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The Red Badge of Courage

By Stephen Crane

The classic story of a sensitive boy under the strain of war moving from cowardice to courage.

Presents a new translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic chronicling the heroic adventures of Beowulf, the Scandinavian warrior who saves his people from the ravages of the monster Grendel and Grendel's mother.

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Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman, his job is to burn books, which are forbidden.

Pride and Prejudice

By Jane Austen

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the “most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works,” and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”

Jane Eyre

By Charlotte Brontë

An orphan girl who accepts employment as a governess finds herself involved in a family secret and in love with her employer.

Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens

Dickens' account of the rises and relapses of an orphan whose expectations and ambitions are greatly shaped and transformed by a mysterious benefactor.

The Secret Garden 100th Anniversary

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

"One of th' gardens is locked up. No one has been in it for ten years." When orphaned Mary Lennox comes to live at her uncle's great house on the Yorkshire Moors, she finds it full of mysterious secrets. There are nearly one hundred rooms, most of which are locked, and the house is filled with creepy old portraits and suits of armor. Mary rarely sees her uncle, and perhaps most unsettling of all is that at night she hears the sound of someone crying down one of the long corridors. The gardens surrounding the odd property are Mary's escape and she explores every inch of them—all except for the mysterious walled-in, locked garden. Then one day, Mary discovers a key. Could it open the door to the garden?

Wuthering Heights

By Emily Bronte

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. “Only Emily Brontë,” V.S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, “exposes her imagination to the dark spirit.” And Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”