Frederick Busch has an enduring love affair with great books, and here he brilliantly communicates his passion to us all. Whether expounding on Melville or Dickens, or celebrating Hemingway or O'Hara, he explains what literature can ineffably reveal about our own lives. For Busch, there was no other recourse save the "dangerous profession;" it was to be his calling, and in these piercing essays, he demonstrates that we as a culture ignore the fundamental truths about fiction only at our ow...

One of the great novelist’s most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius.This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes…along with some of his most sentimental and...

The French Revolution comes to vivid life in Charles Dickens's famous novel about the best of times and the worst of times...The storming of the Bastille…the death carts with their doomed human cargo…the swift drop of the guillotine blade—this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous work A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic eloquence, he brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising in frenzy and ...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above c...

A journey full of laughter, mishaps, eccentric characters, and the timeless charm of Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers is the delightful debut novel that launched Charles Dickens into literary stardom. Originally published in 1836, this classic follows the misadventures of the lovable and naive Mr. Samuel Pickwick and his eccentric companions in the Pickwick Club as they travel across the English countryside in pursuit of knowledge, friendship, and—often unintentionally—comic chaos. ...

"DAVID COPPERFIELD - Top Classic Novels" This edition included NEW illustrations + Free AudioBook Links + Clickable Table of Contents for both the list of included books and their respective chapters. Navigation couldn't be easier. The text and chapters are perfectly set up to match the layout and feel of a physical copy, rather than being haphazardly thrown together for a quick release. David Copperfield is th...

Upon its publication in 1857, Little Dorrit immediately outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughter and helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progress of the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction, David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift from which Dickens's other great attributes derive: his eye and ear, his near-universal empathy, his ability to en...

Dombey and Son follows life of Paul Dombey, a wealthy owner of a shipping company. Paul's dream is to have a son to continue his business. His wife dies in childbirth and Paul ends up with a daughter instead of the desired son. The book elaborates on a number of socially significant themes. In particular the book deals with the then-prevalent common practice of arranged marriages for financial gain. Other themes to be detected within this work include social inequality, familial relationsh...

The classic Dickens novel, containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes,Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family. According to Wikipedia: "Charles John Huffam Dickens, 1812 1870), pen-name "Boz", was one of the most popular English novelists of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Critics George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton championed Dickens's mastery of prose, his endless invention of unique, clever personalities, and his pow...

'His characters are marvellous, his insights wonderful ... You don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better' Ruth RendellThe Old Curiosity Shop was an instant bestseller that, even while it was criticized for its sentimentality, captured the hearts of the nation with its portrayal of little Nell Trent, who is thrown into a terrifying world when her beloved grandfather is unable to pay his debts to the loathsome Quilp. Alongside the pathos of the innocent, t...