Eugenia, Baroness Mnster, wife of a German princeling who wishes to be rid of her, crosses the ocean with her brother Felix to seek out their American relatives. Their voyage is prompted, apparently, by natural affection; but the Baroness has also come to seek her fortune. The advent of these visitors is viewed by the Wentworths, in the suburbs of Boston, with wonder and some apprehension. The brilliant Eugenia fascinates her impressionable cousins and their more worldly neighbour, butshe is baffled by these people, 'to whom fibbing was not pleasing'. Meanwhile Felix, painter of trifling sketches, eases them all in and out of various amorous complications, with 'no fear of not being, in the end, agreeable'.
Tony Tanner Book order (chronological)






Elizabeth Bennet's early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by his arrogant pride.
A young man newly rich tries to recapture the past and win back his former love, despite the fact that she has married
Moby Dick
- 672 pages
- 24 hours of reading
When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he is clueless to the horrors that await him on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis. Considered a failure during Melville's lifetime but now hailed as a classic American novel, Ishmael's story combines symbolism and philosophical debate with gripping adventure narrative in an uncanny and unforgettable fashion. An extract from Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex by Owen Chase--which inspired Melville's own story--is also included.
Nietzsche said that he never travelled anywhere without a volume of Emerson's essays in his pocket, while Mathew Arnold described Emerson as 'the greatest prose writer of the century'. It is a remarkable writer who could at once appeal to a man considered a pillar of Victorian society, and to a man dedicated to bringing down such pillars. In his own time Emerson was considered a profoundly radical thinker, but after his death he was increasingly seen as a bland Boston Brahmin, contentedly ripening with the new England melons, benignly meditating on such viperous notions as the Over–soul.He is now appreciated as one of the truly seminal American writers, refusing all orthodoxies, complacencies and fixities—both a truly celebratory and deeply adversarial thinker. A unique paperback edition, with introduction and chronology of Emerson's life and times.
Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from optimistic early works to the darker Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon--a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection.
City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970
- 464 pages
- 17 hours of reading
Nabokov - Borges - Ellison - Bellow - Heller - Purdy - Hawkes - Barth - Plath - Updike - Roth - Mailer - Kesey.
A Farewell to Arms
- 304 pages
- 11 hours of reading
In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.
Sense and Sensibility
- 135 pages
- 5 hours of reading
Macmillan Readers v úrovni Intermediate můžete číst asi po třech až čtyřech letech studia angličtiny. K porozumění vám postačí slovní zásoba 1600 slov. Knihy mají až 128 stran.
Dr Tanner investigates American literature with regards to wonder and cultivated naivety.



