For the Intellect III

Explore 'For the Intellect III'—a curated list of profound books for thinkers. Discover must-read titles to expand your mind and deepen your knowledge.

Jane Eyre Cover
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Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester.
A Journey to the Center of the Earth Cover
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A Journey to the Center of the Earth

by Jules Verne

Follows Professor Hardwigg, his nephew Harry, and their guide Hans as they explore a volcanic crater in Iceland that leads them to the center of the Earth and to incredible and horrifying discoveries.
The Jungle Cover
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The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

The uncut version of Upton Sinclair's classic 1906 novel about the shocking working conditions endured by immigrants in early twentieth-century Chicago stockyards and packinghouses.
The Jungle Books Cover
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The Jungle Books

by Rudyard Kipling

No Marketing Blurb
Kim Cover
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Kim

by Rudyard Kipling

Kim, an Irish orphan, accompanies a holy man on his journey throughout India and his quest for a mystical river.
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ID: 0140621237
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Lady Chatterley's Lover Cover
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Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D.H. Lawrence

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING THE CROWN’S EMMA CORRIN AND UNBROKEN’S JACK O’CONNELL Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence’s last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, it explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage and her growing love for the robust gamekeeper of her husband’s estate. The most controversial of Lawrence’s books, Lady Chatterly’s Lover joyously affirms the author’s vision of individual regeneration through sexual love. The book’s power, complexity, and psychological intricacy make this a completely original work—a triumph of passion, and a celebration of life.
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ID: 1593080654
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ID: 1416523715
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Cover
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

by Washington Irving

A superstitious schoolmaster, in love with a wealthy farmer's daughter, has a terrifying encounter with a headless horseman.
Les Misérables Cover
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Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo

No summary available.
Little Women Cover
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Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

In New England during the Civil War, four sisters experience joys and hardships together.
Lord Jim (Penguin Classics) Cover
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Lord Jim (Penguin Classics)

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0375757902
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ID: 0192840398
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Maggie Cover
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Maggie

 

No summary available.
The Magnificent Ambersons Cover
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The Magnificent Ambersons

by Booth Tarkington

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." "The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end."
Main Street (Signet Classics) Cover
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Main Street (Signet Classics)

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0140437886
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The Man in the Iron Mask Cover
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The Man in the Iron Mask

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0141439807
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ID: 0375760067
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The Metamorphosis Cover
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The Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”
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ID: 0451529170
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Moby-Dick Cover
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Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read First published in 1851, Herman Melville’s masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s words, “the greatest novel in American literature.” The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale remains a peerless adventure story but one full of mythic grandeur, poetic majesty, and symbolic power. Filtered through the consciousness of the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Moby-Dick draws us into a universe full of fascinating characters and stories, from the noble cannibal Queequeg to the natural history of whales, while reaching existential depths that excite debate and contemplation to this day.
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ID: 1853260738
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ID: 0486424510
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My Ántonia Cover
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My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation of immigrants.
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ID: 0140439188
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ID: 0140442634
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The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Cover
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The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

by Charles Dickens

'The novel has everything: an absorbing melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes, villains and eccentrics, set in a London where vast wealth and desperate poverty live cheek-by-jowl' Jasper Rees, The Times When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless after his father's death, he appeals to his wealthy uncle to help him find work and to protect his mother and sister. But Ralph Nickleby proves both hard-hearted and unscrupulous, and Nicholas finds himself forced to make his own way in the world. His adventures gave Dickens the opportunity to portray an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics: Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, a school for unwanted boys, the slow-witted orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas, the pretentious Mantalinis and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummels and their daughter, the 'infant phenomenon'. Like many of Dickens's novels, Nicholas Nickleby is characterised by his outrage at cruelty and social injustice, but it is also a flamboyantly exuberant work, whose loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. In his introduction Mark Ford compares Nicholas Nickleby to eighteenth-century picaresque novels, and examines Dickens's criticism of the 'Yorkshire schools', his social satire and use of language. This edition includes the original illustrations by 'Phiz', Dickens's original preface to the work, a chronology and a list of further reading. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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ID: 0156028042
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Northanger Abbey Cover
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Northanger Abbey

 

No summary available.
Nostromo Cover
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Nostromo

by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad's 1904 adventure novel, set amid the mist-covered mountains of a fictional South American republic, spins a colorful tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion. The story begins halfway through the revolution, employing flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men — corrupting and destroying some, revealing the strengths of others. Conrad's deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in Nostromo, one of his greatest works.
Notes from Underground Cover
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Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us a brilliantly faithful rendition of this classic novel, in all its tragedy and tormented comedy. In this second edition, they have updated their translation in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.
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ID: 014305824X
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Of Human Bondage Cover
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Of Human Bondage

by W. Somerset Maugham

A masterpiece of modern literature that mirrors Maugham’s own career. Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.
Oliver Twist Cover
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Oliver Twist

by Charles Dickens

A gripping portrayal of London's dark criminal underbelly, published in Penguin Classics with an introduction by Philip Horne. The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery. This Penguin Classics edition of Oliver Twist is the first critical edition to faithfully reproduce the text as its earliest readers would have encountered it from its serialisation in Bentley's Miscellany, and includes an introduction by Philip Horne, a glossary of Victorian thieves' slang, a chronology of Dickens's life, a map of contemporary London and all of George Cruikshank's original illustrations. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.