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Political turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia, as Razumov, a young student preparing for a career in the czarist bureaucracy, unwittingly becomes embroiled in the assassination of a public official. Asked to spy on the family of the assassin -- his close friend -- he must come to terms with timeless questions of accountability and human integrity.
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"Called a "magnificently crafted story ... brimming with wisdom" by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into...
3) The Yosemite
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"John Muir is intimately connected with Yosemite, as this appreciation of the region's majestic landscapes perfectly demonstrates. His classic nature writing is informed by the beloved conservationist's years of exploration, from the heights of Yosemite Falls to the tremendous rush of its snowy avalanches. An essential companion for visitors, it offers rich appraisals of the meadows and valleys of this natural wonder, exuding an almost mystical love...
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Famed naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) came to Wisconsin as a boy and studied at the University of Wisconsin. He first came to California in 1868 and devoted six years to the study of the Yosemite Valley. After work in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, he returned to California in 1880 and made the state his home. One of the heroes of America's conservation movement, Muir deserves much of the credit for making the Yosemite Valley a protected national park...
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"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era of political greed and corruption that followed the American Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the era is exemplified through two fictional narratives; one of the Hawkins family, a poor family from Tennessee who try to get the government...
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"Dr. Moreau, a scientist expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments, finds a deserted island that gives him the freedom to continue torturous transplantations and create hideous creatures with manlike intelligence. But as the brutally enforced order on Moreau's island dissolves, the true consequences of his experiments emerge, and his creations revert to beasts more shocking than nature could devise"--Page 4 of cover.
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Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior ďcor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly...
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Featuring eight works of short fiction, South Sea Tales by Jack London is an adventurous collection with a nautical theme. With settings on islands or ships, South Sea Tales tell the exciting, but often heartbreaking tales of violence, colonialism, and racism. The House of Mapuhi follows the son of a trading magnate, who travels from island to island buying valuable items for his mother's business. When he learns of a brilliant pearl owned by one...
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A gripping and entertaining tale of terror and suspense as well as a potent Faustian allegory of hubris and science run amok, The Invisible Man endures as one of the signature stories in the literature of science fiction. A brilliant scientist uncovers the secret to invisibility, but his grandiose dreams and the power he unleashes cause him to spiral into intrigue, madness, and murder. The inspiration for countless imitations and film adaptations,...
10) We
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The groundbreaking dystopian novel that inspired 1984 and Brave New World. "The best single work of science fiction yet written." -Ursula K. Le Guin
When society has programmed you to sleep . . .
How do you wake yourself up?
The One State is a world where people are merely numbers, and free will itself is a disease. Most are happy in their role as cogs in a huge machine, controlled by the ever-watchful Benefactor.
However,...
11) Hard Times
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Thomas Gradgrind, retired businessman and one of Coketown's most prominent citizens, runs his life and his school along strict utilitarian lines. Fact and reason are his governing principles; imagination and sentiment are to be abhorred and suppressed. Gradgrind raises his children, Tom and Louisa, by the same soulless, barren methods, blighting their young lives. Shorn of emotion because of her upbringing, Louisa yields to a loveless marriage to...
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Transparently based on the lives of Fitzgerald and his beautiful wife, Zelda, this novel traces the meteoric rise and fall of glittering young socialites Anthony and Gloria Patch. Building their marriage on the shaky foundation of an expected inheritance, they devote their youth and happiness on hedonistic pursuits that plunge them into moral and financial bankruptcy.
14) The warden
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The quiet life of an English clergyman is disturbed by rumors about the source of his income.
15) Twice-told tales
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The stunning collection of short fiction that established Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the most powerful and provocative artists in nineteenth-century America Dr. Heidegger invites four friends to witness an experiment. As the impoverished merchant Mr. Medbourne, the gout-ridden sinner Colonel Killigrew, the ruined politician Mr. Gascoigne, and the aged widow Wycherly watch, Heidegger places an old rose in a vase filled with water drawn from the...
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The classic epic of chivalry and courtly love features the disinherited knight Ivanhoe, his fair lady Rowena, and such larger-than-life characters as Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood. This novel of the Crusades, chivalry, and courtly love not only recreates history, but made history as well.
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Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfill his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper with whom she embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their...
18) Moll Flanders
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Dover thrift editions
Oxford world's classics
Everman's library. Fiction volume no. 837
Everyman's library volume no. 32
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Oxford world's classics
Everman's library. Fiction volume no. 837
Everyman's library volume no. 32
More Series...
Description
Moll Flanders is dealt a desperately poor hand, born in Newgate Prison to a convicted felon mother about to be transported to America for her crimes. Cast adrift in a harsh world, seduced at an early age, the ever-resourceful Moll learns to play the survival game with astuteness and irrepressible cunning. Her path is strewn with husbands and lovers, and when all else fails and destitution beckons, she turns to a life of crime to keep the wolf from...
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In this unabridged classic, the time-traveling protagonist is propelled by his machine to the distant year of 802,701 AD. To his horror, he finds only a decaying Earth that is being gradually swallowed by the Sun, and where two strange species|the delicate Eloi and the fierce, subterranean Morlocks|inhabit an eerie dystopia.
20) Plutarch's lives
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Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects and how they led ultimately to tragedy or victory. Richly anecdotal and full of detail, Volume I contains profiles and comparisons of Romulus and Theseus,...