Sign in to subscribe to email alerts for R. Filtering Exclude erotica Include mainstream erotica Include all erotica. About Publish Join Sign In. Readers Benefits of registering Where are my ebooks? Describe your issue Have a question not already answered in the links at left or on our main FAQ page? Janvier del Valle Biography R. He has worked in the Advertising, Marketing, and Communications industries for over ten years and has taught a number of classes in philosophy and theology to adults as well as children. He resides with his wife and daughter in Georgia.
When he isn't writing, he's sleeping. And when he's not sleeping, he's spending time with his family, running, hiking, hitting the gym, watching movies, buying overpriced one-sixth scale action figures, studying and reading philosophy and theology, and most of all, collecting pointy, shiny things that tend to gleam of a certain silver whenever exposed to the moonlit eventide. Betrayal of the Self. The Scepter of Namiss.
Road of the Sword. A Goblin Seeks a Career Change. The Chronicles of Lilith Book 1. The Unicorn of Serpent Lake. A Tale of Two Brothers Part 1: The Knights of the Emerald Sphinx. Pawn, Deception, and Sacrifice - Valdia's Tale. Hymns to the Battlecrow. Taboo — Vast Book 2-Episode 7. The Quest For Dragon Treasure. Persephone and The Seven Pomegranate Seeds. The Children of Llothora. Forgotten Songs of Avalain. The Days of Magic. The Star of Amalore. Along the Many Houses of Damnation. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long.
The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review. Tolstoy is as adept at drawing panoramic battle scenes as he is at describing individual feeling in hundreds of characters from all strata of society, but it is his depiction of Prince Andrey, Natasha, and Pierre—who struggle with love and with finding the right way to live—that makes this book beloved.
Perhaps the most searching fable of the American Dream ever written, this glittering novel of the Jazz Age paints an unforgettable portrait of its day— the flappers, the bootleg gin, the careless, giddy wealth. My sin, my soul. As Humbert describes their car trip—a twisted mockery of the American road novel—Nabokov depicts love, power, and obsession in audacious, shockingly funny language.
Dorothea Brooke is a pretty young idealist whose desire to improve the world leads her to marry the crusty pedant Casaubon. This mistake takes her down a circuitous and painful path in search of happiness. Her intelligent sympathy for even the most unlikable people redirects our own moral compass toward charity rather than enmity. The most famous play ever written, Hamlet tells the story of a melancholic prince charged with avenging the murder of his father at the hands of his uncle, who then married his mother and, becoming King of Denmark, robbed Hamlet of the throne.
When he finally acts decisively, Hamlet takes with him every remaining major character in a crescendo of violence unmatched in Shakespearean theater. The son of a freed Russian serf, Anton Chekhov became a doctor who, between the patients he often treated without charge, invented the modern short story. The form had been overdecorated with trick endings and swags of atmosphere. Chekhov freed it to reflect the earnest urgencies of ordinary lives in crises through prose that blended a deeply compassionate imagination with precise description.
This sweeping saga of obsession, vanity, and vengeance at sea can be read as a harrowing parable, a gripping adventure story, or a semiscientific chronicle of the whaling industry. As we follow the affairs, the badinage, and the betrayals of dozens of characters over the years, time is the highway and memory the driver. Filled with convoluted plotting, scrambled syntax, puns, neologisms, and arcane mythological allusions, Ulysses recounts the misadventures of schlubby Dublin advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, Famed for its hilarious antics with windmills and nags, Don Quixote offers timeless meditations on heroism, imagination, and the art of writing itself.
Still, the heart of the book is the relationship between the deluded knight and his proverb-spewing squire, Sancho Panza. Over a century that seems to move backward and forward simultaneously, the forgotten and offhandedly magical village of Macondo— home to a Faulknerian plethora of incest, floods, massacres, civil wars, dreamers, prudes, and prostitutes— loses its Edenic innocence as it is increasingly exposed to civilization.
Dickens gives a twist to an ancient storyline—of the child of royal birth raised in humble surroundings. Looking back on his life, Pip describes his poor youth near marshes in rural England—his chance encounter with a murderous convict, his experiences with the strange Miss Havisham, who always wears a wedding dress, and his love for her beautiful adopted daughter Estella. As he approaches adulthood, Pip learns that he has a secret benefactor who arranges opportunities for him in London, wherein lies the tale, and the twist.
In the peak heat of a St. What follows is a psychological chess match between Raskolnikov and a wily detective that moves toward a form of redemption for our antihero. Where The Iliad tells of war, The Odyssey is the story of survival and reconciliation following the ten-year battle with Troy. Where Achilles was defined by warrior brutality, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is defined by his intelligence and wit. Two of his daughters, evil to the core, falsely profess their love, while Cordelia, his good and true daughter, refuses his request. Enraged, Lear gives his kingdom to his evil daughters and banishes Cordelia.
Lear pays a dear price for this rash act. The play systematically strips him of his kingdom, title, retainers, clothes, and sanity in a process so cruel and unrelenting as to be nearly unendurable. Hedonistic Dmitri, tortured intellectual Ivan, and saintly Alyosha embody distinct philosophical positions, while remaining full-fledged human beings.
An unsparing portrayal of human vice and weakness, the novel ultimately imparts a vision of redemption. A modernist classic of Old South decay, this novel circles the travails of the Compson family from four different narrative perspectives. In the experimental style of the book, Quentin Compson summarizes the confused honor and tragedy that Faulkner relentlessly evokes: The Ramsays and their eight children vacation with an assortment of scholarly and artistic houseguests by the Scottish seaside.
Weaving mythic tales of biblical urgency with the experimental techniques of high modernism, Faulkner bridged the past and future. This is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a rough-hewn striver who came to Mississippi in with a gang of wild slaves from Haiti to build a dynasty.
Almost in reach, his dream is undone by plagues of biblical and Faulknerian proportions: Through the use of multiple narrators, Faulkner turns this gripping Yoknapatawpha saga into a profound and dazzling meditation on truth, memory, history, and literature itself. The story of Miss Woodhouse—busybody, know-it-all, and general relationship enthusiast—is a comedy of manners deftly laced with social criticism.
Emma teeters from lovable one moment to tiresome and self-centered the next. In writing her story, Austen found an ideal venue for her note-perfect, never-equaled archness. This matching of wife to single man—or good fortune—makes up the plot of perhaps the happiest, smartest romance ever written. Darcy, making Pride and Prejudice as much a battle of wits as it is a love story.
- Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin.
- Organise Your Home: De-clutter, De-stress.
- Knallkopf Therapie (German Edition).
- Along the Many Houses of Damnation by R. Janvier del Valle.
- See a Problem?.
Led in his pilgrimage through the underworld and purgatory by the Greek poet, Virgil, Dante is escorted into paradise by his early beloved, Beatrice, while learning that, in order to ascend, he must be transformed. Its title character is an exceptionally independent orphan who becomes governess to the children of an appealing but troubled character, Mr. As their love develops, the author introduces a host of memorable characters and a shattering secret before sending Jane on yet another arduous journey.
Dalloway by Virginia Woolf This masterpiece of concision and interior monologue recounts events in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a delicate, upper-class London wife and mother, as she prepares for a party at her home on a single day in June Passion brings them together, but class differences, and the bitterness it inspires, keeps them apart and continues to take its toll on the next generation. Wuthering Heights tells you why they say that love hurts. The Bible is both a holy book and a work of supreme fiction; those of us who read it both ways are doubly blessed.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: One does not have to believe Jesus is the Son of God to understand that his parables are penetrating works of fiction that embody complex truths about human nature. And what of Jesus—a god entering history as a man and living as a mortal? The text of the book includes a line poem by the murdered American poet John Shade and a line-by-line commentary by Kinbote, a scholar from the country of Zembla. Tomboy Scout and her brother Jem are the children of the profoundly decent widower Atticus Finch, a small-town Alabama lawyer defending a black man accused of raping a white woman.
Dickens is best known for his immense plots that trace every corner of Victorian society, and Bleak House fulfills that expectation to perfection. The plot braids the sentimental tale of an orphan unaware of her scandalous parentage with an ironic and bitterly funny satire of a lawsuit that appears to entail all of London.
This modernist novel follows the bizarre, often surreal adventures of an unnamed narrator, a black man, whose identity becomes a battleground in racially divided America. Traveling north to Harlem, he meets white leaders intent on controlling and manipulating him. A powerful portrait of Depression-era America, this gritty social novel follows the Joad family as they flee their farm in the Oklahoma dust bowl for the promised land of California.
While limping across a crippled land, Ma and Pa Joad, their pregnant daughter Rose of Sharon, and their recently paroled son Tom sleep in ramshackle Hoovervilles filled with other refugees and encounter hardship, death, and deceit. While vividly capturing the plight of a nation, Steinbeck renders people who have lost everything but their dignity. Modern anxieties are given near-archetypal form in this parable that seems both to foretell the totalitarian societies to come and to mourn our alienation from a terrible Old Testament God.
Not so much a single poem as a gathering of voices ranging from bawdy to pious, this captivating work presents a panoramic view of medieval England. Vivid, direct, and often irresistibly funny, the tales are told by pilgrims making their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Each night another member of the party—a knight, a scholar, a miller—tells a story, and tale by tale, a portrait emerges of the diversity and delight of human possibility.
To this end, she weds the older and more cultivated Gilbert Osmond, and eventually finds that she is less the author of her fate than she thought. Throughout, James gives us a combination of careful psychological refraction and truly diabolical plotting. The result is a book at once chilling and glorious.
There he witnesses the brutality of colonial exploitation, epitomized by Kurtz, an enigmatic white ivory trader. To understand evil, Marlowe seeks out Kurtz, whom he finds amongst the natives, dying. Eight years ago, Anne Elliot was persuaded by a friend to break off her engagement to a handsome naval officer because he lacked wealth and name.
Now twenty-seven, her romantic prospects a dim memory, she encounters him once again, only now he is a grand success. Can she rekindle his love? A novel made seminally modernist through an unreliable narration that is part cubist, part Freudian, it tells the story of the prissy and rather thick John Dowell and his wife Florence who repeatedly meet British soldier Edward Ashburnham and his wife over the years at various upper-crust European spas. The pleasures of kingship are rare and brief, however, as the past comes to haunt the future, in ways obscurely prophesied by three witches, and Macbeth is brought down with a terrible swiftness matched only by the speed of his ascent.
In the first play, the Greek King Agamemnon— who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods before setting sail for the Trojan War— and his slave, Cassandra, are slain by his wife, Clytemnestra. In the final play, Orestes is freed from the Furies or the curse because, unlike the other characters— who search for scapegoats— he admits his own culpability, ending the cycle of violence through personal responsibility.
Lawrence famously remarked that the archetypal American hero was a stoic, a loner, and a killer. In , escaped slave Margaret Garner decided to kill her infant daughter rather than return her to slavery. Her desperate act created a national sensation. In this Pulitzer Prize—winning novel, the murdered child, Beloved, returns from the grave years later to haunt her mother Sethe. Aided by her daughter Denver and lover Paul D, Sethe confronts the all-consuming guilt precipitated by the ghostly embodiment of her dead child.
An embodiment of existential philosophy, he believes in no higher power and accepts that we are born only to die. In this semiautobiographical novel, hero Stephen Dedalus rejects the world of his youth—Ireland in its provincialism, nationalism, Catholicism, and sexual guilt—for art.
From its stream of consciousness technique to its descriptions of expatriate life in Paris, Portrait inspired nearly all the touchstones of twentieth-century modernism, the most important of which is the artist as a misunderstood god. After being dismissed from another prep school, Holden Caulfield—whose slangy, intimate narration defines this novel—has a series of misadventures in Manhattan before going home for Christmas. A timeless voice of adolescent rage and assurance, Holden may rank highest in the pantheon of antiestablishment heroes. In perhaps the most famous American political novel, Warren tracks the unsentimental education of Jack Burden, an upper-class, college-educated lackey to Willie Stark, the populist governor of Louisiana whom Warren modeled on Huey Long.
Read as four discrete stories or as a seamless quartet, the Rabbit novels are a tour de force chronicle, critique, and eloquent appreciation of the American white Protestant middle-class male and the swiftly shifting culture around him in the last four decades of the twentieth century. From his feckless youth as a promising high school athlete and unready husband and father in Rabbit, Run; through vulgar affluence, serial infidelity, and guilt as a car dealer in Rabbit Redux; to angry bewilderment over s social upheaval in Rabbit Is Rich, the meaningfully named Rabbit Angstrom gamely tries to keep up with it all, to be a good guy.
But the world is too much with, and for, Rabbit, who staggers through literal and metaphorical heart failure before finally falling in Rabbit at Rest. The Miss Brodie in question is a wildly popular teacher in a s Edinburgh middle school. Massive privileges accrue to the Brodie set, but Spark is most interested in what the girls sacrifice to be included among the elite in this tense yet charming novel.
A master of the ambiguous ending, Cheever could also be direct: Hester Prynne is a sinner in the hands of seventeenth-century Puritans. Despite her condemnation, Hester refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. Ultimately, it is the fallen lovers, not the Puritans, who come to understand the nature of sin and redemption. Young Alice follows a worried, hurrying White Rabbit into a topsy-turvy world, where comestibles make you grow and shrink, and flamingoes are used as croquet mallets.
The glory and horror of war pulse through this epic poem about the thousand ships launched in battle after the Trojan prince Paris abducts the beautiful Helen from her husband Menelaus, the King of Sparta. Through exquisite language Homer tells of capricious Greek gods and goddesses, fealty and honor between friends, and the terror of war. While crafting mythical tales, he creates an array of legendary heroes, especially Achilles, whose pride is as vulnerable as his heel.
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights c. Scheherazade receives the grim honor of marrying her King, who executes his wives on the day after the wedding night. Those childhood familiars, Sindbad, Ali Babba, and Aladdin, are all here. Though incomplete, his work is enduring. In addition to plays and screenplays, some in collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein, Babel made his mark with The Odessa Stories, which focused on gangsters from his native city, and even more important, the collection entitled Red Cavalry. Soaring language contrasts with the gritty sense of doom in this novel that includes the most famous short chapter in literature: The heartbreaking, semiautobiographical story of two expatriate Americans living in France during the s: In this tragic tale of romance and character, her lush lifestyle soon begins to destroy Diver, as alcohol, infidelities, and mental illness claim his hopes.
After flying forty-eight missions, Yossarian, a bomber pilot in World War II, is going crazy trying to find an excuse to be grounded. This novel is a congery of appallingly funny, logical, logistical, and mortal horrors. Part science fiction, part war story, this is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a former World War II prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself.
Written at the height of the Vietnam War, this muscular satire reveals the absurdity and brutality of modern war. The poem extends our understanding of Christian myth in lush and challenging language. Like Achilles and Odysseus before him, Aeneas makes sacrifices for friendship and descends into the world of the dead, but he never finds peace or a true home. Aeneas does find support and love from the Queen of Carthage, Dido, but he flees in the night, abandoning her to suicide, overthrowing comfort and home to remain true to his quest and the spell of the gods to found the city of Rome.
Hans Castorp visits his cousin at a sanatorium in the mountains of Switzerland. Soon he too becomes ill maybe and checks into the hospital—for seven years. A meditation on time, an inquiry into how life ought to be lived, and an unflinching look at evil, Mann considered the ideas in his monumental novel so challenging that he said it must be read at least twice. Whitman spent half his life writing, revising, and republishing this collection, which is, at heart, a love song to the idea of America.
At first glance, the people Eudora Welty usually writes about seem unremarkable, as are the mostly Mississippi towns, cities, and countryside they live in. Through them you enter the realm of the extraordinary, as revealed in the commonplace. There is plenty of high comedy.
Few authors can match her eye for the incongruous, the hilarious response, the bemused quality of the way her people go about their lives. There is also pathos, veering sometimes into tragedy, and beyond that, awareness of what is unknowable and inscrutable. Her most stunning fiction is the group of interconnected stories published in as The Golden Apples. These center on the citizenry of Morgana, Mississippi, over the course of some four decades. The dialogue her characters talk at rather than to one another , the shading of Greek mythology and W.
Bulgakov reshaped his experience of Stalinist censorship into a surreal fable featuring three characters: While returning home, John Harmon appears to be murdered. He survives and goes undercover. Clever coincidences and revelations follow in this novel notable for its wickedly funny treatment of middle-class society. Now in old age, Stevens faces a sense of loss without the emotional acuity to comprehend it. Like planets moving across the sky—always the same yet always changing—this sumptuously written novel follows the lives of two orphaned sisters who leave Australia in the s to begin new lives in England.
While Grace turns to marriage for a safe transit through life, Caro charts a riskier course, one that brings her love and betrayal over the decades. The Big Chill meets the Black Death when a group of seven women and three men leave Florence to escape the plague of Have you heard the one about the monk who seduced a woman by claiming to be the angel Gabriel? The political satire throbs with urgency, but Dostoevsky raises this work to the level of art through rich characterizations of his combative principals: In her protagonist, Macon Dead, Morrison created one of her greatest characters, and his reluctant coming of age becomes a comic, mythic, eloquent analysis of self-knowledge and community—how those things can save us, and what happens when they do not.
A master of the small epiphany, the moment of clarity, Alice Munro writes of men and women who struggle to reconcile the lives they have made with their sometimes confused longings. Though this novel is semiautobiographical, Stead transforms personal revenge against her own outsized father into revelation. Opening The Charterhouse of Parma is like stepping into the path of a benevolent cyclone that will pick you up and set you down, gently but firmly, somewhere else. Stendhal marks the boundaries of the more traditional nineteenth-century novel, and then proceeds to explode them.
The result is a huge canvas on which every detail is painted with astonishing realism and psychological verisimilitude. One can only imagine how Tolstoy would have punished Gina, who is not only among the most memorable women in literature, but who is also scheming, casually adulterous, and madly in love with her own nephew. Each time I finish the book, I feel as if the world has been washed clean and polished while I was reading, and as if everything around me is shining a little more brightly.
An old man recalls a story of murder and adultery in his childhood Illinois town, and how he came to betray the friend who witnessed them. Instead, this beautifully elegiac novel offers an unsentimental paean to the prairie, to domesticity, and to memory itself. Grounded in their relationship, this rueful modernist epic dissects the intricacies of Edwardian England and the forces unleashed by World War I that would, inevitably and necessarily, slay that genteel world.
Instead Tess suffers cruel mistreatment and becomes pregnant. Love and war, childhood and adolescence, and initiation and experience are recurring themes in these journalistically spare, often autobiographical stories. This is an antihero for whom readers will find themselves cheering. In Becky Sharp, we find one of the most delicious heroines of all time. Sexy, resourceful, and duplicitous, Becky schemes her way through society, always with an eye toward catching a richer man. Cynical Thackeray, whose cutting portraits of society are hilarious, resists the usual punishments doled out to bad Victorian women and allows that the vain may find as much happiness in their success as the good do in their virtue.
Lisbeth Bette Fischer, a seamstress for the demimonde of actresses and courtesans and the poor relation of Baron Hulot, has a secret: Bette then unleashes an underhanded stratagem dictated by her implacably vengeful heart: Scary and psychologically acute. Byron was a gentleman, a womanizer, a cad, and a liberator. He poured a lifetime of observations into this seventeen canto poem. Thus Byron transformed his greatest masterpiece—his life—into art. Beautiful and high-spirited Janie Crawford wants love and adventure.
But, as Hurston shows in her finest novel, living in an all-black town is no shield against the sexism that dictates her young life. Forced to marry one controlling old geezer, she deserts him only to end up with another. When she marries Tea Cake, Janie finally enjoys the essence of a true relationship.
Her happiness is short-lived when disaster strikes, but it becomes the catalyst for ultimate self-discovery. PCle 8 ED The few survivors, spread out across the barren United States, are visited in their dreams by a kindly old woman in Nebraska and a sinister man in the West. They begin making their way toward these separate camps for what will prove to be a last stand between the forces of good and evil. DFW 9 JW 9. Through the services of his two servants, the base Caliban, to whom the island had originally belonged, and the sprite Ariel, Prospero exacts revenge upon his stranded enemies while engineering the marriage of his daughter to a young nobleman.
A collection of short stories about the inhabitants of a town whose physical isolation mirrors their psychological distance. With compassion and sadness, Anderson evokes small-town life and thought through a wide range of characters who are not visited by any tragedies save their own inability to forge a bit of happiness in their lives of quiet desperation.
This rollicking yet existential adventure with deep religious undertones begins with fatherly advice: But the wastrel son denies his father because he is tempted by the sea. This salty path gets young Robinson kidnapped by Moorish pirates, sold into slavery, and shipwrecked on a remote island filled with cannibals. JC 7 AG The form of this novel, about two Native American families, reenacts that of a traditional Chippewa Indian story cycle—fourteen stories told by seven characters, forming a collage that forces the reader to sift through and weigh voice against voice, truth against truth.
Squire Allworthy provides a loving home to his bad nephew Blifil and the bastard orphan Tom. Lusty Tom is sent away after an affair with a local girl whom Blifil desires, and he begins his picaresque adventures on the way to London, including love affairs, duels, and imprisonment. Comic, ribald, and highly entertaining, Tom Jones reminds us just how rowdy the eighteenth century got before the nineteenth came and stopped the fun. This long epistolary novel—full of sexual tension, violence, and psychic conflict—tells the tale of the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe and her rakish suitor, Robert Lovelace.
Disowned by her family, confined in a brothel and raped, Clarissa pays a high price for her morality. Yet she accepts her fate with a moving acceptance in this landmark of English realistic fiction. EDon 10 VV 7. Caught up in the web of old New York society, Lily Bart angles for a wealthy husband. Though presented with ample opportunity, the beautiful and well-connected Lily rejects one man after another as not rich enough, including her true love, Laurence Stern. When she becomes a hapless victim of her own ambition—blackmailed and wrongly accused of adultery—Lily is cast out of high society before making one final attempt to redeem herself.
Simultaneously philosophical and nightmarish, this collection of short stories, parables, and essays popularized both Latin American magic realism as well as metafiction. Borges, a blind Argentine librarian and polymath, here provides almost mathematically concise miniatures—of a man who remembers literally everything, for instance—that read like episodes of The Twilight Zone as written by a metaphysician.
Customers Also Bought Items By
Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. This his and hers pairing, like twinned guest towels, reveals dirty fingerprints on the underside of a tidy looking s Midwestern, middle-class marriage. The novels, set a decade apart, reveal two dimensions of the troubled family, which includes three children. He squanders what little money he earns. All he desires is literary glory, so that even when he nearly drowns, he thinks: His stories range from the slightest fragments, parables, and epigrams to the novella-length classic, The Metamorphosis.
JCO 6 APhil In this landscape, Winston Smith is a man in danger simply because his memory works.
theranchhands.com: R. Janvier del Valle: Books, Biography, Blogs, Audiobooks, Kindle
Gulliver towers over six-inch Lilliputians and cowers under the giants in Brobdingnag. He witnesses a flying island and a country where horses are civilized and people are brutes. Lou Ford is the boy next door—a deputy sheriff in his Texas hometown. ABrav 7 WK 9. There was a copy in the library of my Scottish school; after all, the novel sold 40, copies in , the year it was published.
I finally succumbed only a few years ago at the urging of a dear friend. Some books, much lauded on publication, rapidly gather dust, but luckily for me The Fountain Overflows remains as lustrous and passionate as when West penned the last page. The novel tells the story of the Aubrey family living in Edwardian London. Aubrey is a charismatic and unreliable journalist; Mrs. Aubrey, a former pianist, is an awkward woman of immense moral intelligence. Around these two orbit the Aubrey children: The story is told by Rose.
A man comes to complain to Mrs. Aubrey about her husband having an affair with his wife. After she has done her best to cheer him up, Mrs. Aubrey takes refuge in Madame Bovary and, by the time her husband arrives home, is absorbed in the novel. Together they praise and criticize Flaubert. Only then does she recall what brought herto pick up the novel in the first place.
Some art is much more real than some life, I mean. And this is exactly how I feel about The Fountain Overflows; it is more real, and more pleasurable, than most life. ML 7 DMcF 9. Martin Scorsese called his movie of this novel the most violent film he had made—quite a statement from the director of Raging Bull. Starting with the real-life psychiatric treatment of poet and British officer Sigfried Sassoon for shellshock, Barker shows how the war ruined but failed to replace nineteenth-century norms of gender, class, sexuality, and honor.
DMcF 6 AWald 9. SA 8 JCO 7. DMcF 8 TP 7. But as his world narrows and he must make life or death choices, his life becomes a complicated display of salvation. The story of star-crossed Veronese lovers, this early romantic tragedy painfully depicts the fatal course of young lovers ruined by circumstances beyond their control, belonging as they do to two families who hate each other for long forgotten reasons.
The intense violence at the heart of the play is matched only by the intense passion of Romeo and Juliet, who pay the ultimate price for the brief, intense, and pure love they shared. Built mosaic-like from many intimate, seemingly inconsequential encounters and scenes, the narrative moves with the pace, prismatic glitter, and cumulative force of a glacier, sweeping along sex, art, business, politics, and values in its wake. To find out if there was still copper underground and how much the rest of it was true, the width of the sky, the depth of the stars, the air like new wine, the harsh noons and long, slow dusks.
SC 8 KHarr 6. Chilling and absurd, teeming with black comedy and dark insights into the human soul, The Tin Drum is both an artistic triumph and an act of reclamation. Two French missionaries come to the vast and untamed deserts of New Mexico in Through a series of often symbolic stories about their shared and personal experiences over forty years, Cather depicts both vanished landscapes and timeless themes of faith, loneliness, and our relationships with one another and the natural world. Ingratiating Uriah Heep, talented Mr. Micawber, devoted nurse Peggoty, and willing Barkis are some of the most memorable characters in the entire Dickens canon.
KHarr 7 JI 6. Ambitious farm girl Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago, gaining the favor of a wealthy bar manager named Hurstwood to avoid the sweatshops. The smitten man ditches his family, absconds with company funds, and moves to New York with Carrie. Beginning with his first trip at age ten, we watch him master the art of hunting, learning the ways of men and the woods. RBP 10 ST 3.
Join Kobo & start eReading today
In her epic fusion of structural experiment and exhaustive realism, Lessing lays bare the splintered state of modern womanhood. In four separate notebooks, Anna Wulf records different aspects of her life: MD 3 JE Like an existential sadist, Sophocles explores the tragic complexities of fate by hurling his characters into situations in which they are simultaneously guilty and innocent, forced to choose between right and right or wrong and wrong—or some painfully imprecise combination of the two.
In Oedipus the King, Oedipus is desperate to escape his fate—that he will murder his father and marry his mother—yet inexorably fulfills it with devastating effect. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind, self-exiled ruler moves toward faith and goodness as his sons battle for his throne. In the third play, Antigone, his loving and upright daughter is forced to choose with climactic consequence between equally worthy goals as Sophocles depicts our struggles to explain a world we can scarcely comprehend.
SMK 4 AW 9. Still, they produce twin boys, but Cathy, driven by undeniable demons, forsakes the newborns for her old life.
- Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives.
- Trail of the Spirit Warrior.
- R. Janvier del Valle;
- Smashwords Interview;
- Andante.
Adam tells his rivalrous sons—Caleb, the bad penny, and sweet Aron—their mother is dead. MB 7 GDG 6. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson This novel might easily have become a victim of its own surpassing fame, which has removed all suspense from its central riddle: What is the relationship between Dr. Yet as our narrator plumbs Dr. ALK 9 IR 4. Trying to avoid the conformity of their suburban neighbors on Revolutionary Road, Frank and April Wheeler talk of moving to France where Frank might write the great book or think the great thoughts April believes he is capable of.
However, infidelity and alcohol abuse dissolve their dreams as Frank and April lose faith in each other and themselves in this exquisitely painful novel. The golden age of comics and the Holocaust power this Pulitzer Prize—winning saga about two Jewish cousins in Brooklyn who create the Nazi-bashing superhero, the Escapist.
Through the tragic, comic, often superhuman adventures of Joe Kavalier—a refugee determined to rescue the relatives he left behind in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia—and Sammy Clay, Chabon weaves a lyrical and magical tale about war and mysticism; the connections between love, fear, hope, and art; and the nature of escape. He is a man of ideas; she is an egotistical, spoiled girl.
Can Daniel redeem her? Another character who needs saving is Mirah Cohen, yet through her, Daniel finds a form of salvation by discovering his hidden Jewish heritage in this novel that exposes the deeply rooted anti-Semitism of Victorian England. After the enraged widow rejects him, he redoubles his efforts. Set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, this wise, steamy, and playful novel jumps between past and present, encompassing decades of unrest and war, recurring cholera epidemics, and the environmental ravages of development.
In this, the third book of The Chronicles of Narnia, King Caspian sets sail to the end of the world to rescue the seven lost lords of Narnia. Along with three English children—who have come to Narnia this time by stepping into a painting—and other companions such as the brave, sword-wielding mouse Reepicheep, Caspian has numerous adventures that resonate with Christian and classical mythology. LG 4 LMill 8.