It’s the colorful story of John Pearson, a son of emancipated slaves, and his struggles to advance himself and achieve security, respectability, and spiritual fulfillment in the face of cultural barriers and irresistible temptations.
John is a human being with the full set of human strengths and weaknesses in an era when much of the human race was not universally regarded as human. Thus, the novel is an unadorned portrayal of the lives and culture of rural black Americans in the Deep South after Reconstruction.
It is a valuable resource, memorializing their language, their lifestyle, their beliefs, and their legacy. The dialogue is rendered in slavery-era dialect, and there is so much wit and wisdom; it’s pungent with the atmosphere of that long-lost era of the African-American past.
A story of love and community, written by the hand of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the 20th century’s greatest authors, and a woman who truly understands her characters’ motivations. This modern classic edition of Jonah's Gourd Vine features an updated cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more.
Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, originally published in 1934, tells the story of John Buddy Pearson, “a living exultation” of a young man who loves too many women for his own good. Lucy, his long-suffering wife, is his true love, but there’s also Mehaly and…
"O how can wicked men seem so steady and untouched, with such black hearts, while poor innocents stand like malefactors before them!”
Published in 1740 and written in epistolary format, Pamela is considered one of the first true novels in the English language. The novel is, as suggested by the quotation above, the desperate tale of a servant girl whose innocence is threatened by her dashing, wilful employer.
Full of 18th-century eloquence, charm, and wit, Richardson’s story and characters are developed so masterfully that the book dominated English literature for decades. It dominated me for the several happy weeks that I read it, it was that masterful.
Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a captivating story of one young woman's rebellion against the social order, edited by Peter Sabor with an introduction by Margaret A. Doody in Penguin Classics.
Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued by her dead mistress's son. Although she is attracted to Mr B, she holds out against his demands and threats of abduction and rape, determined to protect her virginity and abide by her moral standards. Psychologically acute in its explorations of sex, freedom and power, Richardson's first novel caused a sensation when it was published, with its depiction of a servant…
I had always heard that The Golden Bowl is one of the most difficult books in English literature. Now I’ve read it, and I can tell you that it is nowhere near as difficult as some other books, like the brain-rattling Tristram Shandy or Finnegans Wake.
But reading The Golden Bowl takes a lot of patience. It is steeped in metaphor, almost constant metaphor. James uses long, awkward, convoluted sentences with clauses and subordinate clauses. His characters’ thoughts are put through a CAT scan of analysis; each slice is examined under a microscope. But, he gives us page upon page of breathtakingly exquisite language, language that deserves, I think, to be read aloud.
Henry James's highly charged study of adultery, jealousy and possession, The Golden Bowl is edited with an introduction and notes by Ruth Bernard Yeazell in Penguin Classics.
Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father Adam, a billionaire collector of objets d'art, lead a life of wealth and refinement in London. They are both getting married: Maggie to Prince Amerigo, an impoverished Italian aristocrat, and Adam to the beautiful but penniless Charlotte Stant, a friend of his daughter. But both father and daughter are unaware that their new conquests share a secret - one for which all concerned…
Nebraska: not just a place on a map. It has a heart and a voice. A then. A now.
Lark, a young Sioux woman, rebels against her people’s traditions and crosses the plains to save her adopted sister from a bad marriage proposal and return her to the Pawnee village from which she was abducted in childhood.
Janet Hinderson is a small-town newspaper editor crusading against a proposed meatpacking plant that will destroy the fabric of the town along with its landmark stand of cottonwoods. Two distinct stories? Nope. Not just any narrator could tell these two stories and wind them into one. It takes a narrator with hindsight. With depth. And grit. Lots and lots of grit. We’re talking mounds of grit here.
