Publisher: 8
Herman Melville
Melville has a fairly wide range of styles and approaches. Piazza is a Tolkien excursion into a fairyland, but she asks where the real fairyland is actually located. Piazza, a descriptive and sensitively told pastoral story.
Charles Dickens
The Pickwick Papers - a novel by Charles Dickens, an English writer who is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. The novel's protagonist Samuel Pickwick, Esquire is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. He suggests that he and three other "Pickwickians" should make journeys to places remote from London and report on their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief subject matter of the novel.
Charles Dickens
This novel demonstrates Dickens experimenting with building his own voice. The Pickwick Papers is a series of linear adventures, unlike the convoluted plots of Dickenss later novels. In other words, we follow our heroes from one stop to the next and meet interesting characters, rather than unraveling a mystery. The novel is a late example of the picaresque, a style of story in which we follow a rough, but still likable, hero through his adventures.The Pickwick Club sends Mr. Pickwick and a group of friends to travel across England and to report back on the interesting things they find. In the course of their travels, they repeatedly encounter the friendly but disreputable Mr. Jingle, who becomes a continual source of trouble for all who know him. Pickwick himself is the victim of a number of misunderstandings that bring him both embarrassment and problems with the law.
Oscar Wilde
Possessing eternal youth and beauty produces exactly the same effect as sentencing a man to life without the possibility of parole. Both have nothing to lose and morals disappear before the desire for immediate self-gratification in all things. And so it is with Dorian Gray. Its a moral story so eventually his evil catches up with him and he dies, as does the criminal. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a fascinating novel in which a beautiful young man, under the poisonous influence of an older dandy, makes a bargain with the devil, according to which he stays young and charming while his portrait becomes a reflection of his conscience. Wildes novel is about youth and beauty versus experience; morality and the triumph of the senses over reason; sin and accountability; society, its hypocrisy and the depths of the human condition.
The Picture of Dorian Gray - With Audio Level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library
Wilde, Oscar
A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. This version includes an audio book: listen to the story as you read. Retold for Learners of English by Jill Nevile. 'When we are happy, we are always good', says Lord Henry, 'but when we are good, we are not always happy.' Lord Henry's lazy, clever words lead the young Dorian Gray into a world where it is better to be beautiful than to be good; a world where anything can be forgiven - even murder - if it can make people laugh at a dinner party.
The Picture of Dorian Gray Level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library
Wilde, Oscar
A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Jill Nevile 'When we are happy, we are always good', says Lord Henry, 'but when we are good, we are not always happy.' Lord Henry's lazy, clever words lead the young Dorian Gray into a world where it is better to be beautiful than to be good; a world where anything can be forgiven - even murder - if it can make people laugh at a dinner party.
Valentine Williams
The novel begins in Paris on the wedding night of Sally and Rex Garrett. A former member of the French Foreign Legion Rex mysteriously disappears on the night of his wedding. At The Pigeon House, a lonely inn, a band of conspirators await the arrival of a deserter from the Foreign Legion, who is their key man in their plan to start an uprising in French Morocco. The conspirators have also driven the bridegrooms closest friend into exile and a shameful death, which means he must hunt them down and destroy them. Williams spy story, The Pigeon Man (1927), presents us with a character whose motivations are as obscure as any in modernist literature. Why is the hero doing what he is doing? Why, for that matter, are the other characters? George Valentine Williams never says explicitly, leaving readers to puzzle this out for themselves.
Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard turned to writing comic and dialect Western tales only late in his career, but he found an immediate and continuously successful market for them, and they are in many respects his most accomplished and polished works. The Pike Bearfield Stories is a collection of stories in the western genre, featuring Pike Bearfield the character who lead well-intentioned lives of perpetual confusion, mischance, and outright catastrophe. It includes: While the Smoke Rolled, A Gent from the Pecos Shave That Hawg! , Gents on the Lynch, The riot at Bucksnort. They are reminiscent of traditional southwestern tall tales, told in dialect, featuring larger-than-life characters, swift action, broad satire, and wry humor. All stories are fast-paced with simple yet effective plots that have a few surprises thrown in for good measure.