Showing results by publisher "Alpha DVD" in Classics

The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is an American romance written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Set in Puritanical Boston in the 17th century, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery, refuses to name the father, and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores the issues of grace, legalism, sin, and guilt.

Persuasion, Jane Austen's final novel, follows the romance of Anne Elliot and naval officer Frederick Wentworth. They were happily engaged until Anne's friend, Lady Russell, persuaded her that Frederick was "unworthy". Now, eight years later, Frederick returns, a wealthy captain in the navy, while Anne's family teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. They still love each other, but their past mistakes threaten to keep them apart.

The Metamorphosis, a novella by Franz Kafka, is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect.

Catherine Morland goes to Bath for the season as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Allen, and there she meets the eccentric General Tilney, his son Henry Tilney and his daughter Elanor Tilney. Catherine is invited to the Tilney's home, Northanger Abbey, where she imagines numerous gruesome secrets surrounding the General and his house. Henry proves that her suspicions have no substance, and while she is still recovering from the humiliation, she finds herself ordered out of the house by the General.

Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty after viewing a picture of himself drawn by artist Basil Hallward. Dorian Gray's picture grows old and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

Gulliver's Travels is a classic satire on human nature and a parody of the "travelers' tales" literary genre. Lemuel Gulliver travels to the remote country of Lilliput where he encounters the six-inch-tall Lilliputians. On his next journey, he is captured by a 60-foot-tall native of Brobdingnag.

In Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness, Marlow is a steamboat captain working on the Congo River for a Belgian trading company. Marlow is asked to retrieve Kurtz, a legendary ivory trader who has lost contact with the home office and may have fallen ill. During the expedition Marlow is struck by the Company's mistreatment of the Congo natives. When Marlow arrives at Kurtz's station, he discovers that Kurtz has set himself up as a sort of god to the natives he had once wanted to civilize.

Professor Pierre Aronnax boards an American frigate commissioned to investigate a rash of attacks on international shipping by what is thought to be an amphibious monster. The supposed sea creature, which is actually the submarine Nautilus, sinks Aronnax's vessel and imprisons him along with his devoted servant Conseil and Ned Land, a temperamental harpooner.

The Warlord of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is the third book in his famous Barsoom series. This novel continues where The Gods of Mars abruptly ended. John Carter's wife, the princess Dejah Thoris, is imprisoned in the Temple of the Sun by the vile pretender goddess Issus. It is said one has to wait an entire Barsoomian year before the room the prisoner is in revolves back to the entrance.

Michael Henchard, a young hay trusser, overindulges in rum-laced furmity and quarrels with his wife, Susan. Spurred by alcohol, he decides to auction off his wife and baby daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, to a sailor, Mr. Newson, for five guineas. Once sober the next day, he is too late to recover his family. When he realizes that his wife and daughter are gone, probably for good, he swears not to touch liquor again for as many years as he has lived so far (21).

Published in two volumes a decade apart, Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears at the top of lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

Summer details the sexual awakening of Charity Royall, who lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in an isolated New England village. Lucius Harney, a visiting architect, awakens her sexual passion and her hope for escape. Exploring Charity's relation to her father and her lover, Edith Wharton delves into dark cultural territory: repressed sexuality, small-town prejudice, and, in subtle hints, incest.

"Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm."

Victor Frankenstein learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger and more powerful than the average man. Frankenstein rejects the creature, and lives to regret his desire to create life, after it kills his brother William. Frankenstein is a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.

"The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and gazed down at the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle become that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over him and stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping its contents to the deck. The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch with his heels, straightened out his legs, and stiffened in one great tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side."

Eric possessed many truly brilliant and extraordinary abilities including musical genuis. Being outcast from society for his ugliness, Eric was forced to wander from one country to another. When in France, he worked at fairs demonstrating tricks and ventriloquism. Later he became a bricklayer and was engaged in building the Paris Opera House. Upon completion of the construction, Eric decided to hide from the world in the cellars of the Opera and turned this great building into his own empire.

In this classic, a young Englishman is shipwrecked on a desert island in the Caribbean with only a few supplies. Robinson Crusoe builds a house, a boat, and a new life. His life on the island is threatened by frequent visits from cannibals. Crusoe saves a captive named Friday from the cannibals, gaining a companion and loyal servant. Thus begins their quest to be rescued from the island.

The first modern treatise of political philosophy, The Prince remains one of the world's most influential and widely read books. Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with expedient exercises of will, reveals nothing less than the secrets of power: how to gain it, how to wield it, and how to keep it. But curiously, this work of outspoken clarity has, for centuries, inspired myriad interpretations as to its author's true message.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's only novel, was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte. The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centers. The story tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.