The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is an ominous fable about the pursuit of great wealth. Readers will be transported to a fabulous fantasy land of such opulence that its very existence has to remain a jealously guarded secret. Fatal consequences lie in store for 'bona fide' guests and uninvited visitors alike, while the sybaritic luxury of the place is evoked in an effortless prose style which is quintessentially F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also featured in this volume are The Cut-Glass Bowl, May Day, The Rich Boy, Crazy Sunday, An Alcoholic Case, The Lees of Happiness, The Lost Decade and Babylon Revisited.
Since its publication in 1913, D. H. Lawrence's powerful and passionate third novel stands as one of the greatest autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. Here is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. Here, too, England's Derbyshire springs to life with both is sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions that rule this remarkable book.
With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) are world famous animal stories. Set in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, The Call of the Wild is about Buck, the magnificent cross-bred offspring of a St Bernard and a Scottish Collie. Stolen from his pampered life on a Californian estate and shipped to the Klondike to work as a sledge dog, he triumphs over his circumstances and becomes the leader of a wolf pack. The story records the decivilisation of Buck as he answers the call of the wild , an inherent memory of primeval origins to which he instinctively responds. In contrast, White Fang relates the tale of a wolf born and bred in the wild which is civilised by the master he comes to trust and love. The brutal world of the Klondike miners and their dogs is brilliantly evoked and Jack London s rendering of the sentient life of Buck and White Fang as they confront their destiny is enthralling and convincing. The deepe
This edition contains Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass. It is illustrated throughout by Sir John Tenniel, whose drawings for the books add so much to the enjoyment of them. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen and the White Rabbit all make their appearances, and are now familiar figures in writing, conversation and idiom. So too, are Carroll's delightful verses such as The Walrus and the Carpenter and the inspired jargon of that masterly Wordsworthian parody, The Jabberwocky.
This volume presents the Latin text, with an Introduction and full commentary, of Book XIII of the Roman poet Ovid's long work Metamorphoses. It discusses in detail Ovid's treatment of his sources and sets out the ways in which he has adapted earlier literature as material for his novel enterprise. Guidance is offered on points of language and style, and the Introduction treats in general terms the themes of metamorphosis and the structure of the poem as a whole. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
This swashbuckling tale, beloved around the world, follows the fortunes of d'Artagnan, a country boy who travels to Paris to join the Musketeers, save his Queen from scandal, and outwit the devious Cardinal Richelieu.
This novel,first published in 1817,achieved a huge success and helped establish the historical novel as a literary form.In rich prose and vivid de*ion,Rob Roy follows the adventures of a businessman's son,Frank Osbaldistone,who is sent to Scotland and finds himself drawn to the powerful,enigmatic figure of Rob Roy MacGregor,the romantic outlaw who fights for justice and dignity for the Scots.This is an incomparable portrait of the haunted Highlands and Scotland's glorious past.
The Wordsworth Classics Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare s works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Romeo and luliet is the world s most famous drama of tragic young love.Defying the feud which divides their families Romeo and luliet enjoy the fleeting rapture of courtship marriage and sexual fulfilment but a combination of old animosities and new coincidences brings them to suicidal deaths. This play offers a rich mixture of romantic lyricism bawdy comedy intimate harmony and sudden violence Long successful in the theatre it has also generated numerous operas ballets and films and these have helped to make Romeo and Juliet perennially topical.
‘Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security', lane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggles of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities. Elinor's character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival. This book, the first of Austen's novels to be published,remains as fresh a cautionary tale today as it ever was.
Bill Canavan rode into the valley with a dream to start hisown ranch. But when he managed to stake claims on the three bestwater holes, the other ranchers turned against him. No one is moredetermined to see Canavan dead than Star Levitt. Levitt is anunscrupulous businessman who has been accumulating cattle at analarming rate. Suspicious after witnessing a secret meeting betweenthe riders of warring ranches, Bill begins noticing other dubiousbehavior: Why is Levitt's fiancee, Dixie Venable, acting more likea hostage than a willing bride-to-be? Canavan doesn't have muchtime to figure out what's going on. The entire valley is againsthim, and everyone is ready to shoot on sight.
A nineteenth-century American travels back in time to sixth-century England in this darkly comic social satire. THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: A concise introduction that gives the reader important background information A chronology of the author's life and work A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context An outline of key themes and plot points to guide the reader's own interpretations Detailed explanatory notes Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to the
It is among such communities as these that happiness will find her last refuge on earth..". Against this backdrop Hardy tells a vivid story of life in rural Wessex which centres on the independent and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. She decides to manage the farm she has inherited and finds herself in a powerful position for a woman of the 1840s. But power brings tragic complications when she has to decide between three rival suitors.
With these words, Washington Irving expresses the dilemma ofevery American artist in the nineteenth century. The Sketch-Book(1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides ofthe Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of anAmerican writer to English literary traditions. He sketches aseries of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parentnation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplantedfrom Europe creates the first classic American short stories, 'RipVan Winkle' and 'The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow'. The result wasnot only a hugely successful travel book; it exerted a strongformative influence on American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorneand Edgar Allan Poe to Henry James, and is well worth rediscoveryin its own right today. Based on Irving's final revision of hismost popular work, this new edition includes comprehensiveexplanatory notes of The Sketch-Book's sources for the modernreader. In her introduction, Susan Manning suggests that the authorforged a new idiom
Cervantes’tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant,tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games. Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the "books of chivalry", this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. On his "heroic" journey Don Quixote meets characters of every class and condition, from the prostitute Maritornes, who is commended for her Christian charity, to the Knight of the Green Coat,who seems to embody some of the constraints of virtue. Cervantes’ greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, an suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out
Written and privately published in Florence in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was denied unexpurgated publication in England until 1960. D.H Lawrence’s uncompromisingly candid novel deals in poetic and sexually explicit language with the passionate relationship between Lady Constance Chatterley and her husband’s powerfully masculine gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Trapped in a marriage, which has become sterile and joyless since her husband’s return from the trenches partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, Connie seizes the chance of sexual fulfilment she had thought lost forever. Sir Clifford Chatterley is enlightened enough to allow Connie a measure of freedom, but when, pregnant with Mellors’ child, she confesses to the affair, the reality of her association with his gamekeeper is more than he can bear. A watershed in twentieth-century literary fiction because of its sensational content, the novel has earned for itself an enduring readership and lasting notoriety.
Long considered the first great modern novel of war by an American author, this classic work is set in the time of the Civil War and tells a powerful, psychological story of a young soldier's struggle with the horrors--both within and without the war. 作者简介： Stephen Crane was born in Newark, NJ in 1871, the son of a Methodist minister. Before he reached twenty-five, Crane had made his mark on the American literary scene by writing two major works: Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895). He failed a theme-writing course in college at the same time he was writing articles for newspapers, among them the New York Herald Tribune. Maggie, drawn from firsthand observations in the slums of New York, was praised and condemned for its sordid realism. By contrast, The Red Badge of Courage, also praised for its realism, was drawn entirely from newspaper accounts and research, as Crane himself never went to war. Crane's adventurous spirit drove him to Cuba in 1896, pro
Following the tremendous popular success of Jane Eyre, which earned her lifelong notoriety as a moral revolutionary, Charlotte Bront vowed to write a sweeping social chronicle that focused on "something real and unromantic as Monday morning." Set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and Luddite revolts of 1811-12, Shirley (1849) is the story of two contrasting heroines. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, who is trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory and whose bare life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention. A work that combines social commentary with the more private preoccupations of Jane Eyre, Shirley demonstrates the full range of Bront 's literary talent. "Shirley is a revolutionary novel," wrote Bront biographer Lyndall Gordon. "Shirley follows Jane Eyre as a new exemplar--but so much a forerunner of the femini
Motherless Sara Crewe was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin’s. Her father was immensely rich and she became ’show pupil’ - a little princess. Then her father dies and his wealth disappears, and Sara has to learn to cope with her changed circumstances. Her strong character enables her to fight successfully against her new-found poverty and the scorn of her fellows.
Grade 9 Up-The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes II is narrated by British theatre, film, and television actor David Timson. His Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are near perfect. The only place where Timson's narration is less than perfect is his female and German characters. All in all, this is a fine production, with piano and string music by Paganini and others sprinkled throughout. All of the stories take place after Dr. Watson has married and moved from Baker Street. "The Scandal in Bohemia" is a good story with which to begin, because in it Watson describes both Holmes' singular lifestyle of old books, the violin and cocaine, and his extraordinary powers of deduction and disguise. This information may help to reel in students who are unfamiliar with the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The four cases are interconnected in that, although Holmes solves each case, in each he has to admit a failure, which adds a humanizing quality to the otherwise invincible Holmes. In "The Scandal in Bohemia," Watson and Holme
Edited by M.R.James In 1888 Henry James wrote 'There was the customary novel by Mr Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight'.Madam Crowl's Ghost & Other Stories are tales selected from Le Fanu's stories which mostly appeared in The Dublin University Magazine and other periodicals,and their haunting,sinister qualities still have an enormous appeal for the modern reader.The great M.R.James,who collected and introduces the stories in this book,considered that Le Fanu 'stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.'
What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars. Even though she is nearly thirty, well past the sell-by bloom of youth, Austen makes her win out for herself and for others like herself, in a regenerated society.
Winterborne sped on his way to Sherton Abbas without elation and without discomposure. Had he regarded his inner self spectacularly, as lovers are now daily more wont to do, he might have felt pride in the discernment of a somewhat rare power in him--that of keeping not only judgment but emotion suspended in difficult cases. But he noted it not.
This is a fascinating selection of Kipling's most famous short stories, bringing together the very best of his work. Life's Handicap reflects his experiences of India, and contains two horror stories which permeate the collection with an air of haunted destinies. Delusions and obsessions, past lives and the slums of London in 1890 are the diverse topics featured in Many Inventions. While Traffics and Discoveries is Kipling's well-loved story about a polo pony.
