LETRAS

In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, Sense and Sensibility is the answer to those critics and readers who believe that Jane Austen's novels, despite their perfection of form and tone, lack strong feeling. Its two heroines--so utterly unlike each other-both undergo the most violent passions when they are separated from the men they love. What differentiates them, and gives this extroardinary book its complexity and brilliance, is the way each expresses her suffering: Marianne-young, impetuous, ardent-falls into paroxysms of grief when she is rejected by the dashing John Willoughby; while her sister, Elinor--wiser, more sensible, more self-controlled--masks her despair when it appears that Edward Ferrars is to marry the mean-spirited and cunning Lucy Steele. All, of course, ends happily--but not until Elinor's "sense" and Marianne's "sensibility" have equally worked to reveal the profound emotional life that runs beneath the surface of Austen's immaculate and irresistible art.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's enduringly popular story of a beautiful and corrupt man and the portrait that reveals all his secrets. Entranced by the perfection of his recently painted portrait, the youthful Dorian Gray expresses a wish that the figure on the canvas could age and change in his place. When his wish comes true, the portrait becomes his hideous secret as he follows a downward trajectory of decadence and cruelty that leaves its traces only in the portrait's degraded image. Wilde's unforgettable portrayal of a Faustian bargain and its consequences is narrated with his characteristic incisive wit and diamond-sharp prose. The result is a novel that is as flamboyant and controversial as its incomparable author.

No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret it. But the rest of us simply fall in love with it--and with its wonderfully charming and intelligent heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. We are captivated not only by the novel's romantic suspense but also by the fascinations of the world we visit in its pages. The life of the English country gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century is made as real to us as our own, not only by Jane Austen's wit and feeling but by her subtle observation of the way people behave in society and how we are true or treacherous to each other and ourselves.

Mansfield Park encompasses not only Jane Austen’s great comedic gifts and her genius as a historian of the human animal, but her personal credo as well—her faith in a social order that combats chaos through civil grace, decency, and wit. At the novel’s center is Fanny Price, the classic “poor cousin,” brought as a child to Mansfield Park by the rich Sir Thomas Bertram and his wife as an act of charity. Over time, Fanny comes to demonstrate forcibly those virtues Austen most admired: modesty, firm principles, and a loving heart. As Fanny watches her cousins Maria and Julia cast aside their scruples in dangerous flirtations (and worse), and as she herself resolutely resists the advantages of marriage to the fascinating but morally unsteady Henry Crawford, her seeming austerity grows in appeal and makes clear to us why she was Austen’s own favorite among her heroines.

For generations of enthralled readers, the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. To F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bemused narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby appears to have emerged out of nowhere, evading questions about his murky past and throwing dazzling parties at his luxurious mansion. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing in the intensity of his new neighbor’s ambition, and his fascination grows when he discovers that Gatsby is obsessed by a long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby’s dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby's remarkable staying power is owed to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream. With a new introduction by John Grisham.

Jack London’s two most beloved tales of survival in Alaska were inspired by his experiences in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. Both novels grippingly dramatize the harshness of the natural world and what lies beneath the thin veneer of human civilization. The canine hero of The Call of the Wild is Buck, a pampered pet in California who is stolen and forced to be a sled dog in the Alaskan wilderness. There he suffers from the brutal extremes of nature and equally brutal treatment by a series of masters, until he learns to heed his long-buried instincts and turn his back on civilization. White Fang charts the reverse journey, as a fierce wolf-dog hybrid born in the wild is eventually tamed. White Fang is adopted as a cub by a band of Indians, but when their dogs reject him he grows up violent, defensive, and dangerous. Traded to a man who stages fights, he is forced to face dogs, wolves, and lynxes in gruesome battles to the death, until he is rescued by a gold miner who sets out to earn his trust.

Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century's greatest chroniclers of childhood, and of all his works his beloved novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer most enchantingly and timelessly captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy. Tom Sawyer is as clever, imaginative, and resourceful as he is reckless and mischievous, whether conning his friends into painting a fence, playing pirates with his pal Huck Finn, witnessing his own funeral, or helping to catch a murderer. Twain’s novel glows with nostalgia for the Mississippi River towns of his youth and sparkles with his famous humor, but it is also woven throughout with a subtle awareness of the injustices and complexities of the old South that Twain so memorably portrays.

Long cherished by readers of all ages, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a powerful parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world. The mighty Mississippi River of the antebellum South gives the novel both its colorful backdrop and its narrative shape, as the runaways Huck and Jim—a young rebel against civilization allied with an escaped slave—drift down its length on a flimsy raft. Their journey, at times rollickingly funny but always deadly serious in its potential consequences, takes them ever deeper into the slave-holding South, and our appreciation of their shared humanity grows as we watch them travel physically farther from yet morally closer to the freedom they both passionately seek.

La Conjura De Los Necios es una disparatada, ácida e inteligentísima novela. Pero no sólo eso, tambien es tremendamente divertida y amarga a la vez. La carcajada escapa por sí sola ante las situaciones desproporcionadas de esta gran tragicomedia. Ignatius J. Really es, probablemente, uno de los mejores personajes jamás creados y al que muchos no dudan en comparar con el Quijote. Más aún, es el antiprotagonista perfecto para una novela repleta de excelentes personajes, situados en la portuaria ciudad de Nueva Orleans, magistral Ignatius. Él es un incomprendido, una persona de treinta y pocos años que vive en la casa de su madre y que lucha por lograr un mundo mejor desde el interior de su habitación. Pero cruelmente se verá arrastrado a vagar por las calles de Nueva Orleans en busca de trabajo, obligado a adentrarse en la sociedad, con la que mantiene una relación de repulsión mutua, para poder sufragar los gastos causados por su madre en un accidente de coche mientras conducía ebria.