"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...

Presents American author Willa Cather's first novel, published in 1912, about Bartley Alexander, a bridge builder who is torn between two women who represent different stages of his life.

"Valerie Martin's Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery's venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon's own...

"A beautifully illustrated version of the original 1925 edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic work. Widely considered to be the greatest American novel of all time, The Great Gatsby is the story of the wealthy, quixotic Jay Gatsby and his obsessive love for debutante Daisy Buchanan. It is also a cautionary tale of the American Dream in all its exuberance, decadence, hedonism, and passion. First published in 1925 by Charles Scribner's Sons, The...

Abandoned pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events such as the Great Plague and the Fire of London to the intimate passions of ordinary and extraordinary...

Rubbed Out
Robin Light has had better days. Business at her pet store is painfully slow. Syracuse has had twenty-three consecutive days of snow. And she's trying to quit smoking. . .again. So when ex-cop Paul Santini calls, offering a cakewalk of a job finding some rich lawyer's runaway wife, Robin takes the case—without getting all the facts. She gets her first clue that something isn't right during a visit to the worried husband,...

Given by Bernice Lanman

The story of the love affair between Thomas Jefferson and his quadroon slave that lasted thirty-eight years, until his death in 1826.

Jules Mendelson is wealthy. Astronomically so. He and his wife lead the kind of charity-giving, art-filled, high-society life for which each has been carefully groomed. Until Jules falls in love with Flo March, a beautiful actress/waitress. What Flo discovers about the super-rich is not a pretty sight. In the end, she wants no more than what she was promised. But when Flo begins to share the true story of her life among the Mendelsons, not everyone...

Benjamin Braddock, totally confused about his life after his college graduation, begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's law partner, but does not realize the enormity of his mistake until he falls in love with the Robinson's daughter, Elaine.