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Anthony Keyes
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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
James Mustich
Encouraged by their teachers and fueled by optimism, patriotism, and the promise of glory, Paul Bäumer and three friends volunteer for what would come to be known as World War I. But the reality of war in the trenches, as they witness unimagined carnage, leaves them struggling to keep their sanity a...show more
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Home
Witold Rybczynski
“Home is where one starts from,” wrote T. S. Eliot, and it is Witold Rybczynski’s intention in this enlightening book to explain how very long it took us to arrive at that starting point. Privacy, domesticity, comfort, the concept of home and family we have inherited—these were all quite clearly inv...show more
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare
The consummate exemplar of the Elizabethan love affair with the sonnet, Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems is replete with luxurious, and lingering, literary melodies. Music amply rewards any reader’s attention, yet there is more to The Sonnets than a considerable catalog of lovely an...show more
Richard II
William Shakespeare
Richard II is a history play distinguished by its poetry. In portraying the downfall of a monarch and the historic violation of the divine right of kings by Henry Bolingbroke, who usurped Richard’s throne to launch the Lancastrian dynasty as Henry IV, Shakespeare gives his title character a lyric el...show more
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Tobias Smollett
One of the founding spirits of the English novel, Tobias Smollett was a man of many parts: novelist, physician, historian, poet and dramatist, translator (his rendering of Don Quixote is still in circulation today), editor and critic, medical writer, pioneering travel writer. Yet his primary place i...show more
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s detailed indictment of the state is drawn from his own bitter experience as well as from the reports, memoirs, and letters of 227 fellow zeks. With relentless realism and psychological acuity, he follows the course of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and oppression as su...show more
Antigone
Sophocles
It is easy to see the battle of wills between Antigone and Creon as a struggle between conscience and power, liberty and tyranny, individual courage and the brutality of the state. Many modern readings of the tale (including mid-twentieth-century restagings by Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht) do so....show more
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first performed play, written in French and then translated by the author into English. It is one of the signal accomplishments in twentieth-century theater and one of the touchstones of modern literature. It is also, as one contemporary critic said of its two ...show more
Oedipus the King
Sophocles
Oedipus the King presents Sophocles’s tragic sense of life with a fearsome and visceral clarity. Although fate is everywhere, not a god appears: Oedipus himself is the agent of his own undoing, and it is his fundamental honor that impels him toward his ruin. The faster we run from torment, the faste...show more
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles
In this austere play, the cursed Oedipus assumes a strange grace, his imminent death promising a blessing, ordained by yet another oracle, on whatever city claims his burial place. Creon and Polynices arrive to escort him back to Thebes, but are cruelly rebuffed. Theseus at last embraces Oedipus and...show more
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
Addie Bundren’s health is deteriorating rapidly, and her eldest son, Cash, is hewing the most beautiful coffin he can manage right outside her bedroom window. Wretchedly poor, the Bundrens watch Addie die, then make their way with her corpse, its coffin in a mule-drawn wagon, across the fictional Yo...show more
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Faulkner's novel forms, disperses, then coalesces again and again around the story of Thomas Sutpen, who arrives in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 with slaves, a French architect, and a “design”: to work his will on a large parcel of land, planting cotton and erecting an extravagant estate house, to e...show more
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel. In it, he bravely indulged the experimental impulse that, under the guidance of his editors, he had kept in check in his previously published work, creating one of the landmarks of modern—and modernist—fiction. The book comprises four sections, thr...show more
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectiv...show more
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding had begun his literary career by parodying the most popular novel of his day, the sanctimonious Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, in two works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (the title says it all). Having upended Pamela, so to speak, Fielding set out to write a novel that was truer to real li...show more
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Written in the years before and during World War II, the Quartets consist of four long poems, each cohering around a season, one of the four natural elements (earth, air, water, fire), and a place: “Burnt Norton,” an English manor house and garden; “East Coker,” a village in Somerset, home to Eliot’...show more
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Appearing in three separate volumes between July 1954 and October 1955, The Lord of the Rings constitutes a single linear narrative that was segmented for publishing convenience rather than by authorial intent. Tolkien’s hero, Frodo, is the adoptive heir of Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit. ...show more
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So reads the famous first line of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and society. Its juxtaposition of universal verity with particular insight sets the tone for the eight hundred pages that follow. Anna Karenina is intima...show more
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
From the opening scene, in which three witches enter in thunder and lightning to invoke occult spirits in menacing rhymes, Macbeth inhabits a dark world of omens and hallucinatory visions. Impelled by the witches’ prophecies, a military hero pursues a murderous course to the Scottish throne, only to...show more