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The Awakening is one of the first American novels that focused on women’s issues and is now seen as a landmark feminist work. Originally titled A Solitary Soul and set in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at the end of the 19th century, it is the story of Edna Pontelier, wife of a New Orleans businessman and mother of two sons who struggles to manage her family duties with her desire to be true to her emotions. The conflict becomes evident at the outset when, while vacationing, she falls in love with Robert, the son of the owner of the Grand Isle resort. He flees to escape the impossible situation, and Edna returns home to retreat from both her family and New Orleans social life. Left alone for a time, she dallies with a rakish acquaintance, becomes friends with Mme Reisz, an eccentric musician, and pines for Robert, who returns, only to run away again in shame. The story does not have a happy ending. The Awakening met with a mixed response due to its ruthlessly honest treatment of issues usually swept under the rug. The psychological insight, social commentary and realistic narrative mark it as an important link the development of American modernism. Critics rank the book alongside her contemporaries Edith Wharton and Henry James and among the first of the works in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connnor, and Tennessee Williams.

The People of the Black Circle is the eleventh of the Conan stories published by Weird Tales in three parts in the fall of 1934. Set in the mythical Hyborian Age in the south Asian regions of Vendhya and Ghulistan (now India-Pakistan and Afghanistan), the story centers around Conan’s kidnapping of princess Devi Yasmina of Vendhya and thwarting an attempt at world domination by the Black Seers of Yimsha. The action begins when Conan, chief of a tribe of hillmen, sets out to rescue seven of his men that have been captured and held by the princess to force him into killing her enemies. Conan instead kidnaps the princess, but the two are set upon by Kerim Shah, agent of the King of Turan, intent upon invading Vendhya. They escape into the mountains, followed by Kemsha, who catches up with them just as he is attacked by Rakhshas from Yimsha, who kill him and capture Devi. Enter a group of Irakzai, who team up with Conan to rescue the princess. All are eventually rescued by the Vendhyan army and join forces to defeat the Turanians.The inevitable attraction between Conan and the princess smolders but never catches fire as forces inexorably draw them apart. The action-packed story is considered one of the finest in the Conan canon due to its epic sweep and insights into magical powers.

Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll and published in 1871. As before, Alice enters an alternative reality, this time by climbing through the looking-glass hung over the fireplace, and the book’s themes, settings and events are a kind of mirror image to those of Wonderland. The first book begins outdoors on a spring day; the second indoors on a wintry night precisely six months later. The first book uses a deck of cards as a theme; the second is based on a game of chess. Time runs backwards. The poem “Jabberwocky” is printed in backwards type and legible only when read in the mirror. The chess motif figures throughout: the looking-glass world is divided by brooks and streams much like squares on a chessboard. The plot follows the path of a chess game: when Alice meets the Red Queen upon arrival, she offers to make Alice a queen of she can advance to the eighth row. In her journey to this end she has numerous unusual encounters. The plump twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee suggest she is only a figment of the Red King’s imagination. The absent-minded White Queen remembers things before they happen. Humpty-Dumpty celebrates his “unbirthday” before his famous fall. She is rescued by the clumsy White Knight, crosses the final brook and is immediately crowned queen. The Red and White Queens appear, and invite one another to a party to be hosted by Alice, of which she is, of course, unaware. The party disintegrates into a chaotic uproar, prompting Alice to grab and shake the Red Queen violently. It’s game over – the Red Queen has been captured. Alice awakes, and the story ends with the speculation that everything may have been a dream of the Red King.

A Modest Proposal is a satiric essay written by Jonathan Swift in 1729 and published anonymously as a pamphlet that suggests that the Irish might find some release from their perpetual economic troubles by selling their children as a nourishing delicacy to their wealthy English overlords. It is presented as a straightforward economic treatise that proceeds with well-reasoned deliberation to an unthinkable and absurd conclusion. In doing so it makes a blistering commentary on the merciless legal and economic exploitation of Ireland by the English as well as on rationalistic modern ways of thinking that give short shrift to human values. The work is held to be a masterpiece of satire and a worthy descendant of the great works of the Roman satirist Juvenal. The term “modest proposal” has to come to symbolize any proposition to address a problem with an efficient but ridiculous cure is used as an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell is a concise and accessible guide to the basic concepts and issues in the study of philosophy. The book is noted for its simplicity and clarity, and was intended to give general readers a foundation for philosophical inquiry as well as provoke constructive discussion. As such, it eschews metaphysics for the more concrete discipline of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. The fundamental theories of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Hegel and others are outlined and explained. Russell begins by delving into the subject of appearance versus reality. He postulates that knowledge is largely derived empirically from sensory perceptions and what he calls the “sense-data” or mental images that we perceive and guides the reader through the famous distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description". “In the following pages I have confined myself in the main to those problems of philosophy in regard to which I thought it possible to say something positive and constructive, since merely negative criticism seemed out of place. For this reason, theory of knowledge occupies a larger space than metaphysics in the present volume, and some topics much discussed by philosophers are treated very briefly, if at all.” — Bertrand Russell, Preface of The Problems of Philosophy

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of 45 poems by English poet William Blake. Songs of Innocence is the first part of the collection and appeared in 1789 with engraved illustrations by Blake. The second part, Songs of Experience, also illustrated, was added in 1794 when Blake published the whole under the full title of Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The categories of innocence and experience are states of mind and ways of seeing that roughly correspond to the classical model of “paradise” and “fall”, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Blake helped formulate the then contemporary Romantic notion of childhood as a state of innocence, without fear, inhibition, or corruption; and adulthood as a contrary and fallen state of original sin prey to oppression, corruption, and power. The opposition is reinforced by poems with like titles and contrasting themes in each part. The poems are short, simple, and acutely sensitive to both joys of life and the harsh realities of class and poverty in the emerging Industrial Revolution.

The Republic of Plato is the greatest and best known of Plato’s works and possibly the most influential work of philosophy and political theory in history. It consists of ten books of dialogs between Socrates and various Athenians and foreigners that address the question of whether a just man or unjust man achieves the greatest happiness by considering the governance and culture of a series of hypothetical cities. In his A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell identifies three parts to the Republic: the definition of the utopia or ideal state (Books I-V); the definition of the philosopher as ideal ruler (Books VI-VII); the pros and cons of various forms of government (Books VII-X). He outlines the progressive degeneration that results from the “five regimes” of Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny. Translator Benjamin Jowett writes in his introduction that “The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary—these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato.” It is no wonder that The Republic has been a centerpiece of a classical education for centuries.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, usually referred to as Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare that is his longest and probably his most popular work, leading the list of performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company for over 100 years and second only to Cinderella as the most filmed story in the world. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, and directed to exact revenge for his murder by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who subsequently seized the throne and married his widow, Hamlet's mother Gertrude. Hamlet agrees and decides to feign madness, and has doubts about the ghost. The plot proceeds with intrigue, betrayals and tragic errors, with Hamlet staging a play for the court enacting a death of a king by a usurper, and culminating in a deadly sword fight. Memorable characters include the elderly advisor Polonius, his son Laertes, his daughter Ophelia, and Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the skull of “poor Yorick”, a jester from Hamlet’s childhood.

The term “enemy of the people” has entered our modern lexicon, thanks to the unprecedented attacks on the press by the United States President for its stubborn insistence on reporting things as they are, not as he wishes they were in his idiosyncratic, imaginary world of “alternative facts”and fawning sycophants. This is, unfortunately,not new. The term may have first emerged in the 1882 play An Enemy of the People, written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in response to the public outcry that greeted his play Ghosts. Both the play and author were called scandalous, degenerate and immoral for daring to have an open discussion of sex outside of marriage and of syphilis. The play’s action centers on the discovery that a town’s public baths have been contaminated by syphilis. Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the protagonist and the medical officer at the baths, argues that the town be notified immediately by the town paper. The mayor, his older brother Peter,wants to lay low and handle it differently. The editor of the paper at first agrees with the doctor, and then has a change of heart, fearing damage to the town’s economy. Unbowed, the doctor calls a town meeting, at which he castigates the authorities and the cowardice of the majority of the public. Insulted and enraged, the townspeople shout repeatedly that “he is an enemy of the people”. They further react by smashing his windows, firing his schoolteacher daughter,disinheriting his wife, and evicting them from their house. Apart from its title, the play remains highly relevant today for its consideration of environmental issues, irresponsible authorities, and the moral dilemmas and perils of whistle-blowing.

White Fang is a sequel and companion novel to The Call of Wild and in many ways a thematic mirror. Where the first book dealt with a domesticated dog embracing his wildness, here White Fang, a hybrid wolf-dog born, gradually overcomes the harsh “survival of the fittest” circumstances in the wilds of the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush and becomes domesticated. Much of the story is told from White Fang’s perspective. He is the only survivor in his litter of five; the others die from hunger. His father, One Eye, is killed trying to steal food from a lynx for the cub. His mother, Kiche, kills the lynx but is seriously injured. The two meet a Native American, Grey Beaver, who recognizes Kiche as his brother’s vagrant wolf dog and adopts the two, but White Fang is persecuted by the other dogs and his mother is sold off. He grows up a callous, savage, solitary, and deadly fighter. At age five a drunken Grey Beaver sells him to an evil dog-fighter, where he defeats all comers until he is nearly brought down by a bulldog. He is rescued by a rich, young gold-hunter, who slowly tames him and brings him home to California from the Yukon, where he performs a heroic feat and settles into a tranquil existence. The book was an immediate worldwide success on release in 1906 and has been popular ever since, especially with younger readers. It has been translated into 89 languages and often adapted for film and television.

A Study in Scarlet is the first of four full-length novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the brilliant Sherlock Holmes. Published in 1887, it sets the stage with the character s and themes that recur throughout all the Holmes stories and novels. Part I opens with the reminiscences of Dr. Watson of the initial meeting with the eccentric Holmes and their decision to share lodgings at 221B Baker Street. Dazzled by Holmes’ extraordinary intelligence and puzzled by his motley cast of visitors at all hours, he learns that Holmes is a “consulting detective”. Holmes’ description of his work gives Watson’s narrative its title: “There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it." Scotland Yard requests Holmes in a baffling murder case and Watson is invited along as Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade chase down obvious but erroneous leads while Sherlock, with the help the “Baker Street Irregulars”, manages to apprehend the murderer. Part II flashes back to Salt Lake Valley in Utah and describes the convoluted misdeeds of the murder victims and the revenge sought by the murderer. The papers give Scotland Yard all the credit, as Holmes had feared they would, which prompts Watson to publish the adventure and set the record straight.

Scientist Edward Prendick is shipwrecked in the Pacific and alights on an island owned by a certain Doctor Moreau. Prendick recalls the public outcry in London occasioned by Moreau’s experiments in vivisection, and soon discovers the island is populated by humans with marked bestial characteristics. He attempts to flee, but Moreau apprehends him and explains his mission is to humanize animals, not the reverse, and that his efforts were marred by an unfortunate tendency of the subjects to revert to animal form. Eventually a subject breaks free and attempts to kill the good doctor. Both are killed in the conflict and the compound is destroyed. The animals revert to nature, and Prendick escapes and returns home. His account of the story is greeted as the ravings of a lunatic. Upon his return to civilization he sees many of his fellow men reverting to an animal state and retires to a reclusive life in the country.