Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is such a rollicking good read that you'll forget many critics and scholars also regard it as one of the most important literary works in English. A group of pilgrims are traveling together to visit a holy shrine at the Canterbury Cathedral. Along the way, they decide to hold a storytelling contest to pass the time, with the winner to be awarded a lavish feast on the

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate

Willa Cather established her reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent with the publication of O Pioneers!-the first of her books set in Nebraska. In this stirring romance of the Western prairies, the lives of two very different heroines unfold during a time when the wild lands of the frontier broke the spirit of many of America's hopeful Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrant farmers. When Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm as...

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

"One of the great American novels--and one of America's most popular--featuring a new foreword by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko Jay Gatsby seemingly has everything. Everybody who's anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his West Egg, Long Island, mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby--young, handsome, fabulously rich--always seems...

"Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) offer a series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. Ranging from doubt and despair to conviction and exaltation, they cover such diverse topics as the nature of moral virtue, human rationality,...