The story is told by a narrator (a lightly fictionalized version of Pushkin's public image), whose tone is educated, worldly, and intimate. The narrator digresses at times, usually to expand on aspects of this social and intellectual world. This allows for a development of the characters and emphasises the drama of the plot despite its relative simplicity. The book is admired for the artfulness...

The Tale of Khoja Nasreddin is a wonderful book that takes pride of place in the treasury of Russian literature, based on the folklore of Central Asia. The adventures of a cheerful, cunning tramp, the hero of many anecdotes, parables, fairy tales, have long gained worldwide fame. Driven by hatred for the greedy rich, fed at the expense of the common people, he uses all sorts of tricks to...

John Steinbeck's cult novel The Grapes of Wrath was first published in America in 1939, received the Pulitzer Prize, and the author himself was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. To date, Grapes of Anger are included in many of the curricula of schools and colleges in the United States. During the Great Depression, a family of ruined farmers is forced to leave their home in Oklahoma....

The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and eventually comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. A classic piece filled with comedy, its humour lies in its honest depiction of manners, education, marriage and money during the Regency era...

Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In its internalisation of the action—the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane's moral and spiritual sensibility, and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald became the mouthpiece of ideas and the spokesman of the mental mood of youth of the 1920s. Through the lips of the hero of the novel published here - 'On This Side of Paradise' (1920) - he announced that a generation had come for whom 'all the gods died, all wars died out, all faith was undermined.' Fitzgerald was the first to inform the world about the beginning of the...

Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece of the German experience during World War I. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. This is the testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the...

Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to...

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life...

German troops triumphantly enter Paris. Ordinary Germans rejoice in unison with the top of the Reich, anticipating the imminent defeat of England and the establishment of German world domination. In such an atmosphere, either a hero or a madman can challenge the regime. Or someone who has nothing to lose. Having received a funeral for his only son, carpenter Otto Kwangel declares war on Nazism....

Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with...