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Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that was now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there, " wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...
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Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...
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Great Expectations, Charles Dickens' most acclaimed and popular novel, tells the story of Pip, a young orphan, who narrates the tale. Pip grows up in the marshlands of Kent, where he lives with his disagreeable sister and her sweet-natured husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery.While visiting his family members' graves in the churchyard, the young Pip encounters Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict. Pip brings him food and a file, but the fugitive and Compeyson-his...
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After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...
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This classic novel is a dramatic presentation of the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family of Yoknapatawpha County, in northern Mississippi. Divided into four sections, the first is recounted from the viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three year old man with mental retardation. The second segment is set eighteen years earlier than the other three and is told from the point of view of Quentin Compson, a Harvard-educated student who commits...
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This is a new reading of Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law. Set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s, Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, and his son, Absalom. Written with keen compassion and understanding, the novel powerfully evokes the experience of a land and a people torn by racial injustice. Paton said of his book: “It is a song...
7) East of Eden
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America between the Civil War and World War I serves as the background for the struggles of the Trask family.
8) Night
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Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. [This book] is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man.
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Beginner's Luck - Literary Debuts
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Classic Literature
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JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Classic Literature
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Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--from...
11) Ellen Foster
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One of the most talked-about and endearing first novels in years bears the story of a female Huck Finn and her search for a true home.
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In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
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Oprah's book club volume 1996
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English
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"Watch your brother, " Beth Cappadora tells Vincent, 7. Five minutes later she returns, "Where is Ben?" It is the moment every parent fears and it arrives to a mother of three in Chicago. The novel follows the family as year after year the hope of finding Ben recedes. Nine years later a boy knocks on their door looking for lawn work. It can't be. It is.
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A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.
17) The reader
Author
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Oprah's book club volume 1999
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English
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A German teenager has an affair with an emotionally remote older woman and only years later, when he is a law student and she is on trial, does he discover that she is a survivor of the Holocaust.
Author
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Oprah's book club volume 1998
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English
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A novel on mental illness, narrated by a man whose twin brother, a schizophrenic, amputates his hand as atonement for his sins. The novel describes the family abuse that led to the illness and the narrator's efforts to obtain the brother's release from an asylum.
19) Paradise
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Oprah's book club volume 1998
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English
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Nine men from Ruby Oklahoma, in defense of the one all-black town worth the pain, assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void out there where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose.
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A pilot's wife is taught to be prepared for the late-night knock at the door. But when Kathryn Lyons receives word that a plane flown by her husband, Jack, has exploded near the coast of Ireland, she confronts the unfathomable--one startling revelation at a time. Soon drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life, Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge might cost. Her search...
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