Catalog Search Results
Literary Reference Center
Novels, short stories, poems, plot summaries and synopses, and literary criticism. Research guides, lesson plans, and citation tools support student learning.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Between the World Wars, the six Mitford sisters-each more beautiful, brilliant, and eccentric than the next-dominate the English scenes. Though they've weathered scandals before, the family falls into disarray when Diana divorces her wealthy husband to marry a fascist leader and Unity follows her sister's lead all the way to Munich, inciting rumors that she's become Hitler's mistress. As the Nazis rise in power, novelist Nancy Mitford grows suspicious...
2) Ulysses
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Serialized first in the Little Review in 1918 and published first in Paris in 1922, although its censorship for obscenity in America and England were not lifted until the mid-1930s. In terms of its story it defies abridgement or explanation except that it all takes place on one day, 16 June 1904, or Bloomsday, which was the anniversary of Joyce's first walk with his beloved Nora Barnacle. It (very) loosely follows the episodes of Ulysses from the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...
Author
Series
Broadview literary texts volume 0
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, [this book] portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In December 1926, Agatha Christie goes missing. Investigators find her empty car on the edge of a deep, gloomy lake, the only clues some tire tracks nearby and a fur coat left in the car - strange for a frigid night. Her husband and daughter have no knowledge of her whereabouts, and England unleashes an unprecedented manhunt to find the up-and-coming mystery author. Eleven days later, she reappears, just as mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming...
9) The prince
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised. "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be...
Author
Language
English
Description
An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator's final Editor's Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened. As he awaits imminent and violent interruption, he takes us on a roller-caster ride of plot and language, determined to share his...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl" and Jack Kerouac' On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through this course, which he taught first at the Narope Institute in Colorado, and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present a full history of Beat literature and to record his own stories and memories, ones that might otherwise...
12) Sphinx
Author
Language
English
Description
A landmark literary event: the first novel by a female member of Oulipo in English, a sexy genderless love story.
Author
Language
English
Description
Retracing for modern-day visitors the Paris of "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Moveable Feast," of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound, thsi guidebook uncovers the cafes, hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, gardens, and other landmarks immortalized by Hemingway in his fiction and nonfiction.
Language
English
Description
"Featuring some of America's greatest writers and poets, this landmark anthology is a one-of-a-kind field guide to the American literary imagination. Americans have always been fascinated by birds and from the beginning American writers have captured this keen interest in a variety of genres: poems, journals, memoirs, short stories, essays, and travel accounts. Here literature professor and avid birder Andrew Rubenfeld, in collaboration with acclaimed...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The World Is a Book, Indeed" takes readers to Paris, Hanoi, Central Africa, São Paulo, and Istanbul, among other places, with engaging personal accounts that build on the convergence of writing, reading, and traveling. Peter LaSalle's expansive essays consider great writers amid the settings that produced their works, while allowing space for larger ideas engendered by literary travel, from comments on international politics to metaphysical understandings...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Beat Generation may be one of the great homegrown countercultures of the United States, but in fact its writers traveled widely and lived abroad for periods of time. Their travels were a vital source of inspiration, and in turn they inspired literary scenes and kindred spirits around the globe.The writers we think of as "beat" first met in New York City in the 1940s and 50s, then joined up with others in San Francisco to form the group that became...
20) Being and time
Author
Language
English
Description
The publication in 1927 of Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, signaled an intellectual event of the first order and had an impact in fields far beyond that of philosophy proper. Being and Time has long been recognized as a landmark work of the twentieth century for its original analyses of the character of philosophic inquiry and the relation of the possibility of such inquiry to the human situation. Still provocative and much disputed,...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request