benign figure, guarding with especial tenderness the welfare of his daughter, Fleur. But all his watchfulness and devotion are powerless to avert tragedy when Fleur revives her old love affair with Jon Forsyte on Jon's return to England with his American wife."
"John Galsworthy devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating the fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, and fortunes and deaths so real that readers accused him of including real individuals whom they knew as the characters in his drama.
Flowering Wilderness, the middle novel of the third trilogy, called End of the Chapter, is the eighth novel in Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles, which has become established as one of the most popular and enduring works of twentieth-century literature and was described by the New York Times as "a social satire of epic proportions and one that does not suffer by comparison with Thackeray's Vanity Fair…[A] comedy of manners, convincing both in its fidelity to life and as a work of art.""
"This Pulitzer Prize-winning classic tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers, but they will soon meet their own downfall.
Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls."
