Description Vanity Fair is perhaps Thackeray’s most famous novel. First serialized over the course of 19 volumes in Punch Magazine and first printed as a single volume in 1849, the novel cemented Thackeray’s literary fame and kept him busy with frequent revisions and even lecture circuits. The story is framed as a puppet play, narrated by an unreliable narrator, that presents the story of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley and the people in their lives as they struggle through the Napoleonic Wars. The
Description August Strindberg’s novel The Red Room centers on the civil servant Arvid Falk as he tries to find meaning in his life through the pursuit of writing. He’s accompanied by a crew of painters, sculptors and philosophers each on their own journey for the truth, who meet in the “Red Room” of a local restaurant. Drawing heavily on August’s own experiences, The Red Room was published in Sweden in 1879. Its reception was less than complimentary in Sweden—a major newspaper called it
Description The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 leveled the city of Lisbon and surrounding areas, and killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people. It came at a decisive time in the history of western thought: the melding of Faith, Philosophy, and Science into a post-enlightenment rational view of the universe. In some sense mankind had just begun to believe he had the universe figured out when the universe struck back with a tragedy so terrible in scale it could not be fit into any box of
Description Little Fuzzy is a science fiction novel set on the planet Zarathustra, a world rich in natural resources being exploited by a huge chartered company from Earth. Jack Holloway is a free-lance sunstone miner working on the outskirts of civilization when he encounters a small, fuzzy animal which turns out to be remarkably intelligent. He soon begins to suspect that “Little Fuzzy” and his family are more than just clever animals, but in fact a new sapient alien species. Such a
Description The first anthology of short stories by Jack London, Lost Face tells seven stories about the Klondike gold rush. In “Lost Face,” the fur thief Subienkow faces gruesome torture and execution by a tribe of Indians, armed with only his wits. “Trust” is a story about the dangers of the Yukon River. Jack London’s best known short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells the story of a nameless man and his dog attempting to survive in the frozen Northern Territory. In “That Spot,” the eponymous
Description In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf tells the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is transformed into an elf after a set of misdeeds. Escaping with his family’s farm goose he joins up with a flock of wild geese and travels with them across Sweden as they return to their annual nesting grounds in Lapland. The story was originally written as a commission for the Swedish National Teachers’ Association to write a geography book for children and has become a firm
Description The Cosmic Computer is a 1963 science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper based on his short story “Graveyard of Dreams,” which was published in the February 1958 issue of Galaxy Magazine. The action largely takes place on the planet Poictesme, which is full of abandoned military installations and equipment—hence the novel’s original name, Junkyard Planet. Young Conn Maxwell returns from Earth with long-awaited news about Merlin, a military computer with god-like abilities long rumored
Description The Magnificent Ambersons, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer prize, is considered by many to be Booth Tarkington’s finest novel and an American classic. The story is set in the Midwest, where George, the spoiled and oblivious scion of an old-money family, must cope with their waning fortunes and the rise of industry barons in the automobile age. George’s antiheroic struggles with modernity encapsulate a greater theme of change and renewal—specifically, the very American notion of a small
Description Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Indian (and more specifically Bengali) literary history, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian—indeed, the first person outside Europe—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely in recognition of his “spiritual offering of songs,” Gitanjali. Tagore himself translated the poems from the original Bengali, taking many liberties in the process. His English translation is rightly recognized as a work distinct from the Bengali
Description Scaramouche tells the tale of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in Brittany. When his friend is killed by an unremorseful landowner, Moreau swears revenge and begins a life of adventure on the run. His travels lead him to joining a traveling theater troupe, becoming a master swordsman, and even to revolution. While the story of Scaramouche is fiction, Sabatini was always very careful to portray history as accurately as he could in his novels. Thus, the backdrop of the French
Description Vanity Fair is perhaps Thackeray’s most famous novel. First serialized over the course of 19 volumes in Punch Magazine and first printed as a single volume in 1849, the novel cemented Thackeray’s literary fame and kept him busy with frequent revisions and even lecture circuits. The story is framed as a puppet play, narrated by an unreliable narrator, that presents the story of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley and the people in their lives as they struggle through the Napoleonic Wars. The
Description August Strindberg’s novel The Red Room centers on the civil servant Arvid Falk as he tries to find meaning in his life through the pursuit of writing. He’s accompanied by a crew of painters, sculptors and philosophers each on their own journey for the truth, who meet in the “Red Room” of a local restaurant. Drawing heavily on August’s own experiences, The Red Room was published in Sweden in 1879. Its reception was less than complimentary in Sweden—a major newspaper called it
Description The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 leveled the city of Lisbon and surrounding areas, and killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people. It came at a decisive time in the history of western thought: the melding of Faith, Philosophy, and Science into a post-enlightenment rational view of the universe. In some sense mankind had just begun to believe he had the universe figured out when the universe struck back with a tragedy so terrible in scale it could not be fit into any box of
Description Little Fuzzy is a science fiction novel set on the planet Zarathustra, a world rich in natural resources being exploited by a huge chartered company from Earth. Jack Holloway is a free-lance sunstone miner working on the outskirts of civilization when he encounters a small, fuzzy animal which turns out to be remarkably intelligent. He soon begins to suspect that “Little Fuzzy” and his family are more than just clever animals, but in fact a new sapient alien species. Such a
Description The first anthology of short stories by Jack London, Lost Face tells seven stories about the Klondike gold rush. In “Lost Face,” the fur thief Subienkow faces gruesome torture and execution by a tribe of Indians, armed with only his wits. “Trust” is a story about the dangers of the Yukon River. Jack London’s best known short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells the story of a nameless man and his dog attempting to survive in the frozen Northern Territory. In “That Spot,” the eponymous
Description In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf tells the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is transformed into an elf after a set of misdeeds. Escaping with his family’s farm goose he joins up with a flock of wild geese and travels with them across Sweden as they return to their annual nesting grounds in Lapland. The story was originally written as a commission for the Swedish National Teachers’ Association to write a geography book for children and has become a firm
Description The Cosmic Computer is a 1963 science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper based on his short story “Graveyard of Dreams,” which was published in the February 1958 issue of Galaxy Magazine. The action largely takes place on the planet Poictesme, which is full of abandoned military installations and equipment—hence the novel’s original name, Junkyard Planet. Young Conn Maxwell returns from Earth with long-awaited news about Merlin, a military computer with god-like abilities long rumored
Description The Magnificent Ambersons, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer prize, is considered by many to be Booth Tarkington’s finest novel and an American classic. The story is set in the Midwest, where George, the spoiled and oblivious scion of an old-money family, must cope with their waning fortunes and the rise of industry barons in the automobile age. George’s antiheroic struggles with modernity encapsulate a greater theme of change and renewal—specifically, the very American notion of a small
Description Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Indian (and more specifically Bengali) literary history, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian—indeed, the first person outside Europe—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely in recognition of his “spiritual offering of songs,” Gitanjali. Tagore himself translated the poems from the original Bengali, taking many liberties in the process. His English translation is rightly recognized as a work distinct from the Bengali
Description Scaramouche tells the tale of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in Brittany. When his friend is killed by an unremorseful landowner, Moreau swears revenge and begins a life of adventure on the run. His travels lead him to joining a traveling theater troupe, becoming a master swordsman, and even to revolution. While the story of Scaramouche is fiction, Sabatini was always very careful to portray history as accurately as he could in his novels. Thus, the backdrop of the French