Classic RecommendationsLike this list

40 items

• The Secret History

  Tartt, Donna

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  Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Slaughterhouse-five

  Or, The Children's Crusade, a Duty-dance With Death

  Vonnegut, Kurt

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  Slaughterhouse-Five introduces Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow him simultaneously thru all his life's phases,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Mansfield Park

  Austen, Jane, 1775-1817

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  Jane Austen's third novel follows ten-year-old Fanny Price, whose penniless family sends her to live with her wealthy relatives. Shy and ignored, Fanny is treated unkindly by her cousins, her two aunts, and her uncle. As Fanny grows up, scandals and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Frankenstein

  the 1818 Text

  Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851,

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  The most famous horror story in world literature--the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster--is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Night

  Wiesel, Elie, 1928-2016

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  "Wiesel's account of his time in concentration camps during the Holocaust with updated front and back matter to include speeches and essays commemorating his recent death"

• Crime and Punishment

  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881

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  A man must endure relentless physical and mental punishments as retribution for his act of murder. Believing he can commit the perfect crime, Roderick Raskolnikov robs and murders an elderly pawnbroker. He eventually finds himself engaged in a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Orlando

  a Biography

  Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941

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  In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Romeo and Juliet

  Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616

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  The tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, is one of the most famous plays written by the English author, William Shakespeare. It is a story about two young people who fall in love, despite the animosity between their families that are consumed by hatred and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Giovanni's Room

  Baldwin, James, 1924-1987,

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  1950's Paris. After a homosexual experience in adolescence, David represses the impulses he finds unacceptable. In Paris he has an affair with Hella Lincoln, and proposes marriage. She considers his proposal on a trip to Spain, David has an affair…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Bell Jar

  Plath, Sylvia

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  This extraordinary work--echoing Plath's own experiences as a rising writer/editor in the early 1950s--chronicles the nervous breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful, but slowly going under, and maybe for…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Great Gatsby

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940

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  "Set during the Roaring Twenties, this masterful story is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to Long Island and attempts to learn the bond business in New York City after the war. There, he co-mingles with his affluent and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900

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  Journey through the haunting tale of Dorian Gray, a man captivated by his own portrait's enduring beauty and youth, leading a life of excess and vice while his portrait grotesquely reflects his moral decay.

• Great Expectations

  Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870

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  Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an English orphan who rises to wealth, deserts his true friends, and becomes humbled by his own arrogance.

• Kidnapped

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894

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  After being kidnapped by his villainous and miserly uncle, sixteen-year-old David Balfour escapes with the help of Jacobite fugitive Alan Breck and becomes involved in the struggle of Scottish Highlanders against English rule.

• The Quiet American

  Greene, Graham, 1904-1991

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  This novel is a study of New World hope and innocence set in an Old World of violence. The scene is Saigon in the violent years when the French were desperately trying to hold their footing in the Far East. The principal characters are a skeptical…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Year of Magical Thinking

  Didion, Joan

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  "Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child."

• Invisible Man

  Ellison, Ralph,

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  In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written.

• The Bluest Eye

  Morrison, Toni. 1931-2019

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  Set in Lorain, Ohio, this is the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• To Kill a Mockingbird

  Lee, Harper,

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  The explosion of racial hate in an Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.

• Little Women

  Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888,

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  Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England.