Category: Literary Classics

By Comte de Lautréamont

De fiel et d'impunité, le monde décrit par le mystérieux comte de Lautréamont est d'un sadisme déroutant pour son époque. Cette épopée en prose éditée en six chants traduit une sorte de parcours initiatique inversé ; du Bien vers le Mal. Maldoror, double authentique du poète, est un héros romantique citadel du byronisme en style, mais qui glisse peu à peu, et nous entraîne avec lui, au sein d'un univers monstrueux, inhumain. Frénétiquement dressé contre Dieu et les Hommes, le personnage maudit clamera son analogie consciente avec Lucifer-Satan. « C'est un cauchemar qui tient los angeles plume ». Quand ses contemporains n'y virent que le fruit d'un esprit malade, les surréalistes reconnurent dans Les Chants de Maldoror un manifeste de los angeles poésie moderne, instigateur de l. a. révolution littéraire du XXe siècle.

By Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Constance Garnett

Russia’s first significant novel, and maybe nonetheless its preferred, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is a comic book epic of greed and gluttony that's sought after not just for its colourful solid of characters and devastating satire, but in addition for its feel of ethical fervor.

The anti-hero of the unconventional is a guy named Chichikov, who hatches an excellent plan to get wealthy quickly. he'll trip via Russia and purchase up, at diminished premiums, the lately deceased serfs of landowners, who now won’t need to pay executive taxes at the ‘dead souls.’ With this record of fictitious serfs as collateral, Chichikov should buy an property and start accumulating his fortune. What follows is a sequence of grotesquely funny transactions with Russian landowners, each one extra queer and repellant than the final. even though Gogol spends a lot of the radical exposing the evils of the Russian gentry via absurd and hilarious satire, he additionally expresses a passionate love for his state that resonates with readers even today.

A stylistic travel de strength, encompassing an mind-blowing variety of voices from smooth, intimate lyricism to strong, bawdy ribaldry, Dead Souls is an intensely felt anatomy of the human situation.

By Ernest Poole

Ernest Poole's bestselling, muckraking vintage concerning the plight of the employee.

The best-known novel by way of the winner of the 1st Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Ernet Poole's The Harbor used to be released in 1915 to immediate acclaim and is still his most vital booklet. on the center of the tale is Billy, an aspiring author who struggles to reconcile his sympathy for employees along with his middle-class allegiance to capitalist growth. As Billy comes of age at the ny waterfront, an eyewitness to explosive tensions among hard work and capital that culminate in a violent strike, he learns to include socialism because the method to the harbor's seething injustices. This novel, one of many so much direct literary remedies of sophistication war, is a precious social historical past and a strong testomony to Poole's mythical expertise.

By Christopher Morley

Parnassus on Wheels is a unique by way of Christopher Morley, released in 1917. The Parnassus of the identify refers back to the mountain that used to be the house of the Muses in Greek mythology. within the tale, Roger Mifflin sells his touring book place to Helen McGill, who tires of taking care of Andrew, her sick brother. Christopher Morley later persisted the tale of Roger Mifflin in his 1919 novel The Haunted Bookshop.

By Shirley Jackson

The vintage supernatural mystery by means of an writer who helped outline the genre

First released in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as an ideal paintings of unnerving terror. it's the tale of 4 seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile known as Hill condo: Dr. Montague, an occult student searching for sturdy proof of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile younger girl good familiar with poltergeists; and Luke, the long run inheritor of Hill apartment. at the start, their remain turns out destined to be purely a spooky stumble upon with inexplicable phenomena. yet Hill home is collecting its powers-and quickly it is going to select certainly one of them to make its personal.

By Joseph Conrad

Conrad's goal was once 'by the facility of the written notice, to make you listen, to make you are feeling . . . ahead of all, to make you see' center of Darkness, his exploration of ecu colonialism in Africa and of elusive human values, embodies extra profoundly than virtually the other sleek fiction the trouble of 'seeing,' its relativity and transferring compromise. Portraying a tender man's first sea-voyage to the East in formative years, an unenlightened adulthood in middle of Darkness, and the blind previous age of Captain Whalley finally of the Tether, the tales during this quantity are united of their subject - the 'Ages of Man' - and of their scepticism. Conrad's imaginative and prescient has motivated twentieth-century writers and artists from T. S. Eliot to Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Herzog, and keeps to attract serious fireplace. In his stimulating advent John Lyon discusses the hyperlinks among those 3 tales, the opinions of Chinua Achebe and Edward stated, and the ebb and stream of Conrad's very good narrative paintings.

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Richard Shelton is a tender knight throughout the Wars of the Roses. We see him ascend and rescue his girl love. He then seeks revenge opposed to his father's assassin, but if the proof issues in the direction of his mother or father he's compelled to enter hiding. He joins the band of outlaws referred to as the Black Arrow.

In fifteenth-century England, whilst his father's assassin is printed to be his parent, seventeen-year-old Richard Shelton joins the fellowship of the Black Arrow in avenging the loss of life, rescuing the lady he loves, and collaborating within the fight among the Yorks and Lancasters within the conflict of the Roses.

By Louis Aragon

Rédigés pendant los angeles Seconde Guerre mondiale, durant laquelle il a été mobilisé, les poèmes du "Crève-coeur" mêlent élans patriotiques et élans amoureux...

By Leo Tolstoy

Acclaimed by way of many because the world's maximum novel, this is often the tale of a spouse, Anna Karenina, who abandons her empty lifestyles because the spouse of a Petersburg executive minister for a passionate courting with a tender officer, count number Vronsky.

By Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is Mark Twain's hottest publication, and its hero is a countrywide icon, celebrated as a distinctively American determine either at domestic and in a foreign country. Tom Sawyer's daring spirit, winsome smile, and creative options to the issues of lifestyle in fictional St Petersburg - even if getting his buddies to whitewash a fence for him, or escaping the calls for of his vigilant Aunt Polly - have gained him the hearts of generations.