"Twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her, so when she meets a senator and he invites her to his hotel room, she says yes. Even though the man is old enough to be her father and even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily, saying yes is an exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have. However, after the senator's car crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car."
"This grand-scale heroic comedy tells the story of the exuberant young Augie, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression.
While his neighborhood friends all settle down into their various chosen professions, Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each one as too limiting. It is not until he tangles with a glamorous perfectionist named Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, that his independence is seriously threatened. Luckily, his nature, like the eagle’s, breaks down under the strain. He goes on to recruit himself to even more outlandish projects but always ducks out in time to continue improvising his unconventional career.
With a jaunty sense of humor embedded in a serious moral view, Bellow’s story both celebrates and satirizes the irrepressible American spirit."
"Written in the winter of 1849, The Scarlet Letter unfolds the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman branded as an adulteress in the harsh Puritan world of seventeenth-century New England. As Hester calls on her inner strength to transcend her shame, the scarlet letter ceases to be a stigma and finally becomes Hester's symbol of self-affirmation. This dramatic reading heightens the sense of lyric poetry that permeates every line of Nathaniel Hawthorne's great novel."
"The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not to tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers -- stern and wild ones -- and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
As she emerges from the prison of a Puritan New England town, Hester Prynne defies the dark gloom much as the rose blooms against the prison door. With her illegitimate baby, Pearl, clutched in her arms and the letter A -- the mark of an adulteress -- embroidered in scarlet thread on her breast, Hester holds her head high as she faces the malice and scorn of the townsfolk. Her powerful, bittersweet story is an American classic that continues to touch the hearts of modern readers with its timeless themes of guilt, passion and repentance.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the American Renaissance. Nathaniel Hawthorne's best-known works include The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). Like Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne took a dark view of human nature."
