Bandon Public Library

The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of...

From SWO Tenure Faculty Selection: Nicole Freim "This book started my love affair with magical realism, sending me on an reckless journey into the likes of Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, and Isabel Allende. Reading it reminds me why I strive to capture thoughts and feelings in the net of language. There are so many moments in the story where I feel like something is revealed, something is said exactly the way I would have said...

Translates twentieth-century Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice," as well seven of his short stories: "Tonio Kroger," "Mario and the Magician," "Disorder and Early Sorrow," "A Man and His Dog," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "Tristan," and "Felix Krull."

One of the best historical novels ever written. Lame, stammering Claudius, once a major embarrassment to the Imperial family and now Emperor of Rome, writes an eyewitness account of the reign of the first four Caesars: the noble Augustus and his cunning wife Livia; the reptilian Tiberius; the monstrous Caligula; and finally old Claudius himself and his wife Messalina. Filled with poisonings, betrayal, and shocking excesses, I, Claudius is history...

Several stories are woven together to show man's inner alienation from the society about him

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, The Shawl and Rosa succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories. In The Shawl, a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration...

Chaos prevails when the bubonic plague strikes the Algerian coastal city of Oran. A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

An unloved foster child in rural Icleand is convinced he will be a great poet. Over the years, he comes to lead a life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs. but he will never attain greatness. --As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and exaltation. As his hero's ambition drives him onward, "World Light" demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even...