Publisher: Sovereign
The play loosely follows the life of Joan of Arc. It contains a prologue introducing the important characters, followed by five acts. Each dramatizes a significant event in Joan's life.
The author created in Daniel Deronda possibly the most likeable character of all her novels. Through the actions and reactions of society life in the mid-nineteenth century there emerges a clear picture of the life of the European Jew, no longer actively persecuted yet made aware of English prejudice.Show book
The eight stories here show Wells in various moods and foreshadow his celebrity. These are uncanny tales, resonating strangely, despite arising from ordinary thoughts, interactions, and memories. Wells shows just how fantastic the everyday can be, if one only pauses to reflect on missed chances, suggestions of what might have been, bleak premonitions of blessed futures whose utopian promise is destroyed by new forms of war.Show book
These three novels by the great American satirist transport readers across the ocean to Europe and back in time to Camelot and the Hundred Years’ War. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: A supervisor at a firearms factory in Hartford, Connecticut, Hank Morgan inexplicably finds himself transported back in time to Camelot. Worse still, he is brought before the Round Table and sentenced to burn at the stake. Will Hank die at the hands of King Arthur’s knights, or can his Yankee ingenuity save him? A seminal work of time travel fiction, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is also an enduring comedic classic. A Tramp Abroad: Based on true events, Mark Twain’s travelogue through late nineteenth-century Europe is embellished with fictional tales and a made-up travel partner. Wandering mostly on foot, Twain meanders through Germany, the French and Swiss Alps, and Northern Italy. He also ventures down the Neckar river by raft, ascends Mont Blanc by telescope, and experiences European life with his usual penetrating wit, infectious curiosity, and timeless humor. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: Twain’s final novel—and, by his own account, his best—is an imagined memoir of Joan of Arc. Beginning with her humble childhood in the French village of Domrémy, it recounts her visions of Archangels and her taking control of the French army at the age of seventeen. From her victory over the English at Orléans and her Bloodless March to Rheims, the story progresses finally to Joan’s tragic defeat and execution by the English.Show book
The last and greatest work by the nineteenth-century Russian writer and philosopher: “The most magnificent novel ever written” (Sigmund Freud). “[The Brothers Karamazov] is a philosophical novel, a family drama, a murder mystery, and a love story. It’s also an immortal masterpiece. “The ferocious, idiosyncratic vitality of Dostoyevsky’s fiction captures readers again and again. So do his indelible characters. “From the novel’s earliest scenes introducing the Karamazovs—the brothers and their drunken, obnoxious father—Dostoyevsky acknowledges that ideas can’t exist without people and that people are the true subject of any novel. Those scenes are both a searching debate about faith and virtue and a sequence that’s recognizable to anyone who has ever spent the holidays with [a] collection of family members ranging from the endearing to the intolerable. It is also, if you ignore Dostoyevsky’s reputation for seriousness, very funny . . . If Ivan’s existential confusion doesn’t speak to you, the Karamazovs’ complicated love lives, both sordid and transcendent, never fail to fascinate. Their problems, however grounded in their particular moment in Russian history, seem only a hair’s breadth away from our own. How powerful is love? Hate? Blood? Money? Faith? What makes this great novel immortal is not its answers but its questions, questions we continue to ask ourselves, decades after the world that forged The Brothers Karamazov has passed away.” —Laura Miller, Slate “There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.” —Joyce Carol OatesShow book
Anna Karenina is the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky, a bachelor. He is eager to marry her if she will agree to leave her husband Karenin, a senior government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, the moral laws of the Russian Orthodox Church, her own insecurities, and Karenin's indecision. A parallel story is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy country landowner who wants to marry Princess Kitty. He has to propose twice before Kitty accepts. The novel details Konstantin's difficulties managing his estate, his eventual marriage, and his personal issues, until the birth of his first child. The novel explores a diverse range of topics: politics, individual characters and families, religion, morality, gender and social class.Show book
Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863 - 1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian 'Golden Age' of the short story. Brown Rat's Docks is a fast-paced detective story involving murder, double crossing and skullduggery, all set in the heart of the London docklands.Show book
