by E. Nesbit (1994)
E. Nesbit's classic story of how Gerald, Cathy and Jimmy find an enchanted garden and awake a princess from a hundred-year sleep, only to have her immediately made invisible by a magic ring. Her rescue is difficult, funny and sometimes frightening.
Charles Dickens
Dickens’ first novel was originally written and published as a serial. It is a comedy relating the misadventures of the members of The Pickwick Club, whose main purpose is to discover and relate quaint and curious phenomena of social life and customs throughout England. This quest takes the members to all parts of the country, travelling by coach and sampling the comforts or otherwise of various coaching inns.
Harry Turtledove
NO ONE COULD STOP THEM--NOT STALIN, NOT TOGO, NOT CHURCHILL, NOT ROOSEVELT . . . The invaders had cut the United States virtually in half at the Mississippi, vaporized Washington, D.C., devastated much of Europe, and held large parts of the Soviet Union under their thumb.But humanity would not give up so easily. The new world allies were ruthless at finding their foe's weaknesses and exploiting them.Whether delivering supplies in tiny biplanes to partisans across the vast steppes of Russia, working furiously to understand the enemy's captured radar in England, or battling house to house on the streets of Chicago, humankind would never give up.Yet no one could say when the hellish inferno of death would stop being a war of conquest and turn into a war of survival--the very survival of the planet . . .From the Paperback edition.
E. M. Forster
The Clark Lectures, sponsored by Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, have had a long and distinguished history and have featured remarks by some of England's most important literary minds. Leslie Stephen, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson and I.A. Richards have all given celebrated and widely influential talks as the keynote speaker. One of the Lectures' most important milestones came in 1927 when, for the first time, a novelist was invited to speak. E.M. Forster had recently published his masterpiece, A Passage to India, and rose to the occasion, delivering eight spirited and penetrating lectures on the novel. The decision to accept the lectureship was actually a difficult one for Forster, as he had deeply ambivalent feelings about the use of criticism. Although suspecting that criticism was somewhat antithetical to creation, and upset by the thought that time spent preparing for the lectures was time away from his own work, Forster accepted. His talks were witty and informal, and they consisted of sharp, penetrating bursts of insight rather than overly-methodical analysis. They were a great success. Published later as Aspects of the Novel, the ideas articulated in his lectures would gain widespread recognition and currency in twentieth century criticism.Of all the insights contained in Aspects of the Novel, none has been more influential or widely discussed than Forster's discussion of "flat" and "round" characters. So familiar by now as to seem commonplace, Forster's distinction is meant to categorize the different qualities of characters in literature and examine the purposes to which they are put. A "flat" character, according to Forster, can be summed up n a single sentence and acts as a function of only a few fixed character traits. "Round" characters are capable of surprise, contradiction, and change; they are representations of human beings in all of their complexity. Forster's aim, however, is not to elevate the round at the expense of the flat, although he admits that the round is on the whole always a more interesting creation. Instead, he argues that there are compelling artistic reasons for a novelist to employ flat characters. And there are unquestionably great novelists, such as Dickens, who use only flat characters.Yet it would be a mistake to reduce this book to its most famous line of argument. Aspects of the Novel also discusses the difference between story and plot, the characteristics of prophetic fiction, and narrative chronology. Throughout, Forster draws on his extensive readings in English, French and Russian literature, and discusses his ideas in reference to such figures as Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, James, Sterne, Defoe and Proust.A landmark in literary criticism, Aspects of the Novel has also provoked its fair share of disagreement. There are many critics who take issue with Forster's method as well has his conclusions, but the extent to which this work has come under attack is in many ways just another measure of its vitality.
Amy Butler Greenfield
"Lucy, a chantress who works magic by singing, is called to court to find a lost instrument of Alchemy. But her magic isn't working properly"--