A. Novels |
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| Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart.1958. Heinemann. |
| | This is the story of Okonkwo, an Ibo tribesman who is very much a participant in the traditional life of his people. Early colonialism and the importing of Christianity bring destruction to to the tribe‘s traditional way of life. |
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| Angelou, Maya - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 1969. Bantam Books & Virago. |
| | Arkansas & California; before and during 2nd World War; autobiography: 1st vol: childhood to late teens (about the difficulties of a black girl growing up in a racist society). |
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| Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Longman Literature. |
| | England; 19th c.; comedy of manners (about the danger of matchmaking). |
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| Atwood, Margret - Cat‘s Eye. 1988. Virago. |
| | Toronto; second part of 20th c; narrator (a painter) is overwhelmed by her past (time lapse of 40 years): her childhood memories of unbearable betrayals and cruelties inflicted by her best friend. |
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| Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451.1953. Reclam (Fremdsprachen-Texte) |
| | It is the middle of the 21st century. Books make people unhappy, books cause trouble, books must be burnt. Only a few people refuse to let them go. Science fiction to make you think. |
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| Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre .1847. Longman Literature |
| | Jane Eyre, a young governess of humble origin, falls in love with Mr Rochester, her employer. |
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| Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange. 1962. Penguin. |
| | Fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends start an evening‘s mayhem by hitting an old man, tearing up his books and stripping him of money and clothes. Horror farce? Social prophecy? Penetrating study of human choice between good and evil? |
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| Cain, James M. - The Postman Always Rings Twice. 1934. Vintage. |
| | A young vagrant and the sexy, bored wife of a restaurant owner plan to murder her husband, with unexpected results. This, Cain‘s first novel, became an instant sensation. It was banned in Boston, and Albert Camus later acknowledged that it was both the inspiration and the model for his novel The Stranger. |
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| Cronin, A. J. - The Citadel. 1937. Vista. |
| | A brilliant doctor likes to work with the poor. Then he falls to the temptation of fame and easy money. He sees the error of his ways only in a tense and tragic climax. |
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| Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations. 1861. Longman Literature. |
| | Story about a poor orphan‘s ‚great expectations‘ and the strange secrets that cloud his hopes of happiness. |
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| Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby. 1926. Longman Literature. |
| | New York in the 20ies, great depiction of the Jazz Age and the American Dream, gripping love story. |
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| Golding, William - Lord of the Flies. 1954. Faber and Faber. |
| | A plane crash leaves a group of boys aged six to thirteen alone on an island. How will they live? Will one of them become their leader? Can they live together in peace? |
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| Gordimer, Nadine - July‘s People. 1981. Longman Literature |
| | South Africa during Apartheid; story about a white family escaping to the village of their black manservant because of a raging revolution. |
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| Greene, Graham - Dr Fischer of Geneva, or the Bomb Party. 1948. Vintage. |
| | Getting rich was his game, and other rich people were his playthings. Then he tried to play with a poor man, who would not play his game. Who was the winner this time? |
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| Greene, Graham - The Third Man. 1951. Vintage. |
| | Just after the Second World War, the four „superpowers“ occupy Vienna. But there is a fifth power, the criminal underworld. This story was made into a famous film. |
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| Hartley, L. P. - The Go-Between. 1953. Penguin. |
| | Jane Eyre, a young governess of humble origin, falls in love with Mr Rochester, her employer. |
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| Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. Arrow. |
| | The last days of the Spanish Civil War - an anti-fascist band trapped in the mountains - an American volunteer sent to blow up a bridge - and Maria . . . |
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| Hemingway, Ernest - The Old Man and the Sea. 1952. Triad Panther. |
| | The story of a young boy, an old man and a giant fish. The scene is the Gulf stream off the coast of Havana. Between the boy and the man there is a perfect relationship. The old man is engaged in a duel with the fish which tows him far out to sea . . . A novel about nature and human nature, life and death. |
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| Hill, Susan - I‘m the King of the Castle.1970. Penguin. |
| | Edmund did not want any other boy in the ugly, isolated Victorian house. It was his house, he was King here. But Kingshaw still came and Edmund Hooper hated him. He was an intruder, to be subtly persecuted. Hooper learned fast how to turn the most ordinary object into a source of terror. Like a frightened animal, Kingshaw ran. |
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| Hornby, Nick - About a Boy. 1998. Indigo. |
| | SPAT: Single Parents-Alone together. It was a brilliant plan. And Will wasn‘t going to let the fact that he didn‘t have a child himself hold him back. A fictional two-year-old named Ned wouldn‘t be the first thing he‘d invented. And it seems to go quite well at first, until he meets an actual twelve-year-old named Marcus, who is more than Will bargained for . . . |
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| Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day. 1989. Faber and Faber. |
| | It is the summer of 1956, and the ageing butler of Darlington Hall takes a rare holiday. But it is a journey that will also take him deep into his past. The Remains of the Day is a remarkable story: a man‘s exploration of his own life, and his heart-breaking to make sense of it. |
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| Joyce, James - Dubliners. 1914. Granada. |
| | Turn of the century Dublin; collection of short stories about incidents in the lives of ordinary women and men. |
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| Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest.1962. Signet. |
| | The men in the psychiatric hospital are kept firmly under control by „Big Nurse“ until Mc Murphy is sent there from the prison that cannot control him. Is he mad? Who is mad? |
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| Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird. 1968. Mandarin. |
| | In the „deep South“ of the USA a white lawyer is asked to defend a black man who is accused of raping a white girl. The life of this small town is seen through the eyes of the lawyer‘s small daughter. |
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| Lessing, Doris - The Fifth Child. 1988. Vintage. |
| | Harriet and David Lovatt realize their dream of a home, four children and a happy family life. But when Harriet becomes pregnant for the fifth time, she instinctively knows that this baby is different. Her fear grows as she struggles to care for the new-born child, finding herself faced with a dark sub-continent of human nature, unable to cope . . . |
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| Mac Laverty, Bernard - Cal. 1983. Diesterweg. |
| | Northern Ireland; 1970s; portrayal of a young Catholic who has been an accomplice in the IRA murder of a policeofficer and later falls in love with the victim‘s wife. |
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| Maugham, W. Somerset - The Moon and Sixpence. 1919. Penguin |
| | Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin,this novel is an unforgettable study of a man possessed by the need to create - regardless of the cost to himself, and to others. |
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| Cronin, A. J. - The Citadel. 1937. Vista. |
| | A brilliant doctor likes to work with the poor. Then he falls to the temptation of fame and easy money. He sees the error of his ways only in a tense and tragic climax. |
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| McCullers, Carson - The Ballad of the Sad Café. 1951. Klett: Echo (d). |
| | Town in the post-World War II South; an Amazon-like woman, a hunchback and an ex-convict play out the ballad of loneliness, maimed desire and love condemned to loss. |
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| Morrison, Toni - The Bluest Eye. 1970. Triad / Granada |
| | It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment. |
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| Orwell, George - Animal Farm. 1945. Longman Literature. |
| | Once a communist sympathiser, Orwell did not like the way things were developing in the USSR. He described them in this fable of a farm where the pigs took over. |
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| Roy, Arundhati - God of Small Things. 1997. Random House. |
| | It is the tale of Esthappen (Estha for short) and his fraternal twin sister, Rahel, and their divorced mother, Ammu, who live in the south Indian state of Kerala. Ammu, a Syrian Christian, has had no choice but to return to her parental home, following her divorce from the Hindu man she had married--the father of Estha and Rahel. The story centers on events surrounding the visit and drowning death of the twins' half-English cousin, a nine year old girl named Sophie Mol. The visit overlaps with a love affair between Ammu and the family's carpenter, Velutha, a member of the Untouchable caste--"The God of Loss / The God of Small Things." Told from the children's perspective, the novel moves backward from present-day India to the fateful drowning that took place twenty-three years earlier, in 1969. The consequences of these intertwined events--the drowning and the forbidden love affair--are dire. Estha at some point thereafter stops speaking; Ammu is banished from her home, dying miserably and alone at age 31; Rahel is expelled from school, drifts, marries an American, whom she later leaves. The narrative begins and ends as Rahel returns to her family home in India and to Estha, where there is some hope that their love for each other and memories recollected from a distance will heal their deep wounds. |
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| Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Penguin. |
| | A teenager, alone in New York for a few days, trying to enjoy his freedom before going home to inform his parents that he has been thrown out of his boarding school. |
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| Steinbeck, John - Of Mice and Men. 1937. Klett: Echo (d). |
| | California; 1930s; story of two migrant farm workers who yearn for some sort of home. |
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| Updike, John - Rabbit, Run. 1960. Penguin. |
| | It‘s 1959 and, stuck with a wife who drinks too much, a child, and a futile job in a banal town, Harry ‚Rabbit‘ Angstrom‘s powers of indecision are unlimited. And so he bounces like a ping-pong ball between a despairing wife and a demanding mistress, and everyone -except ‚Rabbit‘- can see where it‘ll end. |
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| Vakil, Arashdir - Beach Boy. 1998. Penguin. |
| | In this first novel, eight-year-old Cyrus Readymoney introduces us to his magical universe of movies and mischief; tennis tournaments and truant afternoons; sex and samosas; the sea and the shore. Exploring Bombay in the early 1970s, Cyrus strays from his mostly absent parents, members of the Parsi elite, into the complex world of his neighbors, including a mysterious maharani and her seductive adopted daughter. In his travels, he experiences the splendor of Hindi films and delights in all manner of mouthwatering food. But in the course of his wanderings, Cyrus finds himself caught between the innocence and insouciance of his youth and the responsibility and worry that await his in adulthood. When his parents' marriage falls apart and his family is shattered, Cyrus is forced out of his carefree existence into a more severe reality. With an acute ear for the nuances of Indian English and a comic appreciation of a boy's life, Ardashir Vakil creates an extraordinarily vivid tableau of India while at the same time drawing a rich portrait of adolescence and its appetites. |
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| Walker, Alice - The Color Purple. 1982. Washington Square Press. |
| | Life wasn‘t easy for Celie. But she knew how to survive, needig little to get by. Then her husband‘s lover, a flamboyant blues singer, barreled into her world and gave Celie the courage to ask for more: to laugh, to play, and finally - to love. |
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| Wilde , Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. Penguin Modern Classics. |
| | „When we are happy, we are always good,“ says Lord Henry, „but when we are good, we are not always happy.“ Lord Henry‘s clever words lead the young Dorian Gray into a world where it is better to be beautiful than to be good: a world where anything can be forgiven - even murder - if it can make people laugh at dinner party. |
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| Wright, Richard - Black Boy. 1945. Picador Classics. |
| | A black boy, born into the brutal life of the southern states. He has to be tough to survive, but how does he feel inside? The true reminiscences of a man who became a famous writer. |
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B. Plays |
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| Albee, Edward - Who‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1963. Signet. |
| | This dark comedy presents the married couple - George and Martha - in a searing night of dangerous fun and games with a pawnlike other couple who innocently become their weapons in the savaging of each other and of their life together. By the evening‘s end, an almost unbearable relevation provides a climactic shock of recognition at the bond and bondage of their love. |
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| Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot. 1955. Faber and Faber. |
| | What WfG essentially is is a prolongued and sustained metaphor about the nature of human life. It is a metaphor also which makes a particular appeal to the mood of liberal uncertainty which is the prevailing mood of modern Western Europe ... A modern morality play. |
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| Clark, Brian -Whose Life Is It Anyway? 1978. Cornelsen. |
| | This play circles around the controversial question of euthanasia. |
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| Albee, Edward - Who‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1963. Signet. |
| | This dark comedy presents the married couple - George and Martha - in a searing night of dangerous fun and games with a pawnlike other couple who innocently become their weapons in the savaging of each other and of their life together. By the evening‘s end, an almost unbearable relevation provides a climactic shock of recognition at the bond and bondage of their love. |
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| Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot. 1955. Faber and Faber. |
| | What WfG essentially is is a prolongued and sustained metaphor about the nature of human life. It is a metaphor also which makes a particular appeal to the mood of liberal uncertainty which is the prevailing mood of modern Western Europe ... A modern morality play. |
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| Clark, Brian -Whose Life Is It Anyway? 1978. Cornelsen. |
| | This play circles around the controversial question of euthanasia. |
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| Hansberry, Lorraine - Raisin in the Sun. 1958. Klett: Echo (d) |
| | The stereotype of 50s America with its happy housewives and almost non-existent blacks resulted in an up swell of social resentment that finally found public voice and recognition in the civil rights and feminist movements of the sixties. Raisin in the Sun explores both of these vital themes. |
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| Mamet, David - Oleanna. 1992. Methuen. |
| | The relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship, and abuse. |
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| Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman. 1949. Penguin. |
| | Willy Lomann is the common man, and something or other has gone terribly wrong. The point is, what and why. At first blush the answer seems fairly simple. Willy has a fatal flaw. He lives in a dream world; he can‘t face reality; he has always had excuses for his own failures and has ruined Biff‘s life by indulging him all through his childhood in any whim including theft. |
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| Pinter, Harold - The Homecoming. 1965. Eyre Methuen. |
| | When Ted, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house - Max, his father, Sam, an uncle, and Lenny and Joey, his brothers. From this develops a series of encounters, with Ruth as the centre of the action. |
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| Priestley, JB - An Inspector Calls. 1946. Longman Literature. |
| | It is a modern morality and its characters, though they are never unreal, are typical rather than exceptional people. The dramatic interest is superbly sustained up to the final curtain, and the moral of the play - that every man is his brother‘s keeper - is driven home with immense skill |
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| Russell, Willy -Educating Rita. 1980 Diesterweg. |
| | Hairdresser Rita feels that life has passed her by. She wants an education. But does Frank have anything to teach her? |
| Shaffer, Peter - Equus. 1973. Penguin. |
| | E. presents a confrontation between a psychiatrist and a teenager who has blinded six horses. The play recreates the circumstances of this crime and explores the boy‘s apparently inexplicable motives for doing it. |
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| Shaw, Bernard - Pygmalion. 1913. Longman Literature. |
| | This play was made into the musical „My Fair Lady“.
If professor Higgins takes a girl from the slums of London and teaches her to speak like a „lady“, will she then be a „lady“? |
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| Wilde, Oscar - The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. Longman Literature. |
| | A ‚trivial play for serious people‘ is a sparkling comedy of manners. This hiariously absurd satire opposes sincerity and style, barbed witticisms and ostentatious elegance. |
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| Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire. 1947. Diesterweg |
| | In this play Blanche Du Bois‘ pathetic fantasies of primness and respectability are stripped down and violently exposed in New Orleans. |
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| Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie. 1944. Penguin |
| | Mirroring the quiet despair of the Thirties, this play in its nostalgia for a past world and its evocation of loneliness and lost love celebrates, above all, the human need to dream. |
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| Wilder, Thornton - Our Town. 1948. Penguin |
| | The play is set in a New Hampshire village. Each of the three acts pictures life at a different stage: childhood - life of an adult - death. Describing the everyday lives of the people (especially two families), their sorrows and joys Wilder sees it as an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life. |
