Subject: Classic Fiction | Page #5
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Tancred Benjamin Disraeli
Tancred; or, The New Crusade is a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, first published by Henry Colburn in three volumes. Together with Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) it forms a sequence sometimes called the Young England trilogy. It shares a number of characters with the earlier novels, but unlike them is concerned less... read more »
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Taras Bulba Nikolai Gogol
Taras Bulba is a magnificent story portraying the life of the Ukrainian Cossacks who lived by the Dnieper River in the sixteenth century. Taras Bulba is an old and hardened warrior who feels a little rusty from lack of action. When his two sons return from school at Kiev, he eagerly takes them to the 'setch,' the... read more »
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
A pretty young girl has to leave home to make money for her family. She is clever and a good worker; but she is uneducated and does not know the cruel ways of the world. So, when a rich young man says he loves her, she is careful - but not careful enough. He is persuasive, and she is overwhelmed. It is not her... read more »
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The Ancient Allan H. Rider Haggard
Sitting beside entrancing Lady Ragnall while the smoke of an ancient Egyptian herb grows thick around them, Allan Quatermain finds himself departing the world he know and entering into his strangest adventure. In a mystic transformation, he comes to his senses in an earlier incarnation . . . as Shabaka, hunter of... read more »
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The Book of Life Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair, one of America's foremost and most prolific authors, addresses the cultivation of the mind and the body. Sinclair's goal was to attempt to tell the reader how to live, how to find health, happiness and success, and how to develop fully both the mind and the body. Part One: The Book of the Mind covers... read more »
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The Book of Snobs W. M. Thackeray
A collection of satirical works on English society in the mid 19th century and attributed with coining the word snob in its current usage. This fascinating work is thoroughly recommended for anyone who is a fan of Thackeray or interested in the satire of the age. This humorous study begins with the assertion that... read more »
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The Bostonians Henry James
Henry James' celebrated novel about a passionate New England suffragette, her displaced southern gentleman cousin, and a charismatic young woman whose loyalty they both wished to possess goes so directly to the heart of sexual politics that it speaks to us with a voice as fresh and as vital as when the book was... read more »
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The Captive Marcel Proust
In The Captive, Proust's narrator describes living in his mother's Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. The Prisoner (also translated as The Captive) is the first volume of the section within In Search of Lost Time known as the Albertine novel. The name Albertine... read more »
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The Caxtons Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The Caxtons are; Austin Caxton, a scholar engaged on a great work, 'The History of Human Error;' his wife Kitty, much his junior; his brother Roland, the Captain, who has served in the Napoleonic campaigns; the two children of the latter, Herbert and Blanche; and Austin's son, Pisistratus, who tells the story. The... read more »
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The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma chronicles the exploits of Fabrizio del Dongo, an ardent young aristocrat who joins Napoleon's army just before the Battle of Waterloo. Yet perhaps the novel's most unforgettable characters are the hero's beautiful aunt, the alluring Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, Count Mosca, who... read more »
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The Cossacks Leo Tolstoy
Olenin was a youth who had never completed his university course, never served anywhere (having only a nominal post in some government office or other), who had squandered half his fortune and had reached the age of twenty-four without having done anything or even chosen a career. He was what in Moscow society is... read more »
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The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her as a major novelist. The Saturday Review wrote that she had 'assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack... read more »
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The Darling Anton Chekhov
The Darling is a short story by Russian author Anton Chekhov, first published in 1899 in London, it follows the life of a woman who is referred to as darling. Olenka Plemyannikova, the daughter of a retired collegiate assessor, falls in love with the theater owner, Kukin. Olenka’s father dies and she marries... read more »
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The Debacle Émile Zola
Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur, who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate. But after they are thrown together during the... read more »
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The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio
In the summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten young men and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring a host of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings to devious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after... read more »
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The Duke's Children Anthony Trollope
Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children. Palliser soon discovers, however, that his own plans for them are very different... read more »
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The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta Giovanni Boccaccio
A milestone in feminist literature, this marvelous European romance, narrated by a woman, is considered the first psychological novel in a modern language and a precursor of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Lady Fiammetta, the first-person narrator and protagonist, recounts how, although a married woman, she falls... read more »
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The Explorer W. Somerset Maugham
A story of the proud Allertons whose fortune has been squandered, and whose three-hundred-year estate Hamlyn's Purlieu stands to be lost to the family. Lucy and George Allerton, brother and sister, are resolved to overcome the mistakes of their father, Fred Allerton. A powerful exploration of relationships and... read more »
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The Fair Jilt Aphra Behn
The story of a charming, daring, and determined lady who contemplates even murder to attain her love. It is all in vain, however, and her love transforms later into aggressive hatred. These Orders are taken up by the best Persons of the Town, young Maids of Fortune, who live together, not inclos'd, but in Palaces... read more »
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The Fat and the Thin Émile Zola
Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Returning to his native Paris, Florent finds a city he barely recognizes, with its working classes displaced to make way for broad boulevards and bourgeois flats. Living with his brother’s family in the newly rebuilt Les Halles... read more »
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The Financier Theodore Dreiser
Based on the life of flamboyant financier C.T. Yerkes, Dreiser's portrayal of the unscrupulous magnate Cowperwood embodies the idea that behind every great fortune there is a crime. You don't read Dreiser for literary finesse, but his great intensity and keen journalistic eye give this portrait a powerful reality. ... read more »
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The Flood Émile Zola
Sixty-two-year-old Louis Roubieu sees his family's long-awaited prosperity as a reward rained upon him by God for years of arduous toil on the land. Yet it is the very abundance of God's rain, initially observed from the window of their imposing farmhouse, which comes to pose a dire threat to not merely their... read more »
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The Fortune of the Rougons Émile Zola
The first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. In it we learn how the two branches of the family came about, and the origins of the hereditary weaknesses passed down the generations. Murder, treachery, and greed are the keynotes, and just as the Empire was established through violence, the "fortune" of... read more »
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The Gambler Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In this dark and compelling short novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral of betting and... read more »
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The Golden Bowl Henry James
The Golden Bowl is an intense, involved study of marriage, adultery and family ties. The central characters are a man and his daughter and James delves into their consciousness to explore the complexity of their relationship to each other and their respective spouses. The novel is often considered the completion of... read more »
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The Grand Inquisitor Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Grand Inquisitor is a section from The Brothers Karamazov, which is a literary work by Russian author/philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky. The central character in this work is a Grand Inquisitor who arrests Jesus. A Grand Inquisitor, or Inquisitor Generalis in German is the individual who leads an Inquisition, just... read more »
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The Green Ray Jules Verne
Most of the marvels or impossibilities in here are to be found in the picture there presented to us of Scottish names, manners and costumes. It will hardly be denied that such a Scotch family name as Ursiclos, and such clans as the clan McDouglas and the clan Melville, are sufficiently impossible ; nor can it be... read more »
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The Guermantes Way Marcel Proust
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, Le Côté de Guermantes opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a... read more »
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The Hero W. Somerset Maugham
Many war heroes return from battle to a world that has changed dramatically. In the case of James Parsons, the protagonist of W. Somerset Maugham's The Hero, his family and hometown have remained exactly as they were before he left to serve his country abroad -- it is his own outlook and values that have shifted... read more »
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The History of the Nun Aphra Behn
Behn's remarkable work in which she analyzes the retribution of breaking the vows, particularly the religious vows undertaken by nuns. The tale, claimed to be true, focuses on a nun who was lured by the charms of the world into forsaking the nunnery. Fate comes down hard upon her as she has to face the troubles and... read more »