Jack London: Call of the Wild and White Fang

Скачать книгу (размер 1 299 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 256) Аннотация: The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) are world famous animal stories. Set in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, The Call of the Wild is about Buck, the magnificent cross-bred offspring of a St Bernard and a Scottish Collie. Stolen from his pampered life on a Californian estate and shipped to the Klondike to work as a sledge dog, he triumphs over his circumstances…

Charles Dickens: David Copperfield

Скачать книгу (размер 3 910 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 768) Аннотация: «Dickens wrote of «David Copperfield»: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for this greatly loved classic, possibly because of its autobiographical form. Following the life of David through many sufferings and great adversity, the reader will also find many light-hearted moments…

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

Скачать книгу (размер 4 073 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 800) Аннотация: Cervantes' tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant, tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons…

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Скачать книгу (размер 1 054 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 208) Аннотация: «Begun when the author was only eighteen and conceived from a nightmare, «Frankenstein», is the deeply disturbing story of a monstrous creation which has terrified and chilled readers since its first publication in 1818. The novel has thus seared its way into the popular imagination while establishing itself as one of the pioneering works of modern science fiction.»

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

Скачать книгу (размер 2 084 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 410) Аннотация: «Considered by many to be Dicken's finest novel, «Great Expectations» traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dicken's most memorable characters. Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict…

F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Скачать книгу (размер 728 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 144) Аннотация: «Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the «roaring twenties», and a devastating expose of the «Jazz Age». Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy…

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

Скачать книгу (размер 2 278 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 448) Аннотация: Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when…

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

Скачать книгу (размер 728 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 144) Аннотация: «Julius Caesar» is among the best of Shakespeare's historical and political plays. Dealing with events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the drama vividly illustrates the ways in which power and corruption are linked. The cry 'Peace, freedom and liberty!' is used to exculpate brutal realities, while personal ambitions taint public actions. Rich in characterization and…

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Скачать книгу (размер 1 870 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 368) Аннотация: Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Скачать книгу (размер 646 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 128) Аннотация: Its lyricism, comedy (both broad and subtle) and magical transformations have long made A Midsummer Night’s Dream one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s works. The supernatural and the mundane, the illusory and the substantial, are all shimmeringly blended. Love is treated as tragic, poignant, absurd and farcical. 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!', jeers Robin Goodfellow; but the joke may be…

Herman Melville: Moby Dick

Скачать книгу (размер 2 768 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 544) Аннотация: Moby-Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab’s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the…

Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey

Скачать книгу (размер 1 054 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 208) Аннотация: Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen…

Homer: The Odyssey

Скачать книгу (размер 2 605 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 512) Аннотация: Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago. This poem has been translated many times over the years,…

William Shakespeare: Othello

Скачать книгу (размер 891 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 176) Аннотация: This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona’s love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of racism, sexism, contested identities, and the savagery lurking within civilisation, Othello is arguably the most topical and accessible tragedy from Shakespeare’s major phase…

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Скачать книгу (размер 1 136 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 224) Аннотация: Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an…

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Скачать книгу (размер 1 136 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 224) Аннотация: This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat

Скачать книгу (размер 1 707 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 336) Аннотация: «Three Men in a Boat There are four of them — George, Harris, the writer himself and that dog, Montmorency — all participants in a boating expedition on the Thames. The difficulties and vicissitudes heaped upon these innocents develop to epic proportions as they experience the hazards of the great English waterway. Their problems are in no way diminished by the outrageous behaviour of…

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Скачать книгу (размер 1 381 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 272) Аннотация: «Wuthering Heights» is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a…

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Скачать книгу (размер 1 829 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 360) Аннотация: «This title includes introduction and notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury. Set in Hardy's Wessex, «Tess» is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, «A Pure Woman», infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic. It tells of Tess Durbeyfield, the…

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Скачать книгу (размер 2 033 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 400) Аннотация: Lawrence's first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly-knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden forlong. Paul Morel is caught between his need for family and community and his efforts to define himself…