At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. There she accepts her lowly status, and gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund. When the dazzling and sophisticated Henry and Mary Crawford arrive, Fanny watches as her cousins become embroiled in rivalry and sexual jealousy, she struggles to retain her...

"First published in 1913 and regarded by many critics as her most substantial novel, The Custom of the Country is Edith Wharton's powerful saga about the beautiful, ruthless Undine Spragg. A woman of extraordinary ambition and exuberant vitality, Undine is consigned by virtue of her sex to the shadow world of the drawing room and boudoir. Marriage remains the one institution through which she can exercise her will as she entrances man after man, marrying...

Pinocchio, a wooden puppet full of tricks and mischief, with a talent for getting into and out of trouble, wants more than anything else to become a real boy, but first he must learn to be truly unselfish.

"The basis for the epic Technicolor film starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. Lana and Gil Martin marry in 1776, just as the rumblings of war begin to echo throughout the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley. Though aided by strengthening relationships with fellow settlers, establishing their new home on the frontier is constantly threatened by conflicts with British Loyalists and the Seneca Indians, who use violence to drive people off the land....

"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...

"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend...

"'It is a shameful thing to win a war.' The reliably unorthodox Curzio Malaparte's own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a people beset the triumphant but ingenuous American forces as they make their way up the peninsula. Malaparte's account begins in occupied...

Genetic mutation has devastated the world and a bleak, primitive society has emerged from its ruins ; a society which punishes any deviation from rigid norms.Ten-year-old David is having strange dreams about a mysterious city. But in his ultra-religious village of Waknut, all abnormality is abhorred, and he soon realizes that differences can be very dangerous indeed.

The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father's genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events...

This is the big novel that some day was bound to some day come out of our proud Western tradition. It is the story of a lonely marshal who was as much outside the law as the terrorists he was hired to destroy, and of the town he tried to rid of violence. Drawing on events known to have happened on the Southwest frontier of the 1880s, Oakley Hall not only has brought to life one of the most vivid periods of out national history, but has done it with...