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Description Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, five aristocratic families in Russia are transformed by the vagaries of life, by war, and by the intersection of their lives with each other. Hundreds of characters populate War and Peace, many of them historical persons, including Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, and all of them come to life under Tolstoy’s deft hand. War and Peace is generally considered to be Tolstoy’s masterpiece, a pinnacle of Russian literature, and one of history’s
Description Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse, was first published on February 24, 1917 by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York. It was subsequently published in London in May 1918 by Herbert Jenkins. It is based on a story originally published in the Saturday Evening Post from September 16 to November 11, 1916. The book sees Jimmy Crocker, also known as “Piccadilly Jim,” trying to escape his increasingly bad reputation by returning to New York from London. On the way, he meets and falls in love
Description The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and shortest plays. This comedy utilizes slapstick humor, word play, and mistaken identities to create a series of farcical accidents. Over time, the play’s title has become an idiom used to describe “an event or series of events made ridiculous by the number of errors that were made throughout.” In Ephesus, the law forbids entry to any merchants from Syracuse, and if they are discovered within the city, they must pay a thousand
Description The Iron Heel is some of the earliest dystopian fiction of the 20th century. The novel is framed as a presentation of the long-lost “Everhard Manuscript,” a document written by the socialist revolutionary Avis Everhard around 1932. The manuscript is discovered in the year 2600, and is introduced and annotated by a far-future commentator. In it, Avis tells of how the United States was slowly overcome by a group of oligarchs, the Iron Heel, who use their monopoly power to
Description Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.” Indeed, Jude was to
Description After her father’s death, young Anne Beddingfeld moves to London with her meagre inheritance, hopeful and ready to meet adventure. She witnesses a fatal accident at a Tube station and picks up a cryptic note dropped by the anonymous doctor who appeared on the scene. When Anne learns of a murder at the estate that the dead man was on his way to visit, it confirms her suspicion that the man in the brown suit who lost the note was not a real doctor. With her clue in hand she gains a
Description In 1840s St. Petersburg the ageing copyist Makar Dievushkin is, with various degrees of subtlety, trying to woo Barbara Dobroselova, a young woman who has had a swift fall in fortunes. Told in alternating letters to each other, their past stories and current hopes play out in raw and personal detail, as the daily realities of an uncaring and expensive town take hold. Poor Folk was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel and was written to try and cover his escalating debts from his
Description Vladimir Korolenko was a Ukrainian author and humanitarian. His short stories and novellas draw both on the myths and traditions of his birthplace, and his experiences of Siberia as a political exile due to his outspoken criticism of both the Tsars and the Bolsheviks. His first short story was published in 1879, and over the next decade he received many plaudits from critics and other authors, including Chekhov, though he also received some criticism for perceived uneven quality. He
Description Howards End, published in 1910, is considered by many to be Forster’s masterpiece. The plot revolves around three families in Edwardian England: the Schlegels, a trio of half-German, middle-class siblings who to poor people seem rich, but to rich people seem poor; the Wilcoxes, a large, wealthy family of businessmen; and the Basts, a lower class young couple struggling to keep up appearances. The Schlegel siblings are sharp, intelligent, and idealistic, and they pursue culture and
Description Jurgen is James Branch Cabell’s most famous novel, and a highly influential one in the fantasy genre. The novel is a witty, parodic send-up of the ideal of courtly love. Soon after publication, its bawdy style and double-entendre-laden dialog brought it to the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who promptly attempted to prosecute it for obscenity. After some years Cabell finally won the trial, and the publicity the trial brought made the book and Cabell