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1) Beloved
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After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
2) Adam Bede
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George Eliot takes the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire and out if it creates a portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people their labors and loves, their beliefs, their speech.
3) Vanity Fair
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Thackeray's best-loved work, "Vanity Fair, is a satire of epic proportions, and proves that deep-seated cynicism and heartfelt morality don't have to get in the way of a good story. Filled with exceptionally drawn characters, biting social humor, and Thackeray's own illustrations, "Vanity Fair is not only one of the great English novels of the nineteenth century, its title has become synonymous with the follies of high society. Nicholas Dames is Assistant...
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Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice...
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Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. All animals are equals but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is the account of the bold struggle, initiated...
6) Catch-22
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Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.
7) Don Quixote
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Everyman's library volume 3
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From the publisher. Our ceaseless human quest for something larger than ourselves has never been represented with more insight and love than in this story of Don Quixote -- pursuing his vision of glory in a mercantile age -- and his shrewd, skeptical manservant, Sancho Panza. As they set out to right the world's wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce, and fantasy on...
8) The Odyssey
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The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world. This vivid new translation - the first by a woman - matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant...
9) My Antonia
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The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of the immigrant
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Probably Garcia Marquez's finest and most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.
11) Dombey and Son
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Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...
12) Howards End
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"First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families - the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked - some very funny, some very tragic - that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards...
13) Anna Karenina
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A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...
14) Song of Solomon
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Everyman's library volume no. 216
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Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.
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Everyman's library volume 371
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"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
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Written in 1897, The Turn of the Screw remains one of the most suspenseful and fascinating ghost stories ever written. A governess arrives at an isolated English mansion to care for two seemingly angelic but rather strange young children, and the appearance of two evil phantoms leads her to question her sanity. Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the...
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"On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young German soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time. When twenty-year-old Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under...
19) Moll Flanders
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As Moll Flanders rises from the infamous Newgate Prison to fame, wealth, and respectability, Moll comes to embody all the excess and vitality of an era
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Published in 1839, Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens' third novel. In it, Nicholas Nickleby must earn a living to support his mother and sister after his father dies unexpectedly. Turning to a wealthy uncle in London for help, Nicholas is hired on as assistant to Wackford Squeers, a sadistic and small-minded schoolmaster. Meanwhile, his sister must take a job in a milliner's studio and is occasionally pressed into service by their uncle who exploits...