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Recommendations based on Love's Labour's Lostby William Shakespeare
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King Henry IV, Part 1
by William Shakespeare
The play follows the rise of Prince Hal to the throne of England, including his relationship with the legendary knight Falstaff.
, David Scott Kastan lucidly explores the remarkable richness and the ambitious design of, King Henry IV Part 1, and shows how these complicate any easy sense of what kind of play it is. ... (Goodreads)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
by William Shakespeare
Two friends fall in love with the same woman, leading to betrayal and reconciliation.
While the word “gentlemen” suggests that its heroes are adults, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is more intelligible if we think of them as boys, leaving home for the first time. One has a crush on a ... (Goodreads)
Henry V
by William Shakespeare
A young king's battle for power and the courage of his people in a defining moment of history.
Henry V is Shakespeare’s most famous “war play”; it includes the storied English victory over the French at Agincourt. Some of it glorifies war, especially the choruses and Henry’s speeches urging ... (Goodreads)
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
A tangled web of family secrets, betrayal, and tragedy in the American South.
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen , a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a ... (Wikipedia)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
An exploration of a young man's struggle to find his identity and place in the world.
The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an ... (Goodreads)
The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
A story of a young woman's struggle to reconcile her inner life with society's expectations.
Spanning a period of 10 to 15 years, the novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings who grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss. The mill is situated at the junction of the ... (Wikipedia)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
A humorous exploration of fate and free will, seen through the eyes of two minor characters in Shakespeare's "Hamlet".
Hamlet told from the worm's-eye view of two minor characters, bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, reality and illusion mix, and where fate leads heroes to a ... (Goodreads)
The Innocent
by Ian McEwan
A young British man in post-WWII Berlin gets caught up in a web of espionage and betrayal.
Leonard Marnham is "The Innocent" of the novel, a Post Office engineer who is employed by the Americans to install monitoring equipment in the tunnel they are building specifically to tap the ... (Wikipedia)
A Man for All Seasons
by Robert Bolt
The story of Sir Thomas More, a man who stood up for his beliefs against King Henry VIII's desire to divorce and remarry.
The classic play about Sir Thomas More, the Lord chancellor who refused to compromise and was executed by Henry VIII. ... (Goodreads)
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
by Jon Scieszka
A collection of absurdly funny fractured fairy tales.
The star of the book is Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk , who tells the stories and deals with the rest of the cast. There is a very loud and annoying Little Red Hen that comes in to complain about no ... (Wikipedia)
Inferno
by Dante Alighieri
An epic journey through the nine circles of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil.
Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to ... (Goodreads)
The Seagull
by Anton Chekhov
A tale of unrequited love and personal frustrations set in a rural Russian town.
The play takes place on a country estate owned by Pyotr Sorin, a retired senior civil servant in failing health. He is the brother of the actress Irina Arkadin, who has just arrived at the estate for ... (Wikipedia)
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
A grand narrative of life in a small English town, exploring the lives of its inhabitants.
Middlemarch centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act . The narrative is variably considered to consist of ... (Wikipedia)
Leave It to Psmith
by P.G. Wodehouse
An English gentleman gets entangled in a web of chaotic adventures, full of humour and wit.
Down at Blandings, Lord Emsworth is dismayed to hear from Baxter that he is expected to travel to London to collect the poet Ralston McTodd , invited to the castle by his sister Connie , a keen ... (Wikipedia)
The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
A family faces the loss of their beloved cherry orchard due to financial troubles. They struggle to come to terms with the changing times.
The play opens in the early morning hours of a cool day in May in the nursery of Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya's ancestral estate, somewhere in the provinces of Russia just after the turn of the 20th ... (Wikipedia)
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Exploration of the complexities of human relationships and family life.
The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides , on the Isle of Skye . The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring her son James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the ... (Wikipedia)
Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
Exploring themes of morality and justice through the story of a young man and his family.
Nicholas Nickleby's father dies unexpectedly after losing all of his money in a poor investment. Nicholas, his mother and his younger sister, Kate, are forced to give up their comfortable lifestyle ... (Wikipedia)
The Complete Novels
by Jane Austen
Collection of six classic novels exploring the romance, comedy, and tragedy of life in 19th century England.
This new, enhanced leather-bound edition includes all the completed novels of beloved author Jane Austen. Jane Austen’s stories of clever women, elusive love, and social mores have struck a chord ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
by T.S. Eliot
A collection of poetry exploring themes of melancholy and despair.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless ... (Goodreads)
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
A spiritual exploration of death, exploring the afterlife through the eyes of President Lincoln.
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by ... (Goodreads)
Endgame
by Samuel Beckett
A darkly humorous exploration of the human condition and the inevitability of death.
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our ... (Goodreads)
Franz Kafka's The Castle
by David Fishelson
A man's struggle against an oppressive bureaucracy in a mysterious castle.
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales
by Edgar Allan Poe
Gothic horror stories exploring the dark side of the human psyche.
The eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe, from the 1830s and 40s, remain among the most brilliant and influential works in American literature. Some of the celebrated tales contained in this unique volume ... (Goodreads)
The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
A chronicle of the lives of two couples, weaving together tragedy, deceit, and self-deception.
The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the story of those dissolutions, plus ... (Wikipedia)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
Two cousins create a comic book superhero and find success and adventure in 1940s New York.
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City , where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman. With the help of his ... (Wikipedia)
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Collection of stories about everyday life in Dublin, exploring the Irish psyche.
This work of art reflects life in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and by rejecting euphemism, reveals to the Irish their unromantic realities. Each of the 15 stories offers glimpses into the ... (Goodreads)
Wit
by Margaret Edson
A professor's journey of self-discovery as she faces her own mortality.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award,Margaret Edson’s ... (Goodreads)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
A satirical novel that follows the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, a gentleman with a penchant for digressions and tangents.
»Wo ist der Mann von Geschmack, dessen Seele einen Sinn für die Launen des Genies, für Witz und Ironie, für attisches und britisches, cervantisches, rabelaissches und für yoricksches Salz hat und der ... (Goodreads)
The Code of the Woosters
by P.G. Wodehouse
A series of comic misadventures of a bumbling British gentleman in search of a silver cow creamer.
Jeeves wants to go with Bertie on a round-the-world cruise but Bertie is not interested. Bertie's Aunt Dahlia sends Bertie to go to a particular antique shop and sneer at a silver eighteenth-century ... (Wikipedia)
