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Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. All animals are equals but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is the account of the bold struggle, initiated...
2) Babbitt
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Presents the story of George F. Babbitt, the owner of a real estate company in the 1920's. Through the life and times of the main character, the author provides a satirical view of the sociology of American business and middle-class culture.
3) Candide
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"CANDIDE, OU L'OPTIMISME" is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply "optimism") by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and...
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A "Positively Diabolical" Correspondence "My dear Wormwood,..." So begins this product of C.S. Lewis's wickedly funny imagination, a correspondence between two devils, Screwtape and his young nephew, Wormwood. As the senior fiend advises his young apprentice in leading humanity astray, Lewis delves into questions about good and evil, temptation, repentance, and grace, offering knowledge and guidance to all who are trying to live good Christian lives....
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This book is a satire of early 19th century British society. A bewitching beauty who bends men to her will using charm, sex, and guile. An awkward man who remains loyal to his friends, even when those friends don't deserve his affection. A mother who cannot get over the loss of her husband and devotes her life to her child. Though written in 1847-48, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair is peopled by types who remain familiar today. The novel's...
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This 1962 novel is set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, and depicts the chaos when McMurphy, a rebellious prison inmate who has faked insanity in order to finish his sentence in the hospital, incites the other patients to disobey the feared Nurse Ratched. An escalating series of incidents leads to a tragic conclusion.
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In a future totalitarian state where books are banned and destroyed by the government, Guy Montag, a fireman in charge of burning books, meets a revolutionary schoolteacher who dares to read and a girl who tells him of a past when people did not live in fear ... This sixtieth-anniversary edition commemorates Ray Bradbury's masterpiece with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman ; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical...
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"A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture--a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of "the Gardens," a cloistered community in New York's Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the...
10) Main Street
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The wife of a town doctor dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community.
11) Wonder boys
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The “wise, wildly funny story” of a self-destructive writer’s lost weekend by a Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune).
A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript,...
A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript,...
12) Cat's cradle
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Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
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Presents an English translation of the Russian novel written at the height of Stalin's regime, in which Satan, in the guise of a man named Woland, arrives in Moscow and begins to wreak havoc in the literary community, honing in on his real target, an author called The Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate.
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In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial...
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Sergeant Raymond Shaw returns home from the Korean War to an uproarious welcome from the press and his fellow Americans. Little does anyone realize, not even Shaw himself, that Communist conspirators have planted a secret trigger in his unconscious mind that is intended to allow them to use him as an assassin.
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"Satire meets slasher in this short, darkly funny hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends. "Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer." Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede's practicality...
17) Northanger abbey
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Jane Austen's first novel--published posthumously in 1818--tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature....
19) Hard times
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A powerful and courageous work of fiction, Hard Times looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It's an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This edition celebrates Charles Dickens' most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to 'strike the heaviest blow in my power'. Hard Times explores...
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"Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display: In "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments,...