Questa serie offre rielaborazioni avvincenti e condensate di capolavori letterari di fama mondiale. Ogni volume presenta un racconto classico di diverse culture in un formato accessibile ai lettori più giovani. Funge da eccellente introduzione alla ricchezza della letteratura mondiale, ampliando gli orizzonti di molti. Questi libri fungono da ponte verso i testi originali, arricchendo sia gli studenti di lingue che i lettori occasionali.
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of Character’, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.
The romance between Captain Wentworth and Anne, the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, seems doomed because of the young man's family connections and lack of wealth.
Though Aladdin's childhood had been full of beauty, comfort and happiness,
without any trace of sadness or sorrow, he entirely failed to learn the
lessons of hard work and responsibility.
Pip, a poor young boy, receives amazing news. Someone has given him a large amount of money and wants to make him a gentleman. But who is his mysterious benefactor? Is it Miss Havisham, the strange lady who lives in an old house with the beautiful Estella? Pip loves Estella but can she love him? Life is full of surprises...
In the person of Gradgrind and Bounderby he stigmatized the prevalent philosophy of Utilitarianism which, whether in school or factory, allowed human beings to be caged in a dreary scenery of brick terraces and foul chimneys, to be enslaved to machines and reduced to numbers
If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion
and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the
most famous of stories from India.
Young, rich and handsome, Dorian Gray seems to have it all. So why do people
who were once his friends, leave the room when he enters? Can there really be
any truth in the dark tales that are told about him? And just why does he keep
his portrait locked away in an attic room?
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. ...Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-purification, the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream; God can never be realised by one who is not pure of heart. Self-purification, therefore, must remain purification in all walks of life. And purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings. But the path to self-purification is hard and steep. To attain perfect purity, one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet the triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me; indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me far harder than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. Ever since my return to India, I have had experiences of the dormant passions lying hidden within me. The knowledge of them has made me feel humiliated though not defeated. The experiences and experiments have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know I still have before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 26 November, 1925.
If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion
and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the
most famous of stories from India.
Here is a test, a puzzle for you. It is a faithful account of two most
gruesome murders. Can you work out what actually happened in the early hours
of one fateful morning in the Rue Morgue?
In ancient China a magical monkey appears, creating chaos everywhere he goes.
The only way to put his tricks and talents to good use is to make him
protector of Xuanzang, a young and handsome monk determined to travel from
China to India in search of the precious scriptures.
After ten long years of war and the fall of Troy, the Greek hero Odysseus sets
sail for his homeland. His voyage, however, is destined to take much longer
than he expects.
Although Song Jiang is only a lowly local government official, he is loyal to
the emperor and kind to all the citizens in his care. But Song is in trouble.
A series of unfortunate incidents have led to him being arrested, and his
political enemies are keen to see him sentenced to death.
The classic story of Amy Dorrit, who lives much of her life at the Marshalsea prison where her father is imprisoned for debt, earning meager wages at jobs outside the prison walls, including seamstress work for Mrs. Clennam, whose son Arthur takes an interest in her plight.
If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion
and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the
most famous of stories from India.
