Geoffrey Giuliano and The Icon Players
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A Book that Transformed America
Civil Disobedience was Thoreau's first published book and continues to transform American discourse. It is unusual for its symbolism and structure, its criticism of Christian institutions, and its many-layered storytelling.
The ideas presented in this essay have influenced some of the most powerful and influential people in history, including Martin Luther King Jnr, Leo Tolstoy, President John F. Kennedy and Ernest...
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John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...
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Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...
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"When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two...
5) Vanity fair
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Everyman's library volume no. 298
Barnes and Noble classics
The Harvard classics shelf of fiction volume 5-6
More Series...
Barnes and Noble classics
The Harvard classics shelf of fiction volume 5-6
More Series...
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This classic story of two nineteenth-century social climbers is the basis for countless films and TV series, and one of the UK's "Best-Loved Novels." Before the Real Housewives, there were Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. Ruthless and cunning, Becky may have been born in a lower class, but now that she's graduated from school, she's ready to climb up to a better life-and do whatever it takes to get there. Her friend Emmy, however, is the opposite. She...
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In this classic adventure novel, first published in 1873, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a 20,000 pound wager set by his friends at the Reform Club - and he is determined not to lose. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, the reserved Englishman and his manservant immediately set off.
7) The 39 Steps
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Europe is close to war and spies are everywhere. Richard Hannay the protagonist and narrator, an expatriate Scot, returns to his new home, a flat in London, after a long stay in Rhodesia, in order to begin a new life. One night he is buttonholed by a stranger, a well-travelled American, who claims to be in fear for his life. The man appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, beginning with a plan to assassinate the Greek Premier,...
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One of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tells the tragic story of Raskolnikov-a talented former student whose warped philosophical outlook drives him to commit murder. Surprised by his sense of guilt and terrified of the consequences of his actions, Raskolnikov wanders through the slums of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg trying to escape the ever-suspicious Porfiry, the official investigating...
10) Bleak House
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Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience....
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Jack Worthington is an upstanding gentleman in Victorian society. He just has one secret-he tells everyone that he has a brother named Earnest, when, in reality, Earnest is his alter ego. This allows him a certain duality; he can go out and party as Earnest, but have a sterling reputation as Jack. However, he must merge the two when Jack discovers that his lover, Gwendolyn, will only marry a man named Earnest. Meanwhile, Algernon, a family friend,...
13) Heidi
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A Swiss orphan is heartbroken when she must leave her beloved grandfather and their happy home in the mountains to go to school and to care for an invalid girl in the city. This edition of the classic tale includes illustrations and notes about the life of the times.
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In Baroness Emma Orczy's 1905 novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel", the year is 1792 and the French Revolution is complete. People die by the guillotine every day, often unjustly. Stepping in to right these wrongs and rescue the innocent is the elusive "Scarlet Pimpernel", a mysterious agent named for the red flower that is his signature. Meanwhile, foppish Sir Percy Blakeney and his French actress wife Marguerite are having marital difficulties when Marguerite...