Sara Nichols

A founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York City writers, critics, and actors, Dorothy Parker rose to literary fame during the first part of the 20th century. An accomplished poet, writer, critic, satirist, playwright, and screenwriter, Parker was known for her sharp wit in describing 20th century urban life. Although she disliked this characterization, because she thought it undermined her writing, it is primarily for this...

Miles Franklin's 1901 ground-breaking debut, and an instant sensation. Meet Sybylla Melvyn, the young girl hungering for life and love in outback New South Wales. First published in 1901, this Australian classic is the candid tale of the aspirations and frustrations of sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla...

The story of a French priest who goes to New Mexico and with another priest win the southwest for the Catholic Church. After forty years, he dies--the archbishop of Santa Fe.

Orlando: A Biography is a groundbreaking English novel by Virginia Woolf that explores English history, gender roles and sexual politics in a way few books have before or since. Inspired by the life of Woolf's friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, an accomplished poet and novelist, the story follows the life of an aristocratic nobleman who changes sex from man to woman and goes on to live for centuries, meeting all of the most influential and powerful...

In this follow up to her best-selling debut collection of poetry ("Enough Rope" from 1926) Dorothy Parker published "Sunset Gun" (1928) her second of three volumes of short verse. One of the 20th century's most celebrated and renowned humorists, Parker once again delivers a biting, satiric and insightful look at love, life and literature in this brilliant collection. Dorothy Parker-social commentator, political reformer and legendary wit-has enjoyed...

A towering adventure story set in the wilds of Mexico after the First World War, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is B. Traven's much-beloved and thrilling tale of three desperate men who set out to make their fortune in the gold-filled Sierra Madre Mountains...and wind up confronting their own greed and paranoia along the way. The basis for the 1948 John Huston film of the same name (which featured Humphrey Bogart as Dobbs and an Oscar-winning...

One of E.M. Forster's most cherished and critically-acclaimed works, "Howards End" is an examination of social mores, class strife and personal relationships in turn-of-the-century England. The story revolves around three disparate families: the idealistic Schlegels (consisting of Margaret, Helen and brother Tibby), the wealthy Wilcox family (parents Henry and Ruth and their children) and the impoverished Basts (Leonard and his wife Jacky)....

First published in 1924, "When We Were Very Young" is the timeless collection of poetry by A. A. Milne. The introduction to the collection suggests that the narrator is meant to be Christopher Robin, the child at the center of Milne's famous tales of The Hundred Acre Wood. In the poem "Teddy Bear", readers are first introduced to Milne's most famous character, Winnie-the-Pooh, who was originally called "Mr. Edward Bear" by Milne's real-life son, Christopher...

Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" took a meandering course toward publication. Originally written in 1803 as a satire of the popular Gothic novels of the day, the book was not published until after Austen's death in 1817. The story concerns seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, who has lived her entire life in the small village of Fullerton with her parents and nine siblings. This sedate (and frankly boring) life is upended when Catherine receives...

"So Big" is author Edna Ferber's breakout, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of life on an American farm and features one of the most iconic characters in 20th century fiction, the hardscrabble schoolteacher-turned-truck-farmer Selina Peake DeJong. A sensation when it was first published, "So Big" tells the story of young Selina, who moves to the tiny farming town of High Prairie to become a schoolteacher and winds up marrying local farmer, Purvis DeJong....