"Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard...

Written in just fifty-two days in the year 1839, "The Charterhouse of Parma" has since become known as Stendhal's finest work. Evidence of haste is infrequently apparent in this remarkable story, which follows the eventful life of the young Italian nobleman Fabrizio del Dongo. From his childhood in the family castle by Lake Como to the battlefields of Waterloo, Fabrizio proves himself charmingly headstrong and painfully naïve. Upon returning injured...

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch -- obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.--

"It is 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there's something romantic, even poetic, in his isolation. His uncle Radhesh, a magnificent failure who lives in genteel impoverishment and celibacy, has been in London for nearly three decades. [The novel] follows them on one of their weekly, familiar forays...

This film compassioniately details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to find meaning in their lives.