"This memoir by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia. Crews shares details of farm life, his father's death, his friendship with the son of a Black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. As an introduction to Crews's fiction, this portrait...
Features Christmas novellas and short stories, including "A Christmas Carol" and "A Christmas Tree," in which an old man reminisces about tree decorations and his memories of childhood Christmases.
A selection of religious writings by nineteenth-century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, including the title selection that documents his 1879 spiritual crisis during which he decided he had accomplished nothing of lasting value in his lifetime; accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes.
19th-century mechanic Hank Morgan suffers a blow to the head and awakens in sixth-century Camelot. Using his knowledge of the future and 19th-century science, Hank convinces King arthur and his court that he is a powerful magician. Hank then uses his position to try to bring American ideals of democracy to Old England.
Sara Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was an American regionalist and feminist writer, in the circle of writers like Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Born in South Berwick, Maine, Jewett had a happy, peaceful childhood where she developed a strong affinity to the nature and people of rural New England. Her first novel, "A Country Doctor", is a semi-autobiographical work about a young girl's struggle to choose between a medical...
When a French professor visiting the quiet, Dutch coastal town of Delfzjil is accused of murder, Maigret is sent to investigate. The community seems happy to blame an unknown outsider, but there are people much closer to home who seem to know much more than they're letting on: Beetje, the dissatisfied daughter of a local farmer, Any van Elst, sister-in-law of the deceased, and a notorious local crook.
On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly, leaving his wife, brother, and young son to deal with his sudden death.
This book contains four of Ibsen's most important plays in superb modern translations. With her assertion that she is "first and foremost a human being," rather than a wife, mother or fragile doll, Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she appeared in Henrik Ibsen's greatest and most famous play, A Doll's House. Ibsen's follow-up, Ghosts, was no less radical, with its unrelenting investigation into religious hypocrisy, family secrets,...
Spanning centuries and the entire continent of Africa, a panoramic collection of traditional African myths, fables, and folklore captures the rich and diverse cultures of Africa, from ancient Egypt and Ethiopia to the desert Sahara and sub-Saharan region, in tales of great heroes, monsters, migration, and world creation.
When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes's enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate....
"Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including...
"Proud, wilful and charismatic, Pechorin is Byronic in his wasted gifts and bored by his stifling world. With a predatory energy for any activity that will relieve his ennui, he embarks on a series of exciting adventures, involving smugglers, brigands, soldiers, rivals and lovers, and leaves a trail of broken hearts behind him." "A Hero of Our Time is a literary landmark, the first example of the psychological novel in Russia. Its five linked episodes,...
