Many critics consider "The Portrait of a Lady" Henry James's finest achievement and Isabel Archer one of the greatest heroines in all literature. An American heiress just arrived in Europe, Isabel is high-spirited and independent. Two eligible suitors, an English aristocrat and an aggressive American, both woo her. She refuses them, but finds herself captivated by the chrarms of Gilbert Osmond, a worthless, tyrannical dilettante. "The Portrait...

High school junior Del Rainey unwittingly joins a Purity Pledge class at church, hoping to get closer to his long-term crush, Kiera.

"From the popular author of Kane and Abel and A Prisoner of Birth comes the story of one family across generations, across oceans, from heartbreak to triumph. The epic tale of Harry Clifton's life begins in 1920, with the words, "I was told that my father was killed in the war." A dock worker in Bristol, Harry never knew his father, but he learns about life on the docks from his uncle who expects Harry...

The sisters -- An encounter -- Araby -- Eveline -- After the race -- Two gallants -- The boarding house -- A little cloud -- Counterparts -- Clay --A Painful Case -- Ivy Day in the Committee Room -- A Mother -- Grace -- and perhaps the most welL-known of all the stories (and the longest): The Dead.

From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that...

Settle into the season with A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens?s timeless novella tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an old miser who learns the value of kindness and generosity thanks to visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

A tour of Italy takes young Lucy Honeychurch out of her predictable life in Edwardian England and places her into a new world that even her chaperoning spinster aunt cannot control. Encountering everything from unlikely traveling companions to street violence, Lucy faces the greatest challenge in understanding her own shifting emotions toward a most unsuitable suitor.

The slow but inevitable moral degeneration of a weak woman. Describes the patient rendering of the squalor and narrowness of provincial life and of its effect on the woman's mind.

"'In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,' Lillian Boxfish writes, 'I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street...' She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it." Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just...

Eliot's touching novel of a miser and a little child combines the charm of a fairy tale with the humor and pathos of realistic fiction. The gentle linen weaver, Silas Marner, exiles himself to the town of Raveloe after being falsely accused of a heinous theft. There he begins to find redemption and spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love for an abandoned child he discovers in his isolated cottage.