George Amberson Minafer is the spoiled, arrogant grandson of the founder of the family fortune. As the times change, he and his money are eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers and manufactureres and he begins his descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.

Samuel Butler was an individualistic Victorian era writer who published a variety of works. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, considerable studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history as well as criticism. Butler even made prose translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" which remain some of the most popular to this day. His authority on literature came through his posthumous novel, "The...

A Dutch boy and girl work toward two goals, finding the doctor who can restore their father's memory and winning the competition for the silver skates.

"Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, fastidious Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul--determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is inevitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp by entering into relationships with other women. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical...

First published serially in 1862 and as a novel in 1864, "The Small House at Allington" is the fifth novel of Anthony Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire" series. This installment in the series primarily relates the story of Lily Dale, a young woman living in the dower house of the Allington estate with her mother and sister, Bell. Although Lily is secretly loved by a humble junior clerk in a tax office, John Eames, she becomes enamored with Adolphus...

"Carol, a young and progressive librarian living in St. Paul, Minnesota, falls in love with and marries Will Kennicott, a doctor who dreams of returning to the small town of his childhood. Carol agrees and they move to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a town modeled on Sinclair's own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Carol is disappointed by the town's drab appearance and it's provincial, small-minded inhabitants. Brimming with optimism and tenacity,...

When it appeared in 1874 "Lady Anna" met with little success, and positively outraged readers, but Trollope staunchly defended the novel. It is a tightly constructed and passionate study of enforced marriage in the world of Radical politics and social inequality. "Lady Anna" records the lifelong attempt of Countess Lovel to justify her claim to her title, and her daughter Anna's legitimacy, after her husband announces that he already has a wife. Anna...

Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Anthony Trollope's series known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire. It was first published in serial form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, then in book form in 1861. The hero of Framley Parsonage, Mark Robarts, is a young vicar, settled in the village of Framley in Barsetshire with his wife and children. The living has come into his hands through Lady Lufton, the mother of his childhood friend Ludovic, Lord...

A coming-of-age classic about two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, this "profound and universal" (The Wall Street Journal) story of faith, family, tradition, and assimilation remains deeply pertinent today.

"Works of this caliber should be occasion for singing in the streets and shouting from the rooftops." —Chicago Tribune
It's the spring of 1944 and fifteen-year-olds Reuven...

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loveslines from...