The focus of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is on the juvenile exploits of the book’s schoolboy protagonist, Thomas Sawyer, who is known for causing trouble and strife. Tom resides in the charming Mississippi River port town of St. Petersburg with his aunt Polly, half-brother Sid, and cousin Mary. St. Petersburg is regarded as having a typical small-town feel, with a strong Christian presence, a tight-knit social network, and a sense of familiarity.
In contrast to his brother Sid, Tom gets “lickings” from his Aunt Polly. Always up to mischief, Tom prefers to skip school and frequently climbs out of his bedroom window at night to go on adventures with his friend Huckleberry Finn, the town’s social pariah. Sid is such a “tattle-tale,” while Tom, despite his dislike of school, is incredibly intelligent and would typically get away with his tricks.
Aunt Polly gives Tom the task of painting the fence around the home as retribution for skipping school to go swimming. Tom has a cunning plan to trick the local lads into doing the work for him, persuading them of the benefits of whitewashing. Tom is just as flamboyant at school, where he draws attention by yelling, running around, and chasing other boys. Tom uses his customary antics to try to pique the interest of Becky Thatcher, a newcomer to the area, and convince her to get “engaged” by kissing him.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”
“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”
“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money.”
“Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene”
“They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
Shakespeare created a bloody world in Romeo and Juliet where two young people are in love. The Montagues and the Capulets are involved in a blood feud, thus it goes beyond the fact that their families disapprove of them.
The progression from falling in love at first sight to the lovers’ ultimate union in death almost seems inevitable in this environment rich with death. Yet this play, which takes place in a fantastical universe, has come to represent the classic tale of young love. It is simple to react as though it applies to all young couples, in part because of the beautiful language used.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume”
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”
“Don’t waste your love on somebody, who doesn’t value it.”
“Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)”
“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. then your love would also change.”
The Aeneid has influenced generations of artists, writers, and musicians because it is both exhilarating, terrifying, and tragic.
In Virgil’s epic tale, the Trojan hero Aeneas departs his city when it is destroyed with his father Anchises and his baby son Ascanius because he will one day start Rome and give birth to the Roman race. As Aeneas advances toward his objective, he must first establish his worth and mature to the point required for such a prestigious undertaking. In the course of his adventures, he faces fierce storms in the Mediterranean, comes face to face with the terrifying Cyclopes, falls in love with Dido, Queen of Carthage, journeys into the Underworld, and fights in Italy.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The descent into Hell is easy”
“Let me rage before I die.”
“The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.”
“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man’s mad desire become his god?”
“Through pain, I’ve learned to comfort suffering men”
Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” is often regarded as his best work. For performers, playing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is considered the pinnacle of a successful theatrical career. Currently, Kenneth Branagh co-directs and stars in a brilliant ensemble performance. This performance of the rarely seen complete version of the play has three generations of renowned leading performers, many of whom were originally brought together for the Oscar-winning film “Henry V.” The Renaissance Theatre Company, in collaboration with “Bbc” Broadcasting, presents this lucid, finely nuanced, magnificent dramatization, which stars actors such Sir John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson, and Christopher Ravenscroft. It brings this great Shakespearean classic brilliantly to life by combining an entire cast with moving music and sound elements. This presentation of “Hamlet” is a priceless resource for students, instructors, and all true Shakespeareans – a recording to be cherished for decades to come. It reveals new richness with each listening.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
The valiant and well-respected commander Macbeth meets three witches on the heath one night who predict that he will rule Scotland. The merciless, unwavering goals of Lady Macbeth, who bears none of her husband’s uncertainty, spur on his initial skepticism. But carrying out the prophecy to its gory conclusion sends them both down a path of paranoia, despotism, lunacy, and murder.
Shakespeare’s horrific tragedy, which serves as a violent warning to those who crave power for its own purpose, continues to be one of his most well-known and significant works.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
“Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it breaks.”
“Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.”
It is set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, between the years 1642 and 1649, and centers on Hester Prynne, a woman who has an affair and bears a daughter but refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. She is punished for her wrongdoing and her secrecy by having to display the red scarlet letter A (for adultery) on her clothing and by being publicly shamed. She fights to build a brand-new life that is repentant and respectable. Hawthorne examines topics of legalism, sin, and guilt throughout the entire work.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.”
“She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
A significant Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf was most likely written between the first part of the seventh century and the end of the first millennium. The story of Beowulf, the poem’s titular hero, as told in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon oral tradition served as the poem’s primary source of inspiration. It is translated into poetry in this instance, with Christian additions grafted on top.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Behaviour that’s admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.”
“Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.”
“Fate will unwind as it must!”
“I shall gain glory or die.”
“That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.”
Kafka begins The Metamorphosis, his masterwork, with a stunning, weird, but pleasantly humorous first opening. It tells the tale of a young guy who, after transforming into a big insect-like beetle overnight, finds himself an outcast in his own house and a man who embodies alienation. The Metamorphosis has established itself as one of the most popular and significant pieces of fiction from the 20th century. It is a harrowing—yet outrageously comic—meditation on the feelings of inadequacy, shame, and solitude that plague human beings. As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
“How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”
“Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.”
“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles has never been exceeded in terms of the hero’s ferocious battle to find an answer to the question “Who am I?” The play, which tells the tale of a king who, acting solely out of ignorance, murders his father and weds his mother, develops with shattering force, dragging us hopelessly along with Oedipus to the shocking conclusion.
Our Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classics edition of Oedipus includes a dictionary of the more challenging terminology as well as useful sidebar comments to enlighten the reader on areas that may be unclear or disregarded, making it more understandable for today’s readers. Through this version, we hope that the reader will be able to appreciate the poetry’s beauty, the insights’ wisdom, and the drama’s impact to the fullest.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”
“Weep not, everything must have its day.”
“Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father’s.”
“King as thou art, free speech at least is mine. To make reply; in this I am thy peer.”
“Thou lov’st to speak in riddles and dark words.”
Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, wakes in an Italian hospital feeling disoriented and having no memory of the previous 36 hours, including where the horrific object hidden in his things came from. He and his resourceful doctor, Sienna Brooks, are forced to leave because a determined female assassin is pursuing them through Florence. They must embark on a perilous quest to decipher a set of codes created by a brilliant scientist whose preoccupation with the end of the world is rivaled only by his love for one of literature’s most famous works, Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno.
In this lavishly engaging thriller, Dan Brown has lifted the bar once more by fusing cutting-edge technology with classical Italian art, history, and literature. Our Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classics edition of Oedipus includes a dictionary of the more challenging terminology as well as useful sidebar comments to enlighten the reader on areas that may be unclear or disregarded, making it more understandable for today’s readers. Through this version, we expect that the reader will be able to appreciate the poetry’s beauty, the insights’ wisdom, and the drama’s impact to the fullest.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Nothing is more creative… nor destructive… than a brilliant mind with a purpose.”
“The decisions of our past are the architects of our present.”
“The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial.”
“Believe me, I know what it’s like to feel all alone…the worst kind of loneliness in the world is the isolation that comes from being misunderstood, It can make people lose their grasp on reality.”
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their silence at times of crisis.”
This is how Robert Fagles’ superb translation of the Odyssey gets started. The Odyssey is literature’s most grandiose depiction of the journey through the life of the average person if the Iliad is the world’s biggest war epic. A timeless tale of humanity, as well as a test of moral fortitude for each individual, Odysseus’ ten-year journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, required him to rely on his cunning and cunning to survive in the face of supernatural and natural forces.
We now have an Odyssey to read aloud, savor, and appreciate for its sheer lyrical skill. Fagles has caught the fire and poetry of Homer’s original in the stories and legends that are presented here in a bold, modern style. The excellent Introduction and textual analysis by famous classicist Bernard Knox provide the general readers and scholars alike with additional perspectives and background information, enhancing the power of Fagles’ translation.
This Odyssey is meant to enthrall both classicists and the general audience, as well as to enthrall a new generation of Homer scholars. In a striking new modern-verse translation, Robert Fagles, recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, gives us Homer’s most well-known and approachable poem.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
The classic book by Mary Shelley is about a scientist whose creation turns into a monster. This edition is the actual 1818 text, preserving all of Shelley’s original writing’s hard-hitting and highly politicized elements as well as her unabashed wit and powerful female voice. Additionally, this version includes a new preface, reading recommendations, literary evaluations and extracts chosen by novelist and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, a chronology, and an article by renowned Shelley researcher Charles E. Robinson.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”
William Golding, a British author who won the Nobel Prize, published Lord of the Flies in 1954. The story follows a bunch of British youths’ unsuccessful attempts to rule themselves while stuck on a deserted island.
The story revolves around a gang of schoolboys who get lost on a desolate island. However, don’t allow the young cast to fool you into believing that this is a kid’s book. I had no idea Lord of the Flies was as dark as it is, and I was shocked by some of the things that happened.
The young lads initially make an effort to emulate the island’s tidy adult society. To ensure that any passing ships can see the smoke coming from the island, they band together just to keep a fire going. However, without any adults there to watch over them, the lads start to act violently, cruelly, and brutally in an effort to live.
In the end, I gave this book a 3 out of 5-star rating since I was generally unimpressed and let down by the plot. For young adults who want to read a classic psychological survival thriller, this book’s brief length is ideal. Personally, I don’t think I’ll read this book again because I found most of the tale to be really boring. Although it was intriguing to observe how the mind can evolve to survive such a challenging circumstance and turn it into a game. I think you’ll also enjoy reading this book if you have any interests in sociology or psychology.
Animal Farm, a satirical allegorical novella by George Orwell about a farm, was first released in England on August 17, 1945. It depicts the tale of a band of farm animals who rise up to confront their man farmer in an effort to establish an animal-friendly society.
Animals that have been abused and overworked on a farm take over. They went out to construct a paradise of advancement, fairness, and equality with fiery idealism and passionate slogans. The setting is therefore set for one of the most incisive satiric tales ever written—a sharp-edged fairy tale for adults that charts the progression from the revolt against oppression to totalitarianism that is just as dreadful. As Animal Farm was initially published, it was thought to be directed toward Stalinist Russia. Today, it is glaringly obvious that George Orwell’s masterpiece has a meaning and a message that are still fiercely relevant wherever and whenever liberty is attacked, regardless of the cause.
One morning, a pilot who is stranded in the desert awakens to see the most remarkable tiny fellow standing in front of him. Draw me a sheep, please,” the stranger begs. The pilot also understands that when life’s events are too complex to comprehend, there is no other option except to give in to their mysteries. He takes out a pencil and some paper. And so starts this witty and charming fable, which has forever altered readers’ perceptions of the world by revealing the secret of what is truly important in life.
The Little Prince, offered here in a magnificent new translation with meticulously restored artwork, is one of the few stories that are as widely read and as widely adored by both children and adults. It will captivate readers of all ages because it is the authoritative edition of a global classic.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
The surreal tale of a young fellow who trades his soul for everlasting youth and beauty is the subject of Oscar Wilde’s sole book. A youthful aesthete in late 19th-century England was the subject of a devastating depiction by Oscar Wilde in this well-known work. The book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray descends into a life of crime and excessive sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait develops day by day into a grotesque record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the public. The book uses a combination of a Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction. This captivating tale of terror and suspense has been incredibly popular for more than a century. It is one of Wilde’s most significant works and one of the pioneering examples of its kind.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
“To define is to limit.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The third book written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, was released in 1925. It chronicles the tragic tale of self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman he once loved, in Jazz Age New York. The narrative of the book is provided by Nick Carraway, who describes the happenings of the summer of 1922 after moving into the fictitious Long Island community of West Egg. He resides there among the newly wealthy, while his cousin Daisy and her violently wealthy husband, Tom Buchanan, reside across the water in the more affluent community of East Egg.
Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Jay Gatsby’s glamorous parties as the summer goes on. Nick extends an invitation to Daisy to fulfill Gatsby’s wish, and there they rekindle their romance. Tom meets Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel as soon as he learns of the affair. Gatsby claims that he and Daisy have always been in adoration and that she has never loved Tom despite Daisy’s attempts to calm them down. As the altercation intensifies, Tom divulges what he discovered during an inquiry into Gatsby’s affairs: that the man had made his money by dealing in illicit booze. Daisy has abandoned her desire to divorce her husband, and despite Gatsby’s best efforts to the contrary, his case appears doomed.
Daisy, who just knew that Tom was engaging in an affair, does not know who Myrtle Wilson is until she is hit and killed on the road. Daisy is terrified as she continues to drive, but onlookers notice the car. George Wilson, Myrtle’s widower, arrives in East Egg the following afternoon. Tom informs him that Gatsby killed his wife. Wilson visits Gatsby’s home and shoots both the man and himself. Following the Buchanans’ departure from Long Island, Nick plans Gatsby’s burial. Fitzgerald regarded The Great Gatsby as his finest work when it was first released, yet the novel was neither a critical nor financial triumph.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, an internationally recognized book set in a grim, dystopian future sixty years after its initial publication, continues to be regarded as a masterpiece of world literature. Its message is more pertinent now than it has ever been.
The fireman is Guy Montag. His responsibility is to destroy both the homes where they are hidden and the printed book, the most illicit of all goods. When Montag returns to his boring life and his wife, Mildred, who spends the entire day with her television “family,” he never doubts the devastation and ruins his activities cause. Montag, however, starts to doubt everything he has ever known when he befriends an eccentric young neighbor named Clarisse. Clarisse introduces Montag to a past in which people didn’t live in fear and a present in which people view the world through the ideologies in books rather than the mindless chatter of television.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
The controversial masterwork Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. has sparked more discussion than most books. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.
Last Exit to Brooklyn portrays the experiences of New Yorkers. They constantly deal with the darkest excesses of human nature and have been characterized by various reviewers as hellish and obscene. But even in these tumultuous lives, there are exquisitely lovely moments. These fascinating characters include Harry, the strike leader who hides his actual wants behind a sexist macho, Tralala, the cunning prostitute who explores the depths of sexual depravity, and Georgette, the transsexual who falls in love with a heartless hoodlum.
British courts outlawed Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1967, but that ruling was overturned the following year with the assistance of several authors and critics, including Anthony Burgess and Frank Kermode. It was the focus of an obscenity trial in the UK in 1966. The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, The Willow Tree, and Waiting Period are some of his other books. Requiem for a Dream was turned into a movie in 2000 by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked. She saw hate in the icicles that hung from her window; she saw it in the dirty slush on the streets; she heard it in the hail that scratched her window and bit her face; she could see it in the lowered heads hurrying to warm homes …”
“The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn’t be seen from a few feet away.”
“high spirits and overflowing joy making the absence of love known.”
“But it was a bike and it moved. I think that sonofabitch woulda used it even if he had ta push it or pedal it like a kiddy car. So he kicks it over after 5 minutes and we listen to it cough and miss and Spook went puttin off with a shiteatin grin on his face and we went back up stairs and a few minutes later he comes back. Smilin all over the goddamn place and the strap of his hat under his chin. I tellya man, it was a pissa.”
“I read so many different writers at the same time I did not have to work off any influences. Also, never having gone to school I didnt have to unlearn all the lies a person can learn in school about how you should write. I was unaware of the ‘rules of writing’ as proclaimed by individuals who had never written an original line in their lives. Fortunately, I had no recourse but to find my own way.”
In Brooklyn, New York, Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928–2004) was born. He left school at the age of fifteen and joined the merchant marines. His lung condition was discovered while he was at sea. Since he had no other means of support, he decided to try his hand at writing: “I knew the alphabet. I might be able to write. His debut work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was published in 1964, has since gained cult status.
The classic story of a boyhood in a peaceful Southern community and the moral crisis that shook it. When it was initially released in 1960, “To Kill A Mockingbird” has become an immediate bestseller and a popular book among critics. It later went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was eventually turned into a great film that won an Oscar.
“To Kill A Mockingbird” is a compassionate, dramatic, and profoundly touching book that explores the fundamentals of human conduct, including purity and expertise, kindness and brutality, love and hatred, humor and pathos. This local tale by a young Alabama woman claims international appeal with over 18 million copies currently in print and adapted into forty languages. Harper Lee has always viewed her novel as a straightforward love story. It is considered a literary masterpiece in America today.
With its winning combination of heartfelt romance and bittersweet wit, this story of family life in Mexico at the turn of the century has become a best-selling phenomenon. It is earthy, enchanting, and completely charming. Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, moving story with magical moments, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit, and recipes. It was the number one book in Mexico and America for over two years before becoming a hit worldwide.
It recounts the peculiar history of the all-female De La Garza family and is a lavish feast of a book. Mexican tradition forbids Tita, the youngest daughter of the family, from getting married and forces her to care for her mother until she passes away. However, Tita develops feelings for Pedro, who is drawn to her by the entrancing meals she prepares. Pedro desperately marries Rosaura, her sister, to keep close to her, forcing Tita and Pedro to circle one other in unrequited desire. Only a bizarre series of misfortunes, misfortune, and fate manage to bring them back together despite all odds.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“You don’t have to think about love; you either feel it or you don’t.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“Necesito una respuesta en este momento, el amor no se piensa, se siente o no se siente.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“La mera verdad es que la verdad no existe, todo depende del punto de vista.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
“It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate