First Avenue classics

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." Jack Worthing is an important and respected person in Hertfordshire. Being a guardian to a young girl and an employer of many in the community, the list of his responsibilities is never-ending. His brother, Earnest, however, leads a scandalous life and Jack is often forced to leave for London to sort it out. What no one knows is that Earnest is not...

Disregard for messages from the oracles and gods doesn't turn out well for characters in Greek stories, and oedipus is no exception. Encompassing murder and betrayal, incest and patricide, this set of three plays follows the life of a man doomed to suffer from birth. Sophocles wrote these classic Greek tragedies in fifth century BCE. This English translation, by F. Storr, was first published in 1912.

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, [this book] portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

Lucentio comes to Padua to attend the university, but his attention is quickly captured by the lovely Bianca. He would do anything to marry her, including disguise himself as her Latin teacher. But a major obstacle stands in the way of Lucentio's intentions: Bianca's father will only allow Bianca to marry after her sister, Katherine, is married. Katherine is everything Bianca is not. She is ill-tempered, opinionated, and objects to the idea of marriage....

A boy and his stuffed rabbit go on many adventures, but then the boy falls ill and all his toys must be thrown out. After being abandoned, the rabbit is turned into a real rabbit by a fairy.

The Yellow Wallpaper', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story first published in January 1892. The psychological thriller by the renowned US women's rights writer and campaigner is an autobiographical-inspired novella based upon her own experience of severe postnatal depression, leading to post-natal psychosis. At the time, women with PND (known in America as postpartum depression) were seen as hysterical and were often dismissed by doctors...

One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism… "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,

...