Catalog Search Results
1) A lost lady
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"Written from the perspective of a male narrator, Willa Cather's classic novel is an American version of "Madame Bovary". It is a portrait of a talented woman trapped in the conventions and economic restraints of a marriage. It is the story of a woman who defies expectations, and whose personal changes coincide with the transforming American Frontier. In this work, Willa Cather expressed her profoundly modern feminist views in the life of an ordinary...
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In 1851 French Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows-- gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake....
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"In The Call of the Wild, a dog named Buck is kidnapped from this idyllic California home to work as a sled dog in the unforgiving Alaskan environment. In White Fang, a wolf dog navigates the world of wild animals and the world of humans--finding violence and loyalty in both. These two action-packed stories by Jack London depict the harshness of nature and the powerful drive to survive despite i all."-- Backcover.
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First published in 1925, "The Professor's House" is the profound study of a middle-aged man's unhappiness by critically acclaimed American author Willa Cather. The novel tells the story of its central character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, in three parts. In the first part, the Professor feels that he is losing control over his life and resists the direction it is taking. He is displeased with his family's move to a new house, with his daughters...
5) One of ours
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Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with...
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This collection, originally assembled by the author in 1922, features some of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most impressive and recognized pieces of short fiction. Divided into three parts, the tales are a diverse assortment, including the whimsical "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the visceral "May Day," and the adventurous "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
Although he is better known for novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald...
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Roxana, a light-skinned slave nurse on a large Southern plantation, is desperate to give her son a better chance at life than she had ever enjoyed, and so she switches him with the master's son. Years later, when Roxana's real son has turned to gambling, murder, and theft, it is the country lawyer, Pudd'nhead Wilson, who unmasks the true identity of the two. Considered Twain's most courageous work, this short novel is one of the most sensitive treatments...
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Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end. The Original 1897 Classic. A curious man, wearing a long coat, a wide-brimmed hat, and whose face is entirely swathed in bandages save for an obvious fake pink nose, walks into an English inn to the shock and horror of many of the townspeople. Beakers and chemicals in tow, the man demands his solitude. It’s strange enough as it is until...
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"First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness. As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her...
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In this powerful portrait of the self-making of an artist, Willa Cather created one of her most extraordinary heroines. Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, seems destined from childhood for a place in the wider world. But as her path to the world stage leads her ever farther from the humble town she can't forget and from the man she can't afford to love, Thea learns that her exceptional musical talent and fierce ambition...
11) 12 angry men
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Life is in their hands…death is on their minds. Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley and Jack Klugman lead the distinctive cast in this powerful, classic film. Eleven jurors are convinced that the defendant is guilty of murder. The twelfth has no doubt of his innocence. How can this one man steer the others toward the same conclusion? It's a case of seemingly overwhelming evidence against a teenager accused of killing his father in "one of the best...
13) Moby Dick
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Consumed by an insane rage, Captain Ahab has but one purpose in life-- revenge on the great white whale who maimed and disfigured him.
15) Restoration
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From Rose Tremain comes the Booker Prize shortlisted novel that "restored the historical novel to its rightful place of honor" (New York Times). Robert Merivel, son of a glove maker and an aspiring physician, finds his fortunes transformed when he is given a position at the court of King Charles II. Merivel slips easily into a life of luxury and idleness, enthusiastically enjoying the women and wine of the vibrant Restoration age. But when he's called...
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Mirrors the turmoil of nineteenth-century Russia, denouncing both nihlists and revolutionairies.
Based on a true event, in which a young revolutionary was murdered by his comrades, The Possessed provoked a storm of controversy for its harsh depiction of a ruthless band of Russian intellectuals, atheists, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals who attempt to incite the population of a small provincial town to revolt against the government. In...
18) The war poems
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When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to...
19) The idiot
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"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...
20) The misfits
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Following her divorce, a lonely young woman befriends a couple of down-on-their-luck cowboys. Both men desire her, but she longs for only one, who represents for her the freedom she's never had. Teaming up with a weather-beaten rodeo rider, the foursome goes into the mountains on a quest for rare and elusive wild horses. There they come to realize that, for all their differences, they share fundamentally similar needs and desires.