Catalog Search Results
1) My Ántonia
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English
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Description
"Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Antonia details of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of...
2) The bell jar
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Series
Language
English
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Description
[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...
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English
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Description
"The tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century. Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make...
5) Adam Bede
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English
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Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret.
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English
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"Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna...
7) O pioneers!
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English
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Description
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman, writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father's farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength, courage, and resolve, Alexandra fights long and hard to transform her father's patch of raw, wind-blasted prairie into a highly profitable business. A gripping saga...
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Language
English
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
FPPL 2023 - Elizabeth Wetmore's Recs
OBD Patron Picks Summer Reading 2023 - Adult
Women's History Month Fiction 2024
FPPL 2023 - Elizabeth Wetmore's Recs
OBD Patron Picks Summer Reading 2023 - Adult
Women's History Month Fiction 2024
Description
""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness....
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 410
Language
English
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Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants...
10) The Bostonians
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English
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Description
"Basil Ransom, an attractive young Mississippi lawyer, is on a visit to his cousin Olive, a wealthy feminist, in Boston when he accompanies her to a meeting on the subject of women's emancipation. One of the speakers is Verena Tarrant, and although he disapproves of all she claims to stand for, Basil is immediately captivated by her and sets about 'reforming' her with his traditional views. But Olive has already made Verena her protégée, and soon...
11) Jane Eyre
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English
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Description
In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret. Charlotte Bronte's novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic, ever since...
12) [Mansfield Park]
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English
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Description
At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. She gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund, but when the dazzling and sophisticated Crawfords arrive, and amateur theatricals unleash rivalry and sexual jealousy, Fanny has to fight to retain her independence. This new edition places Mansfield Park in...
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Series
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English
Description
When the miller Mr. Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict his passionate daughter Maggie with her inflexible but adored brother Tom. As she grows older, Maggie's discovery of romantic love draws her once more into a struggle to reconcile familial and moral claims with her own desires. Strong-willed, compassionate, and intensely loyal, Maggie...
14) Northanger Abbey
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Series
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English
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Description
"A timeless classic, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is both a coming-of-age story and a parody of the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century. Catherine Morland is destined to be the heroine of her own life story as she navigates friendships and romantic relationships, and as she learns to let go of childish notions of fantasy regarding the lives of others. Held from publication for more than a decade, this story was an instant success when it was...
15) Beloved
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Language
English
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Description
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
16) Villette
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English
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Description
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...
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Language
English
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2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
Audiobooks with Famous Narrators
Banned Books
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Audiobooks with Famous Narrators
Banned Books
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Description
In this Orwellian dramatization, religion becomes a tool of repression and social control to force women into the roles of stay-at-home wives, domestic staff, prostitutes, or surrogate mothers. They have no rights to their bodies or property and are completely dependent upon men. Those women who have had at least one child find themselves forced into the role of breeding machine, producing children for childless couples. References to 20th-century...
Author
Series
Penguin Classics Deluxe
Everyman's library volume no. 6
Oxford world's classics volume 2
Signet classic ; CE 670
Everyman's library volume no. 6
Oxford world's classics volume 2
Signet classic ; CE 670
Language
English
Formats
Description
"George Eliot's beloved masterpiece in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with a foreword by Rebecca Mead, author of the bestselling memoir My Life in Middlemarch A triumph of realist fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of sweeping change. The proposed Reform Bill, the new railroads, and scientific advances are threatening upheaval on every front. Against...
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English
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Description
This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...