Recounts the adventures of a band of Jews–former Soviet soldiers and concentration camp survivors–who battle the retreating German army in the closing days of World War II.
Tag: Fiction
The Pit A Story of Chicago
O Pioneers!
The first of her renowned prairie novels–a story that expresses Cather’s conviction that ‘the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman’. When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father’s death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie..
Complete Poems
Sister Carrie
Martin Eden
Set in San Francisco, this is the story of Martin Eden, an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame. London, dissatisfied with the rewards of his own success, intended Martin Eden as an attack on individualism and a criticism of ambition; however, much of its status as a classic has been conferred by admirers of its ambitious protagonist..
The Age of Innocence
When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland, ‘that terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything’. As the consequent drama unfolds, Edith Wharton’s sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending ‘civilization’..
Octopus : A Story of California
Mephisto
McTeague A Story of San Francisco
McTeague (1899) chronicles the demise of a San Francisco couple at the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an actual crime that was sensationalized in the San Francisco papers, it tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague, his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the ‘American Zola’, and this is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. With its compelling portrayal of human nature at its most basic level, McTeague is a gripping and passionate tale of greed, degeneration, and death. It is also one of the first major works of literature to be set in California, and it provided the story for Erich von Stroheim’s classic of the silent screen, Greed..