Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Axel Heyst aims to drift through life in solitude, believing he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from humanity's passions and delusions. Then, living on a remote island in the Malay Archipelago, he rescues a young English girl escaping from a man who is infatuated with her."-- From cover, pg 4.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century. Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress, marries and moves to New York, and when her husband loses his job, returns to the stage." ***"A powerful account of a young working girl's rise to the 'tinsel and shine' of worldly success, and of the slow decline of her lover and protector Hurstwood." Oxford Companion to Engl Lit. ***"Plain, unaffected, and unconventional story of the actual life of the lower middle-classes...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Regarded as one of Arnold Bennett's finest works, The Old Wives' Tale was first published in 1908. It tells the story of sisters Constance and Sophia Baines, both very different from one another, and follows their lives from youth into old age. Bennett's inspiration was an encounter in a Parisian restaurant: "an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous
...5) Hunger
Author
Language
English
Description
Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger' is an existential foray into the depths of the human psyche, marking a pivotal transition in literature toward a stream-of-consciousness narrative that foregrounds the internal over the external. With its publication at the cusp of the 20th century, 'Hunger' dismantles the strictures of Victorian moralism, delving instead into the erratic cadences of a mind in the grip of starvation. The protagonist's peregrinations through...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin, an innkeeper and his family are sleeping. Around them and their dreams there swirls a vortex of world history, of ambition and failure, desire and transgression, pride and shame, rivalry and conflict, gossip and mystery.
Author
Language
English
Description
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
More Lists...
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
More Lists...
Description
"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"World War I, in the background of Rebecca West's first novel, was "the first war that women could imagine," writes Samuel Hynes in his eloquent introduction, "and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel." Narrated by a woman who, like West, has never experienced war and yet for whom the war was very real, The Return of the Soldier (1918) takes place not on a battlefield, but in an isolated country house. It examines the relationships...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), is a devastating portrait of a generation of wealthy young Americans who struggle to find meaning and happiness in their lives. The sophisticated but emotionally fragile Anthony Patch enjoys an initially idyllic marriage to the beautiful Gloria Gilbert. But their intense romance turns sour as they waste their time and energy in decadent leisure and luxury. Their happiness comes...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In fifteen funny, colorful, poignant and mysterious stories, the irreverent modernist Katherine Mansfield, a friend and contemporary of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, examines a range of themes integral to the human experience, from marriage, family, and death to duty, disillusionment, and regret in this commanding collection, part of the Ecco Art of the Story series. Written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life in the...
13) Howards End
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Howards End concerns the relationships that develop between the imaginative, life-loving Schlegel family -- Margaret, Helen, and their brother Tibby -- and the seemingly cool, pragmatic Wilcoxes -- Henry and Ruth and their children Charles, Paul, and Evie. Margaret finds a soulmate in Ruth, who before she dies declares in a note that her family's country house, Howards End, should go to Margaret. Her survivors choose to ignore her wishes, but after...
14) The comedians
Author
Language
English
Description
"Three men, Brown, Smith, and Jones, meet on a ship bound for Haiti, where "Papa Doc" and the Tontons Macoute rule, with sinister secret police."
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Rise of David Levinsky, written by the legendary founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, is an early Jewish-American classic. According to the scholar Sam B. Girgus, "The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way."" "First published in 1917, Abraham Cahan's realistic novel tells the story of a young talmudic scholar who emigrates from a small...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This vintage book contains three short stories written by Joseph Conrad. These stories do not share the same narrative, but do share a theme: the stages of life. 'Youth' focuses on a young man's first sea-voyage to the East; 'Heart of Darkness' concerns a particularly unenlightened maturity; and 'The end of the Tether' deals with the old age of an ex-military man. Conrad's masterful writing has influenced many important twentieth-century writers and...
17) Jacob's room
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Jacob Flanders, a sensitive young man raised in Edwardian England, discovers as an adult that his life is lacking, but his search for fulfillment is sidetracked by the outbreak of World War I.
18) Seize the day
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of Tommy Wilhelm, an honest, hard-working man who has lost his job, his girlfriend, and part of his sanity as he heads to New York to pick up the pieces of his life.
20) Dangling man
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
An essential masterwork by Nobel laureate Saul Bellow Expecting to be inducted into the army during World War II, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Written in diary format, Bellow's first novel documents Joseph's psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request