Literary Criticism
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…
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann’s epic novel depicts a decaying, corrupted European society on the eve of the First World War. Set in a luxurious sanatorium hig…
Siddhartha
Siddhartha is one of the great philosophical novels. Profoundly insightful, it is also a beautifully written story that begins as Siddhartha…
The Story of Avis
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1877 novel is set in a New England college town, and focuses on Avis Dobell, a professor's daughter. Avis is a ta…
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…
The Dawn of a To-morrow
A wealthy London business man takes a room in a poor part of the city.He is depressed and has decided to take his life by going the next day…
Hard Times
Hard Times was Dickens's shortest novel and the only one to be set in the industrial north of England. A fast moving story with a typical ca…
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…
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…
Deephaven
Sarah Orne Jewett is best known for her clean and clear descriptive powers that at once elevate common-place daily events to something remar…
The Island of Doctor Moreau
In 1896 HG Wells produced the Island of Doctor Moreau. After a fateful shipwreck, a chance rescue, and offer of safe harbor, Edward Prendick…
The Aspern Papers
One of James’s favorite short novels, the Aspern Papers tells of the efforts of the nameless narrator to procure the papers of a famous, bu…
Kipps
Arthur Kipps, an orphaned draper’s assistant of humble means, unexpectedly inherits a large sum of money and that is when all his troubles b…
Martin Eden
Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American author Jack London, about a struggling young writer. It was first serialized in the Pacific Monthl…
Clayhanger
A coming-of-age story about Edwin Clayhanger, who leaves school, has his ambition to become an architect thwarted by his tyrannical father, …
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 Painted Veil
This Maugham classic is set in England and Hong Kong and in a cholera --ridden Chinese village in the 1920's. A committed, principled, epide…
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 …
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel. It traces the early life of Stephen Dedalus and his in…
Short Stories
This is a collection of short stories written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoevsky), who is arguably better-known for his lengthy, contemplativ…