Milan Kundera's novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore...

"All life lessons are not learned at college. Life teaches them everywhere." At eighteen years old, Anne is leaving Green Gables for university - her life's dream. But her feelings are bittersweet: although excited to see the world, she is heartbroken to leave her home and everyone she loves. Before long she has made new friends - including handsome Roy Gardner, who seems to have stepped out of her dreams. When her childhood friend Gilbert Blythe...

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a...