Literary Criticism
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…
A Room with a View
When Lucy Honeychurch travels to Italy with her cousin, she meets George Emerson, a bohemian and an atheist who falls in love with her. Upon…
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories showcases Mark Twain's profound exploration of human nature and morality through a collection of t…
Quicksand
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis (in German, Die Verwandlung, "The Transformation") is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915, and arg…
The Greater Inclination
This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriag…
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…
Heart of Darkness
In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small…
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…
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…
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…
Ward No. 6
The line between sanity and insanity is blurred in this classic novella by Anton Chekhov. The disillusioned idealist Dr. Rabin is in charge…
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 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…
Big Sur
This classic of the beatnik era from famous bohemian traveller Jack Kerouac focuses on Jack Dulouz, a thinly veiled Kerouac surrogate, and h…
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 Rainbow
Briefly appearing in 1915, then banned and taken out of circulation for its adult treatment of sexuality, Lawrence's visionary novel The Rai…
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 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…