The dehumanizing effects of heavy industrialization are given form and bitter indictment in this Dickens novel. Raised by a hard, pragmatic father concerned only with sterile principles, Tom and Louisa Gradgrind grow up with little imagination,...
Fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends start an evening’s mayhem by hitting an old man, tearing up his books and stripping him of money and clothes.
Or rather Alex and his three droogs tolchock an old veck, razrez his books, pull off his...
Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought,...
From the return of Jimi Hendrix, as witnessed by a hero-worshipping spaced-out roadie, to the death of Christ as witnessed by a time-traveling tourist, from the end of the universe to the creation of a new one, these are stories about martyrdom,...
Robertson Davies uses his magical touch to weave together the destinies of this remarkable cast of characters, creating a wise and witty portrait of love, murder, and scholarship at a modern university.
Defrocked monks, mad professors, and...
First published in 1856, five years after the appearance of Moby Dick, The Piazza Tales comprises six of Herman Melville's finest short stories. Included are two sea tales that encompass the essence of Melville's art: 'Benito Cereno,' an...
Long considered the author's strangest novel, this work is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-18th-century America. A mysterious shape-changing confidence-man approaches passengers on a Mississippi steamboat and,...
Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a...