Pines and Plains Libraries

The works of George MacDonald, the Scottish author, poet, and minister, have influenced the likes of W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain. MacDonald wrote some of the first popular fantasy novels and is best known for his enduring stories, such as "Phantastes", "The Princess and the Goblin", "Lilith", and "At the Back of the North Wind". Macdonald said of his work that he wrote "not for children, but for the...

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tells the story of the Roman Empire from the time of Trajan in the third century to the fall of Constantinople in the sixteenth. Along the way Gibbon describes not only the internal issues that arise within the empire, but also the various outside forces that contribute to its fall: the Goths, Huns, Persians, Muslims, and many others. He also has two highly controversial (at the time, and still...

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne's family on...

When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth's wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest...

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester...

"Known to all as "the Lady of the Camellias" because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, Marguerite Gautier is the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved--until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and hopelessly in love with her"--Cover page [4].

Among the most durable and engaging texts in world literature, Julius Caesars Conquest of Gaul tells how he and his legions conquered much of modern France in less than a decade (58-51 BCE), despite determined resistance. Perhaps the most famous Roman ever, Gaius Julius Caesar created a legacy which has resonated, for good or ill, throughout Western culture. Architect of an imperial system, eponymous sponsor of a reformed calendar system, orator second...

Set at the end of World War Two, featuring a large cast of characters, this novel centers on the design and production of the German V-2 rockets. What is the "black device" that is rumored to be placed in a very special rocket? Where is it going? This award-winning novel is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and...

"In the whole of European literature there is no poet who can furnish the texts for a more significant variety of discourse than Virgil. [He] symbolizes so much in the history of Europe, and represents such central European values..." —T.S. Eliot The Eclogues (38 BC), also known as the Bucolics, is a work by Roman poet Virgil. Although less prominent than The Aeneid, Virgil's legendary epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his discovery of what would...

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero. A suffering and persecuted intellectual, Moses E. Herzog passively accepts the disasters of his private and public affairs in an effort to survive modern civilization