Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time"It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham," wrote Gore Vidal. "He was always so entirely there."Originally published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom. This classic bildungsroman tells the story of Philip Carey, a sen...

In this era of political correctness, it is often impossible to say things as one would like. Indeed, certain ways of feeling and talking that were once acceptable are now, in effect, forbidden. Of course, taboos extend further than speech. Social and sexual inhibitions are also evident. Benjamin DeMott argues that the very least a society should do is to try to understand the meaning of its own inhibitions. As he writes in this new edition of You Don't Say, "a supple awareness of...

Supergrow is a collection of fifteen essays that appeared between 1966 and 1969 in publications such as the American Scholar, the New York Times, Antioch Review, Esquire, and the Saturday Review. Author Benjamin DeMott discusses everything under the sun--music, improving one's sex life, violence in Mississippi, theater, student revolts--but a single theme unifies the material: people ought to use their imaginations more. The book starts from the assumption that our troubles stem from failu...

D. H. Lawrence’s great autobiographical novel paints a provocative portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields of Lawrence’s own boyhood, the story follows young Paul Morel’s growth into manhood in a British working-class family.Gertrude Morel, Paul’s puritanical mother, concentrates all her love and attention on Paul, nurturing his talents as a painter. When she muses that he might marry some...

Over 40 years ago the historic Kerner Commission Report declared that America was undergoing an urban crisis whose effects were disproportionately felt by underclass populations. In America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics, Curtis Ivery and Joshua Bassett explore the persistence of this crisis today, despite public beliefs that America has become a "post-racial" nation after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.Ivery and Bassett combine their...

What if the best morning of your life suddenly turned into your worst nightmare? Sam Case is about to find out. Saving Rachel is the story of what happens when killers force a man to choose between his wife and his mistress...and the one he rejects must die. "If Dean Koontz collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock at the circus, this would be their brain child." –Vintage DM Book Reviews

In Women In Love, D. H. Lawrence continues the story of Gundrun and Ursula Brangwen, first introduced in The Rainbow. In the course of their daily lives, the sisters meet and develop relationships with Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. As affairs between the couples deepen, they all must navigate the changing moral guidelines of post-war English society, while their pursuit of personal and physical fulfillment challenges the social strictures of their parents’ generation an...

When Buddy Pancake and his buddies stumble across the Wish List website, they jokingly post their "impossible" wishes. Imagine their surprise when the wishes start coming true! But Buddy and his pals neglected to read the fine print and now must pay the price for the wishes they've been granted. Wish List is a compelling, nail-biting, laugh-out-loud thriller.

The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family, particularly focusing on the sexual dynamics of, and relations between, the characters.Lawrence's frank treatment of sexual desire and the power plays within relationships as a natural and even spiritual force of life, though perhaps tame by modern standards, caused The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial in late 1915, as a result of which all copies were sei...

In 1947, the U.S. Army left behind a secret when they closed Ft. Miles, Delaware. A threat so deadly, they buried it 1000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, sixty years later, an oil rig drilling off the coast of Delaware has hit something.Now one man holds the key to the survival of the planet.

The classic reference work, in an edition first published before 1923. As a Word document, the file is over 14,000 pages long. We have added over 6,000 links to help you navigate to the word you want. (Searching for a word would take you to any instance of that word in definitions, not the word you want defined). With this version, you click on the first letter, then the first two letters, then on the word that's closest to to the one you want (like the guide words at the heads of pages in...

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as we...