Rosshalde

Rosshalde

Hermann Hesse

Fiction / Poetry

*Rosshalde *is the classic story of a man torn between obligations to his family and his longing for a spiritual fulfillment that can only be found outside the confines of conventional society. Johann Veraguth, a wealthy, successful artist, is estranged from his wife and stifled by the unhappy union. Veraguth’s love for his young son and his fear of drifting rootlessly keep him bound within the walls of his opulent estate, Rosshalde. Yet, when he is shaken by an unexpected tragedy, Veraguth finally finds the courage to leave the desolate safety of Rosshalde and travels to India to discover himself anew.
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The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Theatre / Poetry / Fiction

Featuring the entirety of Oscar Wilde's collected poetry, prose, and dramatic works, this collection demonstrates the author's wide range, unerring wit, and unique perspective. Bringing together Wilde's most famous works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Lady Windermere's Fan, this anthology is an important resource for any fan or student of Oscar Wilde.Often considered ahead of his time, Oscar Wilde's works continue to resonate with modern readers and many have been adapted for film and television, including most recently, the 2009 film Dorian Gray starring Ben Barnes and the 2002 film The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Judi Dench and Colin Firth.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
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The Bachelor

The Bachelor

Stella Gibbons

Children's Books / Literature & Fiction / Poetry

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them – from a Balkan exile to Ken’s old flame and the siblings’ own raffish father – the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.
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The House of Broken Angels

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Poetry

The definitive Mexican-American immigrant story, a sprawling and deeply felt portrait of a Mexican-American family occasioned by the impending loss of its patriarch, from one of the country's most beloved authors. Prizewinning and bestselling writer Luis Urrea has written his Mexican coming-to-America story and his masterpiece. Destined to sit alongside other classic immigrant novels, The House of Broken Angels is a sprawling and epic family saga helmed by patriarch Big Angel. The novel gathers together the entire De La Cruz clan, as they meet for the final birthday party Big Angel is throwing for himself, at home in San Diego, as he nears the end of his struggle with cancer and reflects on his long and full life. But when Big Angel's mother, Mama America, approaching one hundred, dies herself as the party nears, he must plan her funeral as well. There will be two family affairs in one weekend: a farewell double-header. Among the attendants is his half-brother and namesake, Little Angel, who comes face to face with the siblings with whom he shared a father but not, as the weekend proceeds to remind him, a life. This story of the De La Cruzes is the story of what it means to be a Mexican in America, to have lived two lives across one border. It is a tale of the ravaging power of death to shore up the bits of life you have forgotten, whether by choice or not. Above all, this finely wrought portrait of a deeply complex family and the America they have come to call home is Urrea at his purest and best. Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank.
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Maid Marian

Maid Marian

Thomas Love Peacock

Fiction / Poetry

Maid Marian is the fourth novel of Thomas Love Peacock, published in 1822. Peacock wrote all but the last three chapters of Maid Marian at Marlow in 1818. He wrote to Percy Bysshe Shelley that he did not find "this brilliant summer," of 1818, "very favourable to intellectual exertion" but before it was quite over "rivers, castles, forests, abbeys, monks, maids, kings, and banditti were all dancing before me like a masked ball." However in 1819 Peacock was recruited to the East India Company where his official duties delayed the completion and publication of the novel until 1822. As a result of the delay, it was taken for an imitation of Ivanhoe although its composition had, in fact, preceded Scott's novel. It was soon dramatised with great success by Planché, and was translated into French and German.
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The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse

Fiction / Poetry

The Glass Bead Game, for which Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, is the author's last and crowning achievement, the most imaginative and prophetic of all his novels. Setting the story in the distant postapocalyptic future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals who play an elaborate game that uses all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the Ages. The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.This edition features a Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski that places the book in the full context of Hesse's thought.
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Barbary Shore

Barbary Shore

Norman Mailer

Nonfiction / Fiction / Poetry

Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But Lovett's housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysterious figures vie for Lovett's allegiance, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power that Mailer has made all his own.  
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Ficciones

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges

Fiction / Short Stories / Poetry

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)
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Burned

Burned

Ellen Hopkins

Literature & Fiction / Young Adult / Poetry

I do know things really began to spin out of control after my first sex dream. It all started with a dream. Nothing exceptional, just a typical fantasy about a boy, the kind of dream that most teen girls experience. But Pattyn Von Stratten is not like most teen girls. Raised in a religious—yet abusive—family, a simple dream may not be exactly a sin, but it could be the first step toward hell and eternal damnation. This dream is a first step for Pattyn. But is it to hell or to a better life? For the first time Pattyn starts asking questions. Questions seemingly without answers—about God, a woman's role, sex, love—mostly love. What is it? Where is it? Will she ever experience it? Is she deserving of it? It's with a real boy that Pattyn gets into real trouble. After Pattyn's father catches her in a compromising position, events spiral out of control until Pattyn ends up suspended from school and sent to live with an aunt she doesn't know. Pattyn is supposed to find salvation and redemption during her exile to the wilds of rural Nevada. Yet what she finds instead is love and acceptance. And for the first time she feels worthy of both—until she realizes her old demons will not let her go. Pattyn begins down a path that will lead her to a hell—a hell that may not be the one she learned about in sacrament meetings, but it is hell all the same. In this riveting and masterful novel told in verse, Ellen Hopkins takes readers on an emotional roller-coaster ride. From the highs of true love to the lows of abuse, Pattyn's story will have readers engrossed until the very last word.
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Some Sing, Some Cry

Some Sing, Some Cry

Ntozake Shange

Plays and Drama / Literature & Fiction / Poetry

Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister, award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the  Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at  Sweet Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina's coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on a journey through the watershed events of America's troubled, vibrant history—from Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead.
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Forgotten Life

Forgotten Life

Brian W Aldiss

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Literature & Fiction / Poetry

Winner of two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Brian W. Aldiss has, for over fifty years, continued to challenge readers' minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive science fiction.Analyst Clement Winters is trying to write a biography of his recently deceased older brother, Joseph. Through the writings Joseph left behind—letters, diaries, notes, and confessions—Clement realizes how little he actually knows his brother and how vastly his perception of him differs from reality. As Clement tries to make sense of the life of his deceased sibling, he uncovers "little dark corners" of his family history and even his own life. This ebook includes an introduction by the author.
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Miniature Fiction: Another 50 Very Short Stories

Miniature Fiction: Another 50 Very Short Stories

Patrick Lane

Literature & Fiction / Poetry / Nonfiction

Very short stories. Bite sized fiction to entertain, thrill, amuse, or perhaps scare you in a small package. Stories that attempt to really go places in only a few sentences.This is the second in the series of five novelette eBooks providing stories relating directly to the New Voyages: Phase II series of fan-films, True To His Oath is a short story based on a concept developed by Charles Root (who played Scotty in the series) and used with permission. The events take place after the live-action episode “Enemy: Starfleet” and before the live-action episode “The Child.”Captain’s log, stardate 7254.3: With repairs to the Enterprise having been completed ahead of schedule—fortunately, the Peshan lasers were barely powerful enough to scratch our hull, and although the Eagle was once as formidable as the Enterprise, neither Alersa herself nor any of her crew knew where to hit us to inflict maximum damage—we were barely two hours out of Starbase Four when we were diverted to the Federation planetoid Memory Alpha. Our mission is to deploy a team of computer specialists to troubleshoot and then repair a major malfunction that has crippled much of the equipment we delivered here last year, rendering the facility all but useless. Commander Spock has completed a preliminary examination of the system and has identified the root cause of the problem. He informs me that repairs and reprogramming should take about three days, so I’ve authorized rotating shore leave for all personnel. On a personal note, Chief Engineer Scott has, not surprisingly, decided to take leave and spend all three days down there in hopes of reacquainting himself with a friend.
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