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  Samson and Delilah

  D H Lawrence

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  'Samson and Delilah' is set against a Cornish backdrop. Lawrence and his wife tried to settle in Cornwall during the First World War but were hounded by the authorities and forced to leave. Lawrence pointedly describes the local people as' mindless' in this story. It is almost a Homeric story of a husband returning home after a long absence, having to fight to regain his wife. But in this story it is the wife who is the obstacle. But she succumbs to the man's physical presence as Lawrence demanded all women should if they were to attain happiness.

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  The Blue Fairy Book

  Andrew Lang

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  Originally published in 1889, The Blue Fairy Book was the first of 12 volumes of fairy tales from around the world, collected by renowned folklorist Andrew Lang. For more than a century it has been the book that introduces young readers to timeless fairy tales that include "Hansel and Gretel," "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," "Beauty and the Beast," "The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots," "The Forty Thieves," and "Snow-White and Rose-Red." 

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  The Longest Journey

  E.M. Forster

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  E. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. 
   
  He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.

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  Fathers and Sons

  Ivan Turgenev

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  The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the character Yevgeny Bazarov has been referred to as the "first Bolshevik", for his nihilism and rejection of the old order. 
  Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons as a response to the growing cultural schism that he saw between liberals of the 1830s/1840s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists (the "sons") and the 1830s liberals sought Western-based social change in Russia. Additionally, these two modes of thought were contrasted with the conservative Slavophiles, who believed that Russia's path lay in its traditional spirituality. 
  Fathers and Sons might be regarded as the first wholly modern novel in Russian Literature (Gogol's Dead Souls, another main contender, is sometimes referred to as a poem or epic in prose as in the style of Dante's Divine Comedy). The novel introduces a dual character study, as seen with the gradual breakdown of Bazarov's and Arkady's nihilistic opposition to emotional display, especially in the case of Bazarov's love for Madame Odintsova and Fenichka. This prominent theme of character duality and deep psychological insight would exert an influence on most of the great Russian novels to come, most obviously echoed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. 
  The novel is also the first Russian work to gain prominence in the Western world, eventually gaining the approval of well established novelists Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Henry James, proving that Russian literature owes much to Ivan Turgenev. (Summary from Wikipedia)

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  The Puzzler

  Rudyard Kipling

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  Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. 
  "The Puzzler" is a humorous tale of a young man who is trying to engineer a meeting with an influential law lord who he hopes will support him with a great business idea. A fortuitous chance means he happens on the law lord while he is conducting a light-hearted experiment with a group of old school friends. 
  They are attempting to see whether a monkey can climb an araucaria (monkey puzzle) tree. The experiment ends in farce as the monkey escapes and gets into the house... exactly at the moment when the owners of the house appear.

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  One Day in the Life of Ivan...

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s startling book led, almost 30 years later, to Glasnost, Perestroika, and the “Fall of the Wall.” One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichbrilliantly portrays a single day, any day, in the life of a single Russian soldier who was captured by the Germans in 1945 and who managed to escape a few days later. Along with millions of others, this soldier was charged with some sort of political crime, and since it was easier to confess than deny it and die, Ivan Denisovich “confessed” to “high treason” and received a sentence of 10 years in a Siberian labor camp.In 1962, the Soviet literary magazine, Novy Mir, published a short novel by an unknown writer named Solzhenitsyn. Within 24 hours, all 95,000 copies of the magazine containing this story were sold out. Within a week, Solzhenitsyn was no longer an obscure math teacher, but an international celebrity. Publication of the book split the Communist hierarchy, and it was Premier Khrushchev himself who read the book and personally allowed its publication.“This reading is ably done. It is an unforgettable tale.”—Booklist

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