Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian short storywriter and novelist. Her biography of Charlotte Bronte is her most famous work. Gaskell's novels portray varied social classes. Gaskell saw and wrote about the problems caused by the gulf between the...
One of Dickens’ most enduringly popular stories is Oliver Twist, an early work published 1837-8. Like many of his later novels, its central theme is the hardship faced by the dispossessed and those of the outside of ‘polite’ society. Oliver...
In the summer of 1946, while secluded in August Strindberg’s small cabin in the Stockholm archipelago, Stig Dagerman wrote Island of the Doomed. This novel was unlike any other yet seen in Sweden and would establish him as the country’s...
An American millionaire builds a Christian seminary in India, furthering his spiritual mission — and setting into motion a generations-spanning cycle of miscommunication and fracture within his family.
Beginning in the 1890s, Come, My...
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a...