Literary Criticism
The Sun Also Rises
This first novel by Ernest Hemingway follows a group of American and British expatriates in the years following World War I as they travel f…
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…
The House of the Dead
The House of the Dead is a novel published in 1861 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian p…
The Magnificent Ambersons
In a world where a gentleman’s life is defined more “by being, rather than by doing,” a family’s reputation can be compromised if it is not …
Jude the Obscure
Eleven-year-old Jude Fawley, inspired by his teacher Mr. Phillotson, who leaves Marygreen for Christminster to take a university degree, dec…
The Permanent Husband
THE PERMANENT HUSBAND, also published as The Eternal Husband, is a psychological novella by the acclaimed Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky.…
Agnes Grey
Agnes Grey is a poignant exploration of the struggles faced by a young governess in 19th-century England. Anne Brontë draws from her ow…
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 Touchstone
Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an adv…
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Clearly frustrated at the refusal of his contemporaries to recognise the iniquity of society, Tressell's cast of hypocritical Christians, ex…
Crome Yellow
Crome Yellow, published in 1921 was Aldous Huxley’s first novel. In it he satirizes the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story…
Master and Man
A land owner, Vasili Andreevich, takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to another town. He wishes to get to the town …
Silas Marner
Silas Marner (originally published in 1861): Betrayed by a beloved friend and accused of a crime he didn’t commit, awkward Silas Marner is e…
Cousin Betty
Cousin Betty (La Cousine Bette), published in serial format in 1846, was one of the last and greatest of Balzac's works. It was part of his …
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 …
Daniel Deronda
In this enduring Victorian classic written in 1876, two stories weave in and out of each other: The first is about Gwendolen, one of Eliot's…
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…
Benito Cereno
On an island off the coast of Chile, Captain Amaso Delano, sailing an American sealer, sees the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship, in obvio…
The Beautiful and Damned
The Beautiful and Damned explores the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria, as they navigate the opulent yet tumultuous world of 1920…
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…