Literary Criticism
The Gambler
The Gambler is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky about a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian general. The novella r…
The Fifth Queen
The Fifth Queen invites listeners into the tumultuous world of Tudor England, where ambition and desire intertwine in the court of King Henr…
The Woman Who Did
Most times, especially in the time when this book was written (1895), it is just as nature and society would wish: a man and woman "fal…
A Sportsman's Sketches
A Sportsman's Sketches (Russian: Записки охотника; also known as The Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album) was an 1852 collec…
The Mysterious Stranger
Here's a Mark Twain story that's very unlike those he became famous for, but when I read it back in Catholic high school, it left a deep imp…
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short masterpiece about a ranting, slightly mad civil servant. The stylistic inventiveness, and the insights into the a…
The Moon and Sixpence
This Maugham novel is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The story is told by the narrator as he gradually comes to know the mai…
The Marrow of Tradition
In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles W. Chesnutt--using the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina massacre as a backdrop--probes and exposes the ra…
The Rainbow
Briefly appearing in 1915, then banned and taken out of circulation for its adult treatment of sexuality, Lawrence's visionary novel The Rai…
Der Schmied seines Glückes
"Der Schmied seines Glückes" ist eine weitere amüsante Novelle aus Seldwyla. Johannes Kabis, der sich selbst John Kabys …
Jennie Gerhardt
This is a story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from and extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs wi…
The Claverings
"I consider the story as a whole to he good, though I am not aware that the public ever corroborated that verdict." - the author T…
The House Behind the Cedars
In this, Chesnutt's first novel, he tells the tragic story of love set against a backdrop of racism, miscegenation and “passing” during the …
Deephaven
Sarah Orne Jewett is best known for her clean and clear descriptive powers that at once elevate common-place daily events to something remar…
Septimus
The book concerns the tangled lives of four people: Zora, a young widow who seeks some purpose in her life; Septimus Dix, an other-wordly bu…
The Homely Heroine
Who ever heard of a plain and downright homely heroine? Isn't a heroine by definition beautiful? Well, Edna Ferber, in her well known style …
Demian
Somewhat autobiographical, this "coming of age" novel unfolds an introspective boy's formative years in pre-World War 1 Germany, f…
Life in the Iron Mills
This 1861 novella was the first published work by Rebecca Harding Davis: writer, social reformer, and pioneer of literary realism. It tell…
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life is one of the last great works completed by Balzac for his huge novel series entitled The Human Comedy. Sect…
Madame Bovary
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting and shockingly frank novel, at once an acut…