By: Oscar Wilde (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003) Summary: Dublin-born Oscar Wilde climbed to the top of society as a witty playwright before writing his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Published in 1890, the story was immediately considered a...
By: Homer, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Viking Penguin, 1996) Summary: Over 2,700 years ago Homer constructed a tale of “waves and wars,” a quest following the epic feats of the Trojan War hero Odysseus. Whereas the Iliad deals with wrath, the Odyssey looks at...
By: Chaim Potok (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) Summary: Asher Lev is a redheaded Hasidic Jew born in 1943 in Brooklyn. He has an almost supernatural ability to draw, yet his faith tradition tries to suppress this. Author Chaim Potok, a rabbi and artist, chronicles...
By: Euripides, trans. John Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Summary: If Sophocles is the kindly grandfather, Euripides is the cranky uncle. These two Greek playwrights were rivals, the former enjoying fame during his lifetime and the latter...
By: Homer trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Classics, 1998) Summary: Homer, the ancient blind bard, is credited as the author of the 8th century BC epic poem The Iliad, a story of the ten-year Trojan War. The actual poem, however, focuses only on events in the...
By: Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008) Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2009) Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010) Summary: Katniss Everdeen narrates each book of The Hunger Games trilogy in present tense, which heightens the anxiety...
By: Louis Sachar (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) Summary: “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.” Louis Sachar, former lawyer and author of There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom and the Wayside books, begins the Newbery Medal and National Book...
By: Donna Tartt (New York: Little, Brown, 2013) Summary: Eleven years after Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch, a novel of Russian scope and Dickensian characters that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This first-person...
By: Lois Lowry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993) Summary: Jonas lives in a society where pain has been eliminated. Marriages are arranged and couples are provided with children; careers are assigned; the elderly are “released.” There is no terrain or alteration in...
By: Marilynne Robinson (New York: Picador, 2004) Summary: John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor in Iowa, is going to die. He has a heart condition which prompts him to begin a series of letters in 1957 to his seven-year-old son in order to teach the boy that which...
