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College Board's 100 Books for College-Bound Readers
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque and Arthur Wesley WheenPaul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I.
Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers.
But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other--if only he can come out of the war alive.
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas PynchonThe highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.
Swann’s Way
by Marcel ProustMarcel Proust's seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu), has inspired many superlatives, among them "the greatest novel ever written" and "the greatest novel of the first half of the twentieth century. "
Swann's Way, the first volume of the Recherche and the most widely read and taught of all the volumes, is the ideal introduction to Proust's inventive genius.
This Norton Critical Edition is based on C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation, which introduced the English-speaking world to Proust and was published during the author's lifetime. It is accompanied by Susanna Lee's introduction, note on the text, and explanatory annotations.
Marcel Proust was forty-two years old when Swann's Way was published, but its foundational ideas and general shape had been evolving for decades.
"Contexts" includes a 1912 reader's report of the manuscript that exemplifies publishers' complicated reactions to Proust's new form of writing.
Also included are three important post-publication reviews of the novel, by Elie-Joseph Bois, Lucien Daudet, and Paul Souday, as well as Andr#65533; Arnyvelde's 1913 interview with Proust.
The fourteen critical essays and interpretations of Swann's Way in this volume speak to the novel's many facets--from the musical to the artistic to its representations of Judaism and homosexuality.
Contributors include G#65533;rard Genette, whose "Metonymy in Proust" appears here in English translation for the first time, along with Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Claudia Brodsky, Julia Kristeva, Margaret E. Gray, and Alain de Botton, among others.
The edition also includes a Chronology of Proust's Life and Work, a Selected Chronology of French Literature from 1870 to 1929, and a Selected Bibliography.
The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
by Edgar Allan PoeVocabulary is a critical part of studying for the SATs. Memorizing words that are written on flashcards can be difficult because they are not put in the context of a sentence.
Kaplan's SAT Score-Raising Classics make learning SAT vocabulary words easier and more enjoyable for students. Classic novels that are taught throughout high school can now be read while learning vocabulary words that frequently appear on the SAT exam.
Designed for easy use, these books feature the actual text on one side of the page, with the word definitions on the opposite side. In addition, the vocabulary words are in easy-to-spot bold typeface throughout.
Each Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic features:* The complete text of the classic novel* Hundreds of vocabulary words tested on the SAT exam* Definitions for each highlighted work on the facing page* A pronunciation guide* An index for easy reference* A teachers' guide that includes instructional suggestions, in-class activities, and homework assignments posted on our web site: kaptest.com
Kaplan's SAT Score-Raising Classics series give readers get an invaluable learning tool and an enjoyable reading experience.
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia PlathSylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time.
In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational--as accessible an experience as going to the movies.
A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak and Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard PevearBoris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom, The New York Review of Books declared, "the English-speaking world is indebted."
First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities--Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.
Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times.
Stunningly rendered in the spirit of Pasternak's original--resurrecting his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone--and including an introduction, textual annotations, and a translators' note, this edition of Doctor Zhivago is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.From the Hardcover edition.
Animal Farm
by George OrwellGeorge Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture.
It is the account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm--a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal.
Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that proves disastrous.
The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But some Animals Are More Equal Than Others. . . .
Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work.
First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies.
This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
by Flannery O'ConnorThe collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story.
The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as "The Displaced Person" and eight other stories.
Beloved
by Toni MorrisonStaring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.
Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free.
She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened.
And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
A New York Times Bestseller
The Crucible
by Arthur MillerA haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community
The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity.
But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft--and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.
First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil.
It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can.
Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman MelvilleThe classic tale of existential despair A Wall Street lawyer specializing in bonds and mortgages hires a respectable young man to copy legal documents by hand.
At first, the new scrivener approaches his duties with a calm efficiency.
Then comes the day when his response to a new assignment is, "I would prefer not to."
The mysterious phrase soon becomes Bartleby's reply to everything asked of him, and his surrender to inertia is both maddening and inexorable.
Torn between frustration and pity, anger and sorrow, his employer desperately tries to save Bartleby, but the cause is as doomed to disappointment as life itself.
A strange and haunting fable that continues to resonate a century and a half after it was first published, Bartleby, the Scrivener is a masterpiece of American literature.
Ceremony
by Larry Mcmurtry and Leslie Marmon SilkoThe great Native American Novel of a battered veteran returning home to heal his mind and spirit
More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power. The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition contains a new preface by the author and an introduction by Larry McMurtry.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel MárquezOne of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career.
The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.
It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel.
Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel Garcia Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master.
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann and John E. WoodsThe story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here-not for his sake
(for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man)
, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth telling
(although in Hans Castorp's favor it should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody)
-is a story that took place long ago, and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs whose tense is that of the deepest past.
The Call of the Wild
by Jack London and Gary PaulsenFirst published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is regarded as Jack London's masterpiece.
Based on London's experiences as a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness and his ideas about nature and the struggle for existence, The Call of the Wild is a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike.
Babbitt
by Sinclair LewisLewis scathing satire of middle-class America, Babbitt explores the social pressures of conformity and materialism.
It tells the story of George Babbitt, a middle-aged family man who becomes disillusioned with both conformity and his belated attempts at rebellion.
Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Babbitt offers a powerful critique of the American Dream and all it entails.
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper LeeHarper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south--and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as an e-book.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country.
A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer-risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
The Woman Warrior
by Maxine Hong KingstonIn her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis.
First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.”
The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come.
Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own.
A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present.
The Metamorphosis
by Franz KafkaFranz Kafka's 1915 novella of nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world.
This new and acclaimed translation is accompanied by possible inspirations and critical analysis of Gregor Samsa's strange story.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James JoyceLike much of James Joyce's work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a fictional re-creation of the Irish writer's own life and early environment.
The experiences of the novel's young hero, Stephen Dedalus, unfold in astonishingly vivid scenes that seem freshly recalled from life and provide a powerful portrait of the coming of age of a young man of unusual intelligence, sensitivity, and character.
The interest of the novel is deepened by Joyce's telling portrayals of an Irish upbringing and schooling, the Catholic Church and its priesthood, Parnell and Irish politics, encounters with the conflicting roles of art and morality (problems that would follow Joyce throughout his life), sexual experimentation and its aftermath, and the decision to leave Ireland.
Rich in details that offer vital insights into Joyce's art, this masterpiece of semiautobiographical fiction remains essential reading in any program of study in modern literature.
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry JamesWidely recognized as one of literature's most gripping ghost stories, this classic tale of moral degradation concerns the sinister transformation of two innocent children into flagrant liars and hypocrites. The story begins when a governess arrives at an English country estate to look after Miles, aged ten, and Flora, eight. At first, everything appears normal but then events gradually begin to weave a spell of psychological terror.One night a ghost appears before the governess. It is the dead lover of Miss Jessel, the former governess. Later, the ghost of Miss Jessel herself appears before the governess and the little girl. Moreover, both the governess and the housekeeper suspect that the two spirits have appeared to the boy in private. The children, however, adamantly refuse to acknowledge the presence of the two spirits, in spite of indications that there is some sort of evil communication going on between the children and the ghosts.Without resorting to clattering chains, demonic noises, and other melodramatic techniques, this elegantly told tale succeeds in creating an atmosphere of tingling suspense and unspoken horror matched by few other books in the genre. Known for his probing psychological novels dealing with the upper classes, James in this story tried his hand at the occult — and created a masterpiece of the supernatural that has frightened and delighted readers for nearly a century.
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry JamesIsabel Archer, a young American, accompanies her eccentric aunt to Europe, where her wit and beauty--in addition to her substantial inheritance--quickly attract all manner of eager suitors.
But beneath the romantic elegance of salons and ballrooms lies a tangle of treachery, deceit, and suffering.
The most enduringly popular of Henry James' novels, The Portrait of a Lady reflects the author's interest in the contrast between the Old and New Worlds.
He traces Isabel's progress across England, Paris, Florence, and Rome with trenchant observations on customs and attitudes.
The heroine's difficulties in reconciling her personal liberty with social propriety express James' shrewd appraisals of the naivete and nobility of the American character, as well as his views on the subtle refinements and conventionality of European culture.
A gripping exploration of the clash between freedom and responsibility, this novel offers an accessible entree into the work of Henry James.
A Doll's House
by Henrik IbsenNora Helmers has recently placed herself at considerable financial risk so that her husband, the overbearing Torvald, could recuperate from an illness.
Torvald thinks Nora careless and childlike—his doll—and proves unable to comprehend the depth of her affection and sacrifice.
Nora comes to see her marriage for what it is and will contemplate the unthinkable.
A Doll's House was first staged in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1879.
The play is important for its criticism of 19th century marriage norms—the first seeds of feminism.
Brave New World
by Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order.
A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.