The Great Gatsby
In 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned". That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned and, above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of...
The Secret Lives of Colour
The Secret Lives of Colour is a 2016 non-fiction book by British writer Kassia St. Clair which explores the cultural and social history of colours. The book, which is based on a column St. Clair writes for British magazine Elle Decoration, is organized in a series of chapters by color, arranged from white to black.
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is the second published novel (but third to be written) by English author Jane Austen, written when she was aged 20–21, and later published in 1813.
A novel of manners, it follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
Her father Mr Bennet, owner of the Longbourn estate in Hertfordshire, has five daughters; but this estate is entailed by a strict settlement that Mr Bennet entered into when coming of age, so now can only be inherited in the male line. His wife brought a settlement of £5,000 into the marriage as her 'separate estate', and has since inherited an additional £4,000 on the death of her father; however, Mrs Bennet and her daughters face living only on the interest from these sums upon Mr Bennet's death.