Book Blurbs
What’s it all about?
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. This Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm homestead by the "land companies" and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. A portrait of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, the novel captures the horrors of the Depression and probes the very nature of equality in America.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes “unstuck in time” after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
The Good Earth
Pearl Buck
Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought, pestilence and revolution.... Through this one Chinese peasant and his children, Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life, its terrors, its passion, its persistent ambitions and its rewards. Her brilliant novel--beloved by millions of readers throughout the world--is a universal tale of the destiny of men.
The Sea-Wolf
Jack London
A thrilling epic of a sea voyage and a complex novel of ideas, The Sea-Wolf is the vivid story of a gentleman scholar, Humphrey Van Weyden, who is rescued by a seal-hunting schooner after a ferryboat accident in San Francisco Bay. London uses Van Weyden’ ordeal at the hands of a schooner's devious crew to explore powerful themes of ambition, courage, and the innate will to survive.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Who is Gatsby? Everyone seems to have a story about him. But the real Jay Gatsby has another story. He is longing for something that he once had. The Great Gatsby captures both the disillusion of the Jazz Age and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. In chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream, Fitzgerald recreates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. Five years, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people
The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Pyle is a brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler’s beautiful Vietnamese mistress.
Night
Elie Wiesel
Night--a terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
A scathing, subversive parable set in a mental ward, the One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero, Randle Patrick McMurphy, and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
Bildungsroman (Coming-of-Age)
A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a timeless tale of a teenager struggling with society and himself. Holden Caulfield is a teenager who hates his own life. He believes that every single person in the world is phony. One day, he decides to leave school. His life changes when he decides to go to New York for three days.
Empire of the Sun
J.G. Ballard
Shanghai, 1941--a city aflame in a world at war. In streets full of chaos and corpses, Jim, a young British boy, searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to death marches, disease, starvation, and the fierce white flash of Nagasaki. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.
Science Fiction
I Am Legend
Richard Matheson
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
One of the best-known horror stories ever. Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, has a great ambition: to create intelligent life. But when his creature first stirs, he realizes he has made a monster. A monster which, abandoned by its maker and shunned by everyone who sees it, dogs Dr. Frankenstein with murder and horrors to the very ends of the earth.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
By 2021, World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of renegade replicants, androids so sophisticated it was nearly impossible to tell them apart from true men or women. When he wasn't “retiring” them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal--the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires...The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning ... along with the houses in which they were hidden. Montag enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames... never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid. Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think... and Montag suddenly realized what he had to do.
Plays
Medea
Euripides
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband, Jason, has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible.
Lysistrata
Aristophanes
Aristophanes's most popular play shows how sex, or the lack of it, becomes a powerful agent of reconciliation. As war ravages ancient Greece, Lysistrata of Athens leads the wives to deny their husbands all sexual favors until they lay aside their weapons. Dismayed and frustrated, the men retaliate--and a battle of sexes begin.
An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen
When Dr. Thomas Stockmann learns that the famous and financially successful spas in his home town are contaminated, he insists they be shut down for expensive repairs. Ridiculed and persecuted by the townsfolk for his honesty, he is declared an "enemy of the people." Ibsen’s classic play is a penetrating exploration of what happens when the truth comes up against the will of the majority.
The Elephant Man
Bernard Pomerance
The Elephant Man is based on the life of John Merrick, who lived in London during the latter part of the nineteenth century. A horribly deformed young man, who has been a freak attraction in traveling side shows, is found abandoned and helpless and is admitted for observation to Whitechapel, a prestigious London hospital. Under the care of a famous young doctor, who educates him and introduces him to London society, Merrick changes from a sensational object of pity to the sophisticated and witty favorite of the aristocracy and literati. But his belief that he can become a man like any other may only be a dream.
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
A dark and bloody drama of ambition, guilt and revenge, Macbeth centers on an ambitious Scottish nobleman who murders the king in order to succeed to the throne. Tortured by his conscience and fearful of discovery, he becomes fatally enmeshed in a web of treachery and deceit that spells his doom.
King Lear
William Shakespeare
A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who truly loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges the notion of a coherent and just universe. The king and others pay dearly for their shortcomings as madness, murder--and the anguish of insight and forgiveness that arrive too late--combine to make this an all-embracing tragedy of evil and suffering.