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2) Bleak House
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English
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Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
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Begun as an ambitious project by the versatile English courtier, diplomat, philosopher, and author Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, The Canterbury Tales follows a group of people on their pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Saint Thomas Becket. The Prologue introduces all of the pilgrims in great detail, and through these descriptions Chaucer provides the entire spectrum of social classes and professions of his time. When the group stops at an inn...
4) Vanity Fair
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English
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Description
Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. This limited edition includes the author's original illustrations.
Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches...
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Life on the Mississippi is no ordinary guided tour, for every page is expressive of the structure, style, and high humor that is the very essence of Twain. Spiced with Twain's pungent observations and commentaries on the culture and society of the great river valley, this book is a wonderful collection of lively anecdotes, tall tales, and character sketches; historical facts and information; and reminiscences of the author's boyhood and his adventures...
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Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother,...
7) Macbeth
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One night on the heath, the brave and respected general Macbeth encounters three witches who foretell that he will become king of Scotland. At first skeptical, he’s urged on by the ruthless, single-minded ambitions of Lady Macbeth, who suffers none of her husband’s doubt. But seeing the prophecy through to the bloody end leads them both spiralling into paranoia, tyranny, madness, and murder. This shocking tragedy - a violent caution to those...
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While spending the summer in a resort on Grand Isle with her husband and children, Edna Pontellier begins a process of self-discovery, which only intensifies after she meets the charming Robert Lebrun. Yet, when Robert departs for Mexico and the summer holiday ends, Edna's newfound sense of independence leads her to isolate herself from New Orleans society and to reject her former lifestyle. Moving into a home of her own and devoting more time to...
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Marlow, the story's narrator, tells his friends of an experience in the British Congo where he once ran a river steamer for a trading company. He tells of the ivory traders' cruel exploitation of the natives there. Chief among these is a greedy and treacherous European named Kurtz, a man who has used savagery to obtain semi-divine power over the natives. While Marlow tries to get Kurtz back down the river, Kurtz tries to justify his actions and motions,...
11) The tempest
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'The Tempest' has long been regarded as Shakespeare's swan-song, though recent chronologies suggest he went on to compose 'Henry VIII' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' after. In its first publication (in the First Folio of 1623), 'The Tempest' appears in the 'Comedies' section. In modern criticism, it is more likely to be described as a 'late play' (written towards the end of what we perceive to be Shakespeare's writing career, c. 1607-13) or a 'romance'...
13) The jungle
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1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial...
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness ..." The most famous and possibly the most popular of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities shows a master of dramatic narrative extracting gold from the ore of history. If the bloody tableau of the French Revolution were...
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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts...
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Originally written as a political satire and now read as an adventure story, the travels of Gulliver include adventures in a land where people were only inches tall, in a land of giants, on an island that floated in the air, and in a country ruled by horses.
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Hank Morgan finds himself transported to Dark Ages Englandw̮here he is immediately captured and sentenced to death at Camelot. Fortunately, heś quick-witted, and in the process of saving his life he turns himself into a celebrity of the highest magnitudew̮inning himself the position of prime minister as well as the lasting enmity of Merlin.
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Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined...
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This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...
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