Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Great Gatsby]
Livres Classiques - page 2
The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author's unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Call of the Wild]
For Mary Morstan has received several large pearls - one a year for the last six years - and now a mystery letter telling her she is a wronged woman. If she would seek justice she is to meet her unknown benefactor, bringing with her two companions.
But unbeknownst to them all, others stalk London's fog-enshrouded streets: a one-legged ruffian with revenge on his mind - and his [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre The Sign of Four]
From the planet of war they came to conquer the Earth ...
The night after a shooting star is seen streaking across the sky, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common. Fascinated and exhilarated, the local people approach the mysterious object armed with nothing more than a white flag.
[lire la quatrième du livre The War of the Worlds]
Kasia Boddy's introduction traces the history of the American short story and explores the changes and continuities in its forms and preoccupations. This edition also contains a chronology, explanatory and biographical notes and suggestions for further reading.
[lire la quatrième du livre The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories: [...]]
This collection of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes includes many of the famous cases - and great strokes of brilliance - that made the legendary detective one of fiction's most popular creations.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes]
The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!'This violent, profound, baroque and blackly humorous novel is the story of Melmoth, who has sold his soul in exchange for immortality in a satanic bargain, and now preys on the helpless in their darkest moments, [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Melmoth the Wanderer]
Drawing on Anne Brontë's own experiences, and dealing with themes such as the nature of childhood, the rise of the middle classes and the loneliness, cruelty and even ill treatment that life as a governess could entail, Agnes Grey is full of quiet passion and remains a beloved classic to this day.
[lire la quatrième du livre Agnes Grey]
The epistolary novel Lady Susan is the darkly humorous tale of the amatory schemes and machinations of an ambitious and unprincipled coquette.
[lire la quatrième du livre Lady Susan]
A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.
The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre The Garden Party]
After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set.
[lire la quatrième du livre A Handful of Dust]
Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules.
But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an aspiring actress and occasional call-girl, his dream rapidly becomes a nightmare.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Day of the Locust]
The French Terror is raging, and few are safe from the threat of the guillotine. Sir Percy Blakeney, a foppish Englishman, decides to rescue imprisoned aristocrats before they can be executed. Showing great daring and aided by a band of brave comrades, he disguises himself as the formidable Scarlet Pimpernel.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Scarlet Pimpernel]
Eminent politician Paul Lessingham is the toast of Westminster, but when 'the Beetle' arrives from Egypt to hunt him down, the dark and gruesome secret that haunts him is dragged into the light. Bent on revenge for a crime committed against the disciples of an Egyptian goddess, the Beetle terrorizes its victims and will stop at nothing until it has satisfaction.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Beetle]
When 'The Awakening' was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her death, it is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Awakening]
It was Friday night. Mr and Mrs Darling were dining out. Nana had been tied up in the backyard. The poor dog was barking, for she could smell danger.
[lire la quatrième du livre Peter Pan]
Created from two short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and the unfinished The Prime Minister, the novel addresses Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
[lire la quatrième du livre Mrs Dalloway]
'The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening'To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness.
[lire la quatrième du livre To the Lighthouse]
Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish vision, H.P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness.
[lire la quatrième du livre At the Mountains of Madness]
'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.'Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans to visit. Among the most fashionable are psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, who hold court at their villa.
[lire la quatrième du livre Tender is the Night]
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control.
[lire la quatrième du livre Animal Farm]
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party.
[lire la quatrième du livre Nineteen Eighty Four]
Through the Looking Glass begins the adventure anew when Alice steps through a mirror into another magical world where she can instantly be made queen if she can only get to the other side of the colossal chessboard.
[lire la quatrième du livre Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Other Stories]
he Penguin English Library Edition of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad'The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time.
[lire la quatrième du livre Heart of Darkness]
his compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life.
[lire la quatrième du livre Lord Jim]
'Merry Christmas!...every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding'
Dickens' story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has proved one of his most well-loved works.
[lire la quatrième du livre A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings]
In 1960 Jack Kerouac was near breaking point. Driven mad by constant press attention in the wake of the publication of On the Road, he needed to 'get away to solitude again or die', so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. The resulting novel, in which his autobiographical hero Jack Duluoz wrestles with doubt, alcohol dependency and his urge towards self-destruction, is one [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Big Sur]
'If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?' Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents at Dorlcote Mill, but her passionate, wayward nature and fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her conventional family.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Mill on the Floss]
Here begins the story of an evil ages old and forever new. It is the story of those who feed a diabolic craving into the veins of their victims, into the men and women from whose blood they draw their only sustenance. It is a novel of peculiar power, of hypnotic fascination. The reader is warned that he who enters Castle Dracula may not escape its baleful spell, even when he closes this book.
[lire la quatrième du livre Dracula]
In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a 'wicked woman' as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Tenant of Wildfell Hall]
Today, however, the stories are admired for their intense and masterly dissection of "dear dirty Dublin," and for the economy and grace with which Joyce invested this youthful fiction.
[lire la quatrième du livre Dubliners]
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette.
There she struggles to retain her self- possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Villette]
Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Scarlet Letter]
The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty's criminal organization alerts Sherlock Holmes of the evil deed by means of a cipher . . .
When Holmes and Watson arrive at a Sussex manor house they appear to be too late. The discovery of a body suggests that Moriarty's henchmen have been at their work.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Valley of Fear]