Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband ...more
First published in 1816, Jane Austen's EMMA is about an unconventional heroine--and one whom Austen thought no one but herself would like. Emma Woodhouse is bright, beautiful, and rich; she is also snobbish and judgmental, and she can be cruel, with a tendency to interfere in other people's lives. The novel chronicles Emma's attempts to make a matc...more
Milton takes the traditional epic and transforms it with the clarity of his moral vision and with the power of his language, turning it into triumphant blank verse--seldom used in his day except in drama--that is moving, exciting, and full of the grandeur of Milton's poetic vision. In the early parts of "Paradise Lost", he manages to convey sympath...more
An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion-his sense of smell-leads to murder.In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of ...more
ANIMAL FARM, Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm, parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. 1984, Orwell's 1948 vision of a world subsumed in tyran...more
A writer is held hostage by his number-one fan in the novel that "demand[s] that we take King seriously as a writer with a deeply felt understanding of human psychology" (Publishers Weekly). His deeply felt understanding of what terrifies us doesn't hurt either.