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In this scathing book, the author produced a landmark study of affluent American society that exposes, with brilliant ruthlessness, the habits of production and waste that link invidious business tactics and barbaric social behavior. Veblen's analysis of the evolutionary process sees greed as the overriding motive in the modern economy, and with an impartial gaze he examines the human cost paid when social institutions exploit the consumption of unessential...
Author
Language
English
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A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of capital punishment engraves the letter of the law into the body of the condemned. Such are the nightmare scenarios that emerge in the short stories of Franz Kafka, one of the twentieth century's most formative, mystifying literary figures. Though immediate in their impact, Kafka's stories invite endless angles...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
At a Victorian dinner party in Richmond, London, the Time Traveler returns to tell his extraordinary tale of mankind's future in the year 802,701 AD. It is a dystopian vision of Darwinian evolution, with humans split into an above-ground species of Eloi, and their troglodyte brothers. The first book H. G. Wells published, The Time Machine is a scientific romance that helped invent the genre of science fiction and the time travel story. Even before...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.5 - AR Pts: 22
Language
English
Description
On a drunken impulse, Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser by trade, sells his wife Susan and their child to a sailor. Years later, Susan returns to Casterbridge a widow, to seek her legal husband who is, surprisingly, now the Mayor.
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Series
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English
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Mrs. Gareth is the widowed chatelaine of Poynton. She is fighting to keep her house with its priceless objets d'art from her son Owen and his lovely, but utterly philistine fiancee. When she discovers that her young friend Fleda Vetch is secretly in love with Owen, she thrusts Fleda into the battle line. The power struggle between the three women leaves Owen vacillating. Fleda risks betraying, and being betrayed by, all that she holds most dear.
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Series
Language
English
Description
The Odd Women (1893) is a novel by George Gissing. Inspired by a report of over one million more women living in Britain than men, Gissing sought to explore the societal and personal implications of unmarried life while exploring the demands of the growing feminist movement. The Odd Women is a story of romance, independence, and the pressures of society that poses important questions about convention in Victorian England while proving surprisingly...
10) The sea-wolf
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.1 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
Description
Jack London's 1904 novel "The Sea Wolf" is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman, who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". However, his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.7 - AR Pts: 9
Language
English
Description
"The Invisible Man (1897) blends comedy and tragedy in its story of a scientist who discovers a way to make himself invisible. His inability to reverse the process leads to a radical disconnection from society - and eventually from his own sanity. Arriving in a town where no one knows him, disguised in bandages and dark glasses, the invisible man is driven to violent and criminal extremes before his secret is revealed. This prescient parable of the...
12) Resurrection
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Language
English
Description
With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs Translated by Louise Maude This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution....
13) The reef
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Series
Language
English
Description
Written in 1912 and set in and around London, "The Reef" is a story of complex morality and its intricately woven place in society. This narrative primarily follows George Darrow and Anna Leath, a young gentleman and a widowed lady who plan to marry. Both of them experience doubts about their union, with surprising outcomes. Darrow has a brief liaison with the delicate, generous Sophy Viner, a kind woman of the working class. She later meets Anna's...
14) Belinda
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Series
Language
English
Description
"Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel, Belinda, is an absorbing, sometimes provocative, tale of social and domestic life among the English aristocracy and gentry. The heroine of the title, only too conscious of being 'advertised' on the marriage market, grows in moral maturity as she seeks to balance self-fulfilment with achieving material success. Among those whom she encounters are the socialite Lady Delacour, whose brilliance and wit hide a tragic secret,...
15) Jacob's room
Author
Language
English
Description
Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922) differs from its two predecessors in its experimental, abstract approach to writing. Jacob Flanders' life is examined largely through the impressions and accounts of others in his life, mostly women, creating a portrait of a young man both representative of and victimized by Edwardian society. The novel coincided with Woolf's emerging interest in feminism and is critical of the righteous patriarchy...
16) Doctor Thorne
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Series
Language
English
Description
The squire of Greshamsbury has fallen on hard times, and it is incumbent on his son Frank to make a good marriage. But Frank loves the doctor's niece, Mary Thorne, a girl with no money and mysterious parentage. He faces a terrible dilemma: should he save the estate, or marry the girl he loves? Mary, too, has to battle her feelings, knowing that marrying Frank would ruin his family and fly in the face of his mother's opposition. Her pride is matched...
17) Nana
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Nana is probably the most famous character in Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel that bears her name, published in 1880, is the ninth volume in the series. It consists of a number of episodes, or tableaux, in the short but spectacular life of Ana Coupeau, the fourth child of Gervaise Macquart. We first saw her as a young girl in L'Assommoir (1877), her father an abusive alcoholic, her mother Gervaise reduced to a similar degraded state. She works as...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.6 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
W. E. B. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk, his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the paradoxical "double-consciousness" of African American life. When it was first published in 1903, The Souls of...
19) The trial
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Language
English
Description
One of the great works of the twentieth century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure. One of the iconic figures of...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the greatest Christian classics of all time, answering that question and illustrating the deepest struggles Christians face as they walk with God in this life. Since its publication in 1678, it has been the most widely read Christian book other than the Bible. From the dark confines of a prison cell, John Bunyan wrote a book that transformed not only his experience but that of millions after him. C. S. Lewis described...