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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
James Mustich
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
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True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
The son of an Irish convict father, Ned Kelly stole horses as a child, murdered policemen, robbed banks, and took up as a “bushranger”—the Australian term for runaway convicts who evaded British authorities in the open continent. His notoriety grew until Kelly became a Robin Hood–like symbol of Iris...show more
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The story, at least in outline, is probably familiar. Its setting is seventeenth-century Boston, during the Puritan era. Hester Prynne wears the scarlet “A” that marks her as an adulteress. While she thus pays openly for her sin, the “godly” Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale endures the torments of a guilt...show more
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Heinlein's most famous and influential work, albeit not his most brilliantly speculative, is surely Stranger in a Strange Land, a book whose questioning of social mores and religious certitude have made it as congenial to some readers as it has been controversial to others. Astonishingly ente...show more
Dune
Frank Herbert
Inspired by a visit to the famed sand dunes of Oregon, Herbert delved into research on environmental science and related matters as he began to chart the long, complex backstory of his epic, which ultimately came to span some twenty-one thousand years of future history. Through canny and judicious t...show more
An Infamous Army
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer may fairly be said to have found, nurtured, and raised to adulthood that flourishing foster child of Jane Austen, the Regency romance. Through dozens of novels, beginning with The Black Moth, composed when the author was seventeen to amuse her sickly brother, Heyer deployed wit, inve...show more
The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The music of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is like no other: It has a wild beauty all the more impetuous for the intricate lacings of rhyme and rhythm that constrain it. Hopkins’s songs of soulful searching and exuberant praise are vivid with design and pattern. They generate what he memorably call...show more
The Kite Runner: Rejacketed
Khaled Hosseini
A rare look at the war torn middle east through not only the eyes of its indigenous people, but that of a child.
The Fatal Shore
Robert Hughes
History contains few moments more dramatic than the arrival in Australia of her earliest British colonizers. Britain’s unprecedented system of “convict transportation,” begun in the late 1700s, was to last for some eighty years, during which time more than 160,000 men, women, and children were shipp...show more
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
The product of two decades of literary labor, Les Misérables was begun while the author enjoyed political favor in Paris and finished during Hugo’s nineteen-year political exile in the Channel Islands. At the core of its vast narrative is Jean Valjean, a peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bre...show more
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
What people can’t get in the technologically determined society of Aldous Huxley’s imagined future are family, religion, literature, art, individuality, love, or a genuinely human relationship of any sort. In this brave new world, poverty, conflict, and unhappiness have all been eliminated by way of...show more
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver’s novels seem to expand our sense of life and our capacity to tackle it. Although The Poisonwood Bible is in some ways just as intimate as Kingsolver’s earlier books in its depiction of a family’s life, its scope and setting are anything but domestic. At the start of this story, t...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
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
At the center of George Eliot’s vast portrait of the provincial city of Middlemarch, its society and inhabitants, is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a “home epic” of a bright, brave young woman learning how to live and what to live for. Most memorable of Middlemarch’s characters, however, is no charac...show more
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
The year is 1327, a time of political intrigue and theological wrangling between the furtive powers of the papacy and the earthly forces of the Holy Roman Empire. At an unnamed Franciscan abbey—housing a labyrinth in which is hidden the greatest library in Christendom, including forbidden works of u...show more