A guide to reading "Jane Eyre" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.
In early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, the passionate attachment between a headstrong young girl and a foundling boy brought up by her father causes disaster for them and many others, even in the next generation. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.
Rice writing as A. N. Roquelaure. In the traditional folk tale "Sleeping Beauty," the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. Anne Rice's retelling of the Beauty story probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to se...more
"STARTLING . . . FIENDISH . . . MEMNOCH'S TALE IS COMPELLING."--New York Daily News"Like Interview with the Vampire, Memnoch has a half-maddened, fever-pitch intensity. . . . Narrated by Rice's most cherished character, the vampire Lestat, Memnoch tells a tale as old as Scripture's legends and as modern as today's religious strife."--Rolling Stone"...more
A Great and Terrible Beauty is a curl-up-under-the-covers kind of book . . . a vast canvas of rustling skirts and dancing shadows and things that go bump in the night. It's a vividly drawn portrait of the Victorian age, a time of strict morality and barely repressed sensuality, when girls were groomed for lives as rich men's wives . . . and the sto...more
1908. The Mystery of the Yellow Room is the first book that justified Leroux's decision to give up journalism and concentrate on producing books. It was an early example of a locked room mystery, in which a murder is committed behind impenetrable sealed doors. The impossible crime was solved by a Gallic Sherlock Holmes of Leroux's invention, a dete...more
In ON LOVE AND DEATH, Patrick Suskind reveals the hidden source of his mesmerizing fiction: an obsession with the darkly erotic link between love and death. In this witty and thought-provoking meditation on the two elemental forces of human existence, he brilliantly draws on scenes as contemporary as a young couple having oral sex in a traf...more
Victoria Frances creates in her first book a gothic romantic fantasy reminiscent of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, filled with tales of vampires, magic, and the undying spirit of lovers which reaches across the centuries. Lushly illustrated, Favole: Stone Tears is the first book in an ongoing series by an emerging new talent in the illustration...more