An intricate blend of serious social commentary and novelistic virtuosity, Bleak House--part romance, part melodrama, and part detective story--is often regarded as Dickens' best book. Its comic vignettes, convoluted intrigues, and fortuitous coincidences are played out by a cast of characters as idiosyncratic and memorable as any Dickens ever crea...more
A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present--considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece. "Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers."--Saturday Review of Literatur...more
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more