Books in the Thrift Editions series

One of the most innovative authors and distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf examines family dynamics and the tensions between men and women in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. She explores multiple perspectives of the members of the Ramsay family as they navigate experiences of disappointment and loss. Divided into three parts, the story takes place pre- and post-World War I during visits to the Ramsays' summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Virginia Woolf strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the passage of time as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, as well as exploring the essential indefinability of character. To the Lighthouse is among her most successful experiments in her pioneering use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device in addition to such groundbreaking novels as Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Voyage Out.

William Faulkner is one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, but success was elusive with his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1926. The promising young author had not yet achieved the reputation that would lead to the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes. Soldiers' Pay reflects Faulkner's gift for keen observations, embracing his Southern experience, as well as his experimental narrative techniques blended with literary modernism. He captures the post-World War I atmosphere of the Lost Generation on American soil and explores the war's emotional impact on three weary veterans and their hometown in Georgia.

Wilde's witty and buoyant comedy of manners, filled with some of literature's most famous epigrams, reprinted from an authoritative British edition. Considered Wilde's most perfect work.

Gripping ghost story by great novelist depicts the sinister transformation of 2 innocent children into flagrant liars and hypocrites. An elegantly told tale of unspoken horror and psychological terror.

Charming satire concerns a young lady who poses as a serving girl to win the heart of a young gentleman too shy to court ladies of his own class. Notes.

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817 62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach." Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed, built fences, surveyed, and wrote in his journal.One product of his two-year sojourn was this book a great classic of American letters. Interwoven with accounts of Thoreau's daily life (he received visitors and almost daily walked into Concord) are mediations on human existence, society, government, and other topics, expressed with wisdom and beauty of style.Walden offers abundant evidence of Thoreau's ability to begin with observations on a mundane incident or the minutiae of nature and then develop these observations into profound ruminations on the most fundamental human concerns. Credited with influencing Tolstoy, Gandhi, and other thinkers, the volume remains a masterpiece of philosophical reflection."

Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) was an immediate, spectacular success and established his literary reputation. Perhaps the definitive novel of that "Lost Generation," it tells the story of Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy Princeton student who halfheartedly involves himself in literary cults, "liberal" student activities, and a series of empty flirtations with young women. When he finally does fall truly in love, however, the young woman rejects him for another. After serving in France during the war, Blaine returns to embark on a career in advertising. Still young, but already cynical and world-weary, he exemplifies the young men and women of the '20s, described by Fitzgerald as "a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."