Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces reisistance from the society she inhabits.

"Based on [the author]s own experiences as a young man, the books two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in [the author]s own words, 'a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.'y--...

In this collection of masterful stories, steeped in realism, James Joyce creates an exacting portrait of his native city, showing how it reflects the general decline of Irish culture and civilization.

Jewett creates a mosaic of tales and character sketches, all set in the fictional Maine fishing hamlet of Dunnet Landing. The unnamed narrator, an unmarried female writer (like Jewett herself), has come to the town seeking a summer of solitude and work. But sheś drawn to the villagers she meets. Most of them are over sixty, alone, and covering a roiling inner ocean of feeling with a craggy exterior as rocky as the ragged coastline. Entranced by their...

The work is structured around the life of protagonist George Willard, from the time he was a child to his growing independence and ultimate abandonment of Winesburg as a young man. Set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio, not to be confused with the actual Winesburg, which is based loosely on the author's childhood memories of Clyde, Ohio.

The adventures of an eccentric Spanish country gentleman and his companion who set out as a knight and squire of old to right wrongs and punish evil.

"Nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude in his relations with his wife Arabella has ever been put in English print," asserted M. O. W. Oliphant, the Scottish humorist. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure--the ill-received novel that was to be his last--is a strikingly modern portrait of provincial, workaday life, frank sexuality, and the desire to transcend the mire of prosaic living. Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of Literature at the...

The first novel of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, this work introduces the fictional cathedral town of Barchester and many of its clerical inhabitants. Originally published in 1855, the story centers on Mr. Septimus Harding who has been granted the comfortable wardenship of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse from a medieval charity of the diocese. Mr. Harding, a fundamentally good man and an excellent musician, conscientiously fulfills his...

First published anonymously in 1872, "Under the Greenwood Tree" is Thomas Hardy's story of the romantic entanglement between church musician, Dick Dewey, and the attractive new school mistress, Fancy Day. A pleasant romantic tale set in the Victorian era, "Under the Greenwood Tree" is the first of Hardy's "Wessex" novels and is one of his most gentle and pastoral stories. Dick falls in love with the beautiful and talented Fancy the moment he meets...

First published in 1919, "On The Makaloa Mat" is a fantastic collection of seven short stories by Jack London. The tales come together to create an illuminating sketch of life on the idyllic Hawaiian Islands, as well as the effect that contact with Western civilization had on its inhabitants and culture. The stories include: "On the Makaloa Mat", "The Bones of Kahekili", "When Alice Told Her Soul", "Shin-bones", "The Water Baby", "The Tears of Ah...