Since its original publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one of the bestselling novels of all time—has been heralded by readers everywhere as The Great American Novel. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Widely considered The Great American Novel, and often remembered for its epic film version, Gone With the Wind explores the depth of human passions with an intensity as bold as its setting in the red hills of Georgia. A superb piece of storytelling, it vividly depicts the drama of the Civil War and...

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love. Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semiautobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip...

L'Étranger est le premier roman d’Albert Camus, paru en 1942. Il prend place dans la tétralogie que Camus nommera « cycle de l’absurde » qui décrit les fondements de la philosophie camusienne : l’absurde. Jugé, reconnu coupable de meurtre avec préméditation, condamné à mort et exécuté, on ne saura jamais pourquoi Meursault a tué. Il assiste à son procès comme si c'était un autre qu'on jugeait. Une profonde réflexion sur l'être et la vie. Albert Camus (7 November, 1913—4 January 1960) was a French-Algerian author, journalist, and playwright best known for his absurdist works The Stranger...

Anne leaves Green Gables and her work as a teacher in Avonlea to pursue her original dream (which she gave up in Anne of Green Gables) of taking further education at Redmond College in Nova Scotia. Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane enroll as well, as does Anne's friend from Queen's Academy, Priscilla Grant. During her first week of school, Anne befriends Philippa Gordon, a beautiful girl whose frivolous ways charm her. Philippa (Phil for short) also happens to be from Anne's birthplace of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia. The girls spend their first year in boardinghouses and decide to set up house...

"The Marching Morons" is a look at a far future in which the world's population consists of five billion idiots and a few million geniuses—the precarious minority of the "elite" working desperately to keep things running behind the scenes. In his introduction to The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, Pohl states that "The Marching Morons" is a direct sequel to "The Little Black Bag": it is easy to miss this, as "Bag" is set in the contemporary present while "Morons" takes place several centuries from now, and there is no character who appears in both stories. The titular black bag in the first story is...

The Great Divorce is a theological dream vision by C. S. Lewis, in which he reflects on the Christian conception of Heaven and Hell. Clive Staples or C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a British literary scholar and novelist. He was a fellow of Magdalen College, a prestigious school at Oxford University. His strong religious background influenced such books as "The Problem of Pain" and "The Screwtape Letters". He is better known for his adult science fiction trilogy: "Out of a Silent Planet", "Perelandra", and "That Hideous Strength". This series is heavily influenced by Christian thinking and was...

The detective known only as The Continental Op investigates a theft of diamonds from the Leggett family of San Francisco. The plot involves a supposed curse on the Dain family, said to inflict sudden and violent deaths upon those in their vicinity. Edgar Leggett's wife is a Dain, as is his daughter Gabrielle Leggett. The detective untangles a web of robberies, lies and murder. It is discovered that Gabrielle Leggett is also involved in a mysterious religious cult and is addicted to drugs....

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by Ernest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele. A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented...

Dr. Montague, a scientific investigator of ghostly phenomena, has chosen to live for several weeks at Hill House, by repute a place of horror that will brook no human habitation. To check and contribute to his observations, he selects three companions previously unknown to him; two girls, Theo and Eleanor, and Luke, a young man, who is heir to Hill House. What happens cannot, in fairness, be told. But Dr Montague’s words were prophetic: ‘A ghost cannot hurt anyone; only the fear of ghosts can be dangerous.’ Whether the ghosts at Hill House caused the fear, or the fear created the ghosts,...

Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf suffered from...