An American Tragedy is the story of Clyde Griffiths, who spends his life in the desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream.

The first in a "trilogy of desire", The Financier tells the story of the ruthlessly dominating broker Frank Cowperwood as he climbs the ladder of success, his adoring mistress championing his every move. Based on the life of flamboyant finance captain C. T. Yerkes, Theodore Dreiser's cutting portrayal of the unscrupulous magnate Cowperwood embodies the idea that behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Jennie Gerhardt is the tragic story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from an extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs with two different men from a much higher social class. How members of her family, the family of one of the wealthy men, and society in general react to her situation is the basis of this classic story.

The Titan is the second volume in what the author called his "trilogy of desire," featuring the character of Frank Cowperwood, a powerful, irresistibly compelling man driven by his own need for power, beautiful women, and social prestige.

Edna Pontellier is married, twenty-eight, and at a crossroads in her life. She is passionate and artistic but has no one who understands her deep yearnings. She jumps at the chance to spend a summer away from her husband and the heat of New Orleans at a small coastal retreat.

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing.

"We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era Black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. Now Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a Black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first White president".

An Oprah's Book Club Selection regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest and most accessible novels, Light in August is a timeless and riveting story of determination, tragedy, and hope. In Faulkner's iconic Yoknapatawpha County, race, sex, and religion collide around three memorable characters searching desperately for human connection and their own identities.

Wealthy Maggie Verver has everything she could ever ask for - except a husband and a title. While in Italy, acquiring art for his museum back in the States, Maggie’s millionaire father, Adam, decides to remedy this and acquire a husband for Maggie. Enter Prince Amerigo, of a titled but now poor aristocratic Florentine family. Amerigo is the perfect candidate.

The fictionalized account of Louisiana's colorful and notorious governor, Huey Pierce Long, All the King's Men follows the startling rise and fall of Willie Stark, a country lawyer in the Deep South of the 1930s. Beset by political enemies, Stark seeks aid from his right-hand man Jack Burden, who will bear witness to the cataclysmic unfolding of this very American tragedy.

Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.

This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the state's most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.

Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives.

With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit, and sometimes rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

Sister Carrie is an epic of urban life, the story of an innocent heroine adrift in an indifferent city. When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face. Her story is one of struggle, from sweatshop to stage success, and of the love she inspires in a married man twice her age, whose obsession with her threatens to destroy him.

Jennie Gerhardt is the tragic story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from an extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs with two different men from a much higher social class. How members of her family, the family of one of the wealthy men, and society in general react to her situation is the basis of this classic story.

Beautiful, sophisticated and endlessly ambitious Lily Bart endeavours to climb the social ladder of New York's elite by securing a good match and living beyond her means. Now nearing 30 years of age and having rejected several proposals, forever in the hope of finding someone better, her future prospects are threatened. A damning commentary of 20th-century social order, Edith Wharton's tale established her as one of the greatest British novelists of the 1900s.

One of Edith Wharton's most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. As she climbs the class ladder through a series of marriages and affairs, she shows little concern for who she has to step on.

Of Human Bondage is one of the greatest novels of modern times, and it is certainly Maugham's greatest achievement. It was published in 1914, when Maugham was at the height of his creative powers. The story concerns Philip Carey, afflicted at birth with a club foot, and his passionate search for truth in a cruel world. We follow his growth to manhood, his educational progress, his first loves, and the wrenching tragedies and disappointments that life has in store for him. In some of the finest prose of the 20th century, Maugham has presented us with the timeless story of one man's search for the meaning of life.

This title includes not only the entire audiobook of Right Ho, Jeeves, but also all of the P.G. Wodehouse titles in the current Classic Tales library. It also includes a Jeeves short story only available in the collection: "Extricating Young Gussie". The complete running time is over 15 hours. All titles have been remastered, and have never sounded better!

Set in stifled, industrial Staffordshire in the late 19th century, against a strong evangelical background, Anna of the Five Towns tells of the courting of hard businessman Ephraim Tellright's daughter by prosperous and accomplished Henry Mynors. As her father's fortune grows, so does Anna understanding. She realises her legacy and responsibility for the possible ruination of her father's tenants, Titus Price and his son, Willie, who also loves her.

Elizabeth Ann was orphaned at an early age and raised by her maiden aunts in the busy city. But suddenly illness forces the aunts to send her to other relatives: the Putnams, who live in the country on a farm. Elizabeth Ann learns all about the farm and making butter and applesauce and dearly loves the the life there. Then, one of the aunts comes back and wants to take her back to the city. Such a dilemma!

Bigger, newer, faster. Demolish and rebuild, then demolish and rebuild again. Smoke, soot, and noise are the badges of prosperity, and growth is for growth's sake.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

This audiobook is about the rise and fall of Michael Henchard. While out-of-work he gets drunk at a fair and impulsively sells his wife and baby for five guineas to a sailor. Eighteen years later he is reunited with his wife and daughter, who discover that he has gained wealth and respect and is now the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Though he attempts to make amends he is no less impulsive and once again loses everything due to bad luck and his violent, selfish and vengeful nature.

Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters.

He was a gossip columnist’s dream. Piccadilly Jim’s life was a collage of broken promises and drunken brawls. And his straight-laced Victorian aunt was not amused. So, she decided to reform him. Unfortunately, her reform project started at a time when Jim had fallen in love and had already decided to reform himself. Thus, life became complicated. Jim pretends to be himself - a beautiful display of Wodehousean logic; hilarious indeed!

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is closely modelled on the 18h-century novels that Charles Dickens loved as a child, such as Robinson Crusoe, in which the fortunes of a hero shape the plot. The likeable young Nicholas, left penniless on the death of his father, sets off in search of better prospects.

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.

An American Tragedy is the story of Clyde Griffiths, who spends his life in the desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream.

Sister Carrie is about a young country girl who moves to the big city, where she begins to realize her own American Dream by embarking on a life of sin rather than hard work and perseverance. At the time of its first publication, the novel caused a minor scandal, and Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for it. This was due to its blurred division between good and bad and the fact that, at the end, Carrie is rewarded rather than punished for her immoral life.

Jennie Gerhardt is the tragic story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from an extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs with two different men from a much higher social class. How members of her family, the family of one of the wealthy men, and society in general react to her situation is the basis of this classic story.

The first in a "trilogy of desire", The Financier tells the story of the ruthlessly dominating broker Frank Cowperwood as he climbs the ladder of success, his adoring mistress championing his every move. Based on the life of flamboyant finance captain C. T. Yerkes, Theodore Dreiser's cutting portrayal of the unscrupulous magnate Cowperwood embodies the idea that behind every great fortune there is a crime.

The Titan is the second volume in what the author called his "trilogy of desire," featuring the character of Frank Cowperwood, a powerful, irresistibly compelling man driven by his own need for power, beautiful women, and social prestige.