100 Story Merchant-recommended Stories
Discover 100 merchant-recommended must-read stories! Explore curated book lists filled with top-rated tales handpicked by experts for every reader's taste.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.
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The Alexandria Quartet Boxed Set
by Lawrence Durrell
Includes Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. "People are always saying--inaccurately--that something or another is like a dream, but Durrell's Alexandria is actually like the landscape of a dream. A hot, dry city, surrounded by desert, raked by winds and by contradictions. A relentless yet voluptuous city, beautiful and squalid, overcivilized and primitive"--Anatole Broyard, Times [London]
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy, "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Set in the period between the world wars, this novel tells of two sisters, their trials, and their survival.
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A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius Reilly, the hero, is a grotesque Gargantua, in violent revolt against the entire 20th century and what he takes to be the manifold excesses and perversions of the past 400 years. He lumbers through New Orleans leaving chaos in his wake.
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David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; his nemesis, the eternally humble Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora; and the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations. In David Copperfield – the novel he described as his ‘favourite child’ – Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of his most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.
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Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The classic tale of the bizarre Carpathian count, who drinks human blood to stay alive, and the Englishman who knows his secret
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Dream of the Red Chamber
by Cao Xueqin(曹雪芹)
The Chia family experiences a decline in fortune during the Ch'ing dynasty.
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The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. “A rare spellbinding web of dreams.” —Time The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
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Fahrenheit cuatrocientos cincuenta y uno
by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 ofrece la historia de un sombrío y horroroso futuro. Montag, el protagonista, pertenece a una extraña brigada de bomberos cuya misión, paradójicamente, no es la de sofocar incendios sino la de provocarlos para quemar libros. Porque en el país de Montag está terminantemente prohibido leer. Porque leer obliga a pensar, y en el país de Montag está prohibido pensar. Porque leer impide ser ingenuamente feliz, y en el país de Montag hay que ser feliz a la fuerza... La novela más célebre de Ray Bradbury, maestro de la ficción científica.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A book about love and courage and decency and glory. It is written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. With an understanding that rips the heart with compassion.
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