Jane Austen's timeless romance consistently appears on top of "most loved books" among literary scholars and the reading public, and has been adapted into a 2005 movie starring Keira Knightley. "Like all masterpieces of literature, it cannot be digested in one reading." Austen's level of realism in portraying her three-dimensional characters is unparalleled in English literature. "Not even Dickens, who used to weep over the deaths of his characters,...

Recounts the further adventures, successes, and failures of the numerous young men of Plumfield school. Sequel to "Little Men."

Originally published in serial format in "The Egoist" between 1914 and 1915, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," is the semi-autobiographical portrayal of James Joyce's early upbringing as an Irish Catholic in late 19th century and early 20th-century Dublin. The novel was originally planned as a 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style entitled "Stephen Hero" however Joyce reworked the novel into five condensed chapters, dispensing...

An Ode to a Vanished Way of Life on the Nebraska Plains

"I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." ― Willa Cather, My Antonia

In Willa Cather's My Antonia, thoughts of home and homesickness

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Captain Ahab takes his crew on a mission to find Moby Dick, the great white whale that crippled him.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine's editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde's knowledge. Despite that censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited...

Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility is the classic coming of age story of two sisters-Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who have contrasting temperaments. On the surface Elinor, the older sister represents sense, while Marianne represents sensibility; however upon closer examination we find that they both exhibit varying aspects of each characteristic. Set in southwest England, in the towns of London and Kent, the novel follows...

First published in 1818, "Persuasion" was English novelist Jane Austen's last completed work. The novel centers on the story of Anne Elliot, a lovely young woman who years prior had accepted the proposal for marriage from the handsome young naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Despite Frederick's cleverness and ambition, his lower social status and lack of wealth makes him an inappropriate match for Anne in the view of her family. Instead of following...

Clever and confident, Emma is positive that she can find the perfect husband for her new friend Harriet. But with one mistake after another, Emma realizes that she might not understand people as well as she thought. In fact, she might not even understand her own heart.