The Cliff

Crome Yellow (1921) is a novel by English author Aldous Huxley. Inspired by his stay at Garsington Manor with members of the Bloomsbury Group, Crome Yellow, Huxley's debut novel, satirizes the society of England's intellectual and political elite. In addition to its autobiographical content, the novel investigates such themes as spirituality, the nature and composition of art, and the fear of a dystopian future. Invited to spend part of the summer...

Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, known best for his satirical plays and lyric poems. He had a knack for absurdity and hypocrisy, a trait that made him immensely popular in the 17th century Renaissance period. However, his reputation diminished somewhat in the Romantic era, when he began to be unfairly compared to Shakespeare. The Theatre in London had had been denied to "The Admiral's Men" in 1597, but the troupe...

Judah Ben Hur is made a galley slave after injuring the Roman governor, and is later converted to Christianity after finding his destiny at the foot of a cross in Jerusalem.

Restless Classics presents The Souls of Black Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois's seminal work of sociology, with searing insights into our complex, corrosive relationship with race and the African-American consciousness. Reconsidered for the era of Obama, Trump, and Black Lives Matter, the new edition includes an incisive introduction from rising cultural critic Vann R. Newkirk II and stunning illustrations by the artist Steve Prince. Published in 1903, exactly...

Charles Dickens' work The Battle of Life: A Love Story has an English village on the site of a historic battle as the setting. Some characters allude to the war as a metaphor for the struggle for life, hence the title. Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA is an English writer and social commentator. He produced some of the world's most renowned fictional characters and is often regarded as the best author of the Victorian era. His writings achieved unparalleled...

"It's better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep." "I am the most terrible animal that's ever existed." "Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy. You in America will see that someday." "It's good to trust others but, not to do so is much better." "I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look for moral guidance." (Mussolini) Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, born on July 29, 1883, who went...

A deliciously satirical attack on a money-mad society, Vanity Fair, which first appeared in 1847, is an immensely moral novel, and an immensely witty one. Called in its subtitle A Novel Without a Hero, Vanity Fair has instead two heroines: the faithful, loyal Amelia Sedley and the beautiful and scheming social climber Becky Sharp. It also engages a huge cast of wonderful supporting characters as the novel spins from Miss Pinkerton's academy for young...

Candide is characterized by its tone as well as by its erratic, fantastical, and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious coming-of-age narrative, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is bitter and matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake....

In the picaresque series of sketches in Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens wrote one of the masterpieces of comic fiction, and presented readers with some of the most colorful and beloved characters of all time. In Dickens' first novel, initially based on a series of illustrations, members of the eponymous club recount their various experiences and encounters as they travel around England. Without the dark themes that dominated so many of his novels,...

Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser" is a sixty-five-line free-verse poem in four sections describing the suffering in the Civil War hospitals and the poet's suffering, faithfulness to duty, and developing compassion as he tended to soldiers' physical wounds and gave comfort. Published at war's end, the poem opens with an old veteran speaking, imaginatively suggesting some youths gathered about who have asked him to tell of his most powerful memories....