Classics World Literature

Étienne Lantier, mécanicien au chômage, erre sur les routes du nord de la France. Au hasard d'une rencontre, frigorifié et mort de faim, il finit par trouver un emploi dans la mine du Voreux. Il découvre alors les conditions inhumaines du travail et la misère de la vie de mineur. Mais, les conditions économiques étant au plus bas, la Compagnie propriétaire du Voreux essaie de baisser encore leurs maigres salaires.

A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.

"L'art de la guerre" est le premier traité de stratégie militaire écrit au monde. Son auteur, Sun Tzu développe des thèses originales qui s'inspirent de la philosophie chinoise ancienne.

First published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway's death, this is the story of an artist and adventurer, a man much like Hemingway himself. Beginning in the 1930s, Islands in the Stream follows the fortunes of Thomas Hudson, from his experiences as a painter on the Gulf Stream island of Bimini through his antisubmarine activities off the coast of Cuba during World War II. Hemingway is at his mature best in this beguiling tale.

Fast-paced and suspenseful, The Last of the Mohicans follows an intrepid group of frontiersmen and Native Americans as they navigate the rugged terrain of both the landscape and their racial differences. Together they strive to deliver Colonel Munro’s two daughters to safety at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. Widely considered the first “Great American Novel”, James Fenimore Cooper’s classic encapsulates the violence and beauty, tragedy and heroism at the heart of the American frontier, set against the stunning backdrop of the northern New York wilderness.

There are ghost towns in the world - places where the humans were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the shape-shifting Others. One of those places is Bennett, a town at the Northern end of the Elder Hills - a town surrounded by the wild country. Now, efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a community where humans and Others live and work together. But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit.

Secular humanism has triumphed. Everything the late Victorians and Edwardians believed would bring human happiness has been achieved: Technology has made it so no one needs to work for a living, the social sciences ensure a smooth-running social order, and, in the name of tolerance, religious beliefs have been uprooted and eliminated except for a single holdout - a largely discredited and rapidly shrinking Catholic Church. Yet people are unhappy.

First published by H. G. Wells in 1898, The War of the Worlds is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories. The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator intones, "No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's."

From the author of the YA-crossover hit The Marrow Thieves, a propulsive, stunning and sensuous novel inspired by the traditional Métis story of the Rogarou - a werewolf-like creature that haunts the roads and woods of Métis communities. A messed-up, grown-up "Little Red Riding Hood".

The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war: under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in the mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war—of any war—told for a whole generation of victims.

À la suite du traité de Tilsit, la paix semble à nouveau s'établir durablement en Europe. Et chacun de retourner à ses occupations d'avant-guerre. Les bals, les fêtes, l'insouciance des vies reprennent de plus belle, d'autant que beaucoup ont vu la mort de près et sont revenus auréolés de gloire. Les alliances entre les familles se nouent et se dénouent au gré des amours. Chacun pousse ses pions pour trouver le bon parti au mépris des autres même de ses anciens camarades de guerre.

What really happened in the Marabar caves? Adela Quested arrives in Chandrapore, India, prepared to marry a British magistrate who exemplifies the narrow-minded, anti-Indian projudices of the imperial bureaucracy. But she soon meets the charming and mercurial Dr. Aziz, who offers to show her the "real" India. An expedition to the famed Marabar caves ends in explosive accusations and a schism that foreshadows the eventual end of British rule in India.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect – while surviving on eight dollars a year. From this experience emerged Walden, one of the great classics of American literature.

Al MacBharrais is both blessed and cursed. He is blessed with an extraordinary white moustache, an appreciation for craft cocktails - and a most unique magical talent. He can cast spells with magically enchanted ink and he uses his gifts to protect our world from rogue minions of various pantheons, especially the Fae.

In 1958, 27 years after Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World", he took another look at his remarkable fable and résumé the development since. His understandings are most alarming in his time already. They are even more alarming almost another half century later and shockingly up-to-date, considering recent developments. His prophetic view proofs once more, how terribly precise and visionary it was.

You, dear listener, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart - no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon's presence, even for the briefest of moments - even at the risk of one's life - is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten….All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world's preeminent dragon naturalist.

In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton paints the full panorama of human history in light of Christian tradition. Highly influential in C. S. Lewis' conversion from atheism to Christianity, this book continues to inspire new generations of listeners.

For 300 years, The Pilgrim's Progress has remained perhaps the best-loved and most read of devotional fictions. In plain yet powerful and moving language, Bunyan tells the story of Christian's struggle to attain salvation and the Gates of Heaven. He must pass through the Slough of Despond, ward off the temptations of Vanity Fair, and fight the monstrous Apollyon. In Part II, his wife and children follow the same path, helped and protected by Great-heart, until for them, too, "the trumpets sound on the other side."

Here is the precursor to Jurassic Park. Victorian explorers have heard there is a remote plateau where dinosaurs still survive, and a group set outs on a dangerous mission to find out more about it.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.