Thirteen must-reads (an incomplete literary education)
Discover thirteen must-read books for an incomplete literary education. Explore this curated list of essential reads to expand your literary knowledge and passion.
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The Annotated Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's wise, ironic, and elegant masterpiece. • A controversial love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. • This annotated edition assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. • Edited with a preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. "Fascinatingly detailed." -Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book Review When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
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A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes
Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.
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The Raj Quartet, Volume 1
by Paul Scott
In August of 1942, a young Englishwoman is raped in an Indian garden, and her fate and that of an elderly English school teacher entwine.
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The Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
A classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, THE LEOPARD is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
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Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.
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The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
An anthropologist conducts an unusual research project in a reputedly haunted house.
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Guilt and desire, money and the nature of capitalism are pervasive themes in Dickens's magnificent novel, Great Expectations.'Pip's expectation, before his expectations, is that he will be shown to have already committed a crime', writes David Trotter in his Introduction to this new edition. The orphan Pip's terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his 'great expectations'. How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients of his struggle for moral redemption.