Fiction
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson -
Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine
Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex
trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating
well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and
government.
But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of
publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more
shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong
to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who
came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now
becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.
As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander’s innocence, plunges into an
investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous
hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark
past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald -
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.
