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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
A framed fictional narrative in which Victor Frankenstein and the being he creates recount ambition, rejection, learning, and responsibility. Their claims need to be read as situat...
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Books
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The Prophet
The fictional Almustafa answers questions from the people of Orphalese in poetic speeches. His symbolic language explores love, work, freedom, and human connection.
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Stray Birds
Numbered short poems and aphoristic images in Tagore’s English text. Nature and emotion speak through metaphor; these images are not literal promises about life.
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A historical argument challenging the conventions that restrict women’s education and independence. Its language and social assumptions reflect its eighteenth-century setting.
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Middlemarch
An interconnected portrait of provincial life, tracing how ideals, limited knowledge, affection, and social expectations shape people’s choices. Characters and the narrator sometim...
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Little Women
The March sisters grow through affection, ambitions, disagreements, work, and loss. Dialogue and narrative observations belong to the fictional story, rather than being direct stat...
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The Story of My Life
Keller recounts her childhood, education with Anne Sullivan, reading, and university studies. These excerpts come from Part I, not the later letters or the supplementary account by...
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Douglass’s autobiographical account of enslavement, literacy, resistance, and escape. The quoted passages are from his narrative, excluding the prefatory contributions by other wri...
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Lovers, fairies, and amateur actors cross paths in a comedy about love, perception, and imagination.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
A novel about beauty, influence, conscience, and a portrait that records the consequences of its subject’s choices.
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The Enchiridion
A concise handbook compiled by Arrian, emphasizing judgment, choice, and what lies within our power.
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The Tao Teh King
A classical Chinese text on the Way, non-contention, simplicity, and the reversal of ordinary ideas of strength, in Legge’s English translation.
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The Way to Wealth
The fictional Father Abraham quotes Poor Richard in a speech about time, work, and thrift. Many sayings draw on older proverbial traditions.
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Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Thoreau reflects on simplicity, attention, labor, reading, and life near Walden Pond.
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Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A selection of essays on self-reliance, friendship, reading, nature, and the expansion of thought.
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Meditations
Private philosophical notes on attention, responsibility, and meeting the world as it is.
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Pride and Prejudice
A comedy of manners about first impressions, self-knowledge, and the work of changing your mind.
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
A curious journey through a world where language and logic refuse to behave.
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