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Modern library of the world's best books volume 378
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English
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"Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfil her last wish - to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Narrated in turn by each of the family members - including Addie...
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"Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of America's most beloved writers, most known for his short stories of mystery and horror. He was also an accomplished poet and tough literary critic. Much like the drama and fiction, Poe's life was full of hardships. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by a foster family. As a young man, he developed problems with gambling, debts, and alcohol, and was even dismissed from the army. His love life was marked by...
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"The quest for self-discovery never ends, especially for Harry Haller-better known as the Steppenwolf. After a life spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her intoxicating power. Through their nighttime adventures, the Steppenwolf experiences the decadent underbelly of the bourgeois society he always despised. Harry becomes a man divided-lost in a surreal underground world of pleasure and set...
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When a bumbling holy man mistakenly baptizes a colony of penguins, God endows the animals with souls and their formerly peaceful community declines into a maelstrom of violence and sin. This witty allegory lampoons French history from ancient to modern times, taking satirical swipes at socialists, royalists, industrialists, militarists, and even the Dreyfus affair, and concluding with a remarkably prescient view of the future. Indeed, more than a...
6) Victory
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English
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Raised by a single Swedish philosopher, Axel Heyst inherits his father's pessimistic view of society. As a child, he is taught about all the dark inclinations of humankind, warping his mind. Axel struggles with these beliefs and the atmosphere of the environment in which he grew up. Because of this, he has a mix of complicated feelings when his father passes away. He decides to leave London and travel the world, which lead him to both adventures and...
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The first volume of Decline and Fall was published in 1776, and by the time the final volume appeared in 1787, Gibbon had produced an exhaustive, million-and-a-half-word account of a 'revolution, which shall ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth'.
This panoramic work, covering 13 centuries from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, has been described as 'a bridge that carries one from the ancient world to the...
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English
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The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies...
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English
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First published in 1653, Izaak Walton's "The Compleat Angler" is a classic and much-loved treatise on the art of fishing. Immediately popular after its publication, "The Compleat Angler" was reprinted and updated numerous times by Walton. Written as a conversation between the fictional characters of the experienced angler Piscator and his student Viator, which was changed to a hunter named Venator in later editions, the treatise is part an instructional...
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The classic account of the Russian Revolution by an American journalist who witnessed it firsthand.
John Reed, an American writer for a socialist magazine, was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 and Russia began its transformation into the Soviet Union. Read by Lenin himself and adapted into a film by Sergei Eisenstein, Reed’s eyewitness account is a masterpiece of twentieth-century reporting....
John Reed, an American writer for a socialist magazine, was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 and Russia began its transformation into the Soviet Union. Read by Lenin himself and adapted into a film by Sergei Eisenstein, Reed’s eyewitness account is a masterpiece of twentieth-century reporting....
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This is not the 1940 version but is based on the edition originally published in 1935 in the US by Little, Brown: Boston. The African Queen is a tale replete with vintage Forester drama-unrelenting suspense, reckless heroism, impromptu military manoeuvres, near-death experiences-and a good old-fashioned love story to boot.
As World War I reaches the heart of the African jungle, Charlie Allnutt and Rose Sayer, a dishevelled trader and an English...
14) The Decameron
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English
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Translated with an Introduction and Notes by G.H. McWilliam.
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English
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Ann Veronica is a New Woman novel by H.G. Wells. Ann Veronica describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty," against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Victorian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the Women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter...
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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
'[Arnold Bennett's] superb Old Wives' Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest 'long novel' that has been written in English and in the English fashion, in this generation.'
—H. G. Wells
First published in 1908, The Old Wives' Tale affirms the integrity of ordinary lives as it tells the story of the Baines...
'[Arnold Bennett's] superb Old Wives' Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest 'long novel' that has been written in English and in the English fashion, in this generation.'
—H. G. Wells
First published in 1908, The Old Wives' Tale affirms the integrity of ordinary lives as it tells the story of the Baines...
17) Nostromo
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English
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"Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard" is set in the South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera. Charles Gould is a native...
18) Light in August
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English
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A landmark in American fiction, Light in August published in 1932, explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas-a man doomed, deracinated and alone-wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is, pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and...
19) Sons and lovers
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English
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From the author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, his dramatic masterpiece on the complex relationships within a working-class family.
Gertrude Morel married beneath her status and now loathes her drunken, working-class husband. She instead focuses her passion on her son, Paul, who returns her love and equally despises his father. As Paul matures into a young artist, this relationship strains his attempts at connecting with other
...20) Les misérables
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Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe's great democratic revolutions....
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