Jo's Boys (1886) is a novel by American author Louis May Alcott. Written while Alcott was living in the historic Thoreau-Alcott House in Concord, Massachusetts, Jo's Boys picks up ten years after the events of Little Men, which followed the young sons of Jo Bhaer (née March) and Professor Friedrich Bhaer at their newly established Plumfield Estate School. As with the rest of the series, Jo's Boys was inspired by the educational reforms theorized...

Published in 1913, Swann's Way is the first of the seven parts of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, "Remembrance of things past," one of the major achievements of 20th-century literature. The narrator discovers that an involuntary memory triggered by some casual action, say, eating a madeleine cake or stooping to remove one's shoe, has the power to recover large areas of the past, and he sets out to resurrect his past life and the people and places that...

Written when women-and workers generally-had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess's life. At the Bloomfields and later the Murrays, she suffers under...

A remarkably handsome youth, Dorian Gray, meets Lord Henry Wotton and is corrupted into a life of terrible evil. Granted eternal youth, Dorian Gray lives a wild, dissipated life while his portrait grows old and haggard. Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works... full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused...

Sir Charles Baskerville's sudden heart attack and death have the townspeople in shock and searching for the one to blame--the family dog--while Sherlock Holmes leads the investigation.

"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...

"Filled with lively humor, compassion, and intimacy."
—Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." With that opening sentence we enter the childhood world of one of the most appealing young heroines in contemporary fiction. Her courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable as she tells her own story with stunning honesty and insight....

Joyce's novel traces the intellectual and religious-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions with which he has been raised. He finally goes abroad to pursue his ambitions as an artist.

One of the first and greatest detective stories, The Moonstone tells of the theft of a sacred diamond and the efforts of Sergeant Cuff, the policeman investigating the crime, to solve the mystery.

In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about "packingtown," the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the "muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the...