Deschutes Public Library

Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities.

Told through a central character, Alex, the disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism. A modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption set in a dismal dystopia whereby a juvenile deliquent undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior.

Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world. A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles's crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.

A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey across Mississippi to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.

Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom.

One of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759. Witty, caustic skewering of romance, science, philosophy, religion, government - nearly all human ideals and institutions. It concerns the adventures of the youthful Candide. In the course of his travels and adventures in Europe and South America, Candide saw and suffered such misfortune that it was difficult for him to believe this was "the best of all possible worlds" as Dr. Pangloss has assured him. Indeed, it seemed to be quite the opposite.

After discovering the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.

Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do ...

A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator. Includes illustrated notes throughout the text explaining the historical background of the story.

An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.

An autobiographical novel about a young girl-brilliant, beautiful, and successful, but slowly breaking down-written by a poet who later committed suicide.

The Color Purple is the story of two sisters -- one a missionary to Africa and the other a child wife living in the South -- who remain loyal to one another across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life--Cover.

A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.

As they each attempt to overcome their loneliness, an adolescent girl, a boisterous reformer, and a Negro patriarch all look to Singer, a deaf mute, for some answer to what they want from life. Set in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s.

1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial publishers rejected the manuscript, It quickly became a best-seller, arousing public sentiment and resulting in such Federal legislation as the Pure Food and Drug Act.

A Mohican brave struggles to protect two English girls from an evil Huron during the French and Indian War in upstate New York.

A young man's quest for eternal youth and beauty ends in scandal, depravity and death. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The picture of Dorian Gray was a succes de scandale. Early readers were shocked by its hints at unspeakable sins, and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at his trial at the Old Bailey in 1895. This definitive edition includes a selection of contemporary reviews condemning the novel's immorality, and the introduction to the first Penguin Classics edition by Peter Ackroyd.

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd".

In July 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a small cottage in the woods near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. During the two years spend there, he began to write 'Walden', his most important work, a chronicle of his communion with nature that became one of the most influential books in Western literature.