Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes.
True religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle's phrase, "e;It is Christ formed within us.
Leonella and her niece, Antonia, visit a church to hear the sermon of a celebrated priest, Ambrosio, and while waiting tell their story to two young men, Don Lorenzo and Don Christoval.
Anyone interested in the 1960s will be fascinated by the lives of Brud and Reggie Hicks, the brothers from Texas, their wives Gwendolyn Adams and Gwendolyn James, both members of historically prominent Boston area families, Sam Davis, the defrocked Methodist minister who joins them at Walden Brook, Leo Dennison, a local gun dealer and Keetsville native who is a former selectman, and Stacy Phelps, owner of the Keetsville general store.
Agent Nathan Hunt makes a decision that will change his life and sets in motion a series of events involving the Mafia, the Russian Mob, the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and the small town of Graham Massachusetts where he has gone to ground as Eddie Sanders a janitor at the local community college.
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence.
The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women's physical and mental health.
Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote the book when she was 47, was largely responsible for popularizing the regionalism genre with her sketches of the fictional Maine fishing village of Dunnet Landing.
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town.
Dissatisfied with life in her rural Wisconsin home, 18-year-old Caroline moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress.
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England.
Claude, working on the family farm, and married to a woman who is more interested in her missionary work, than she is in him, tires of his monotonous life.
Moll, which she emphasizes is not her birth name, though she never does reveal what it was, is raised until she is teenager in America by a foster mother.
