Where the Red Fern Grows is the story of Billy Coleman, a man reminiscing about his childhood in the Ozarks and the Redbone Coonhounds he raised and trained. After working diligently to purchase the dogs, Little Ann and Old Dan, as puppies, the young Billy raises them as champion hunters. They accompany him as he grows into a man, helping him through many turbulent periods. Eventually Old Dan is killed fighting a Mountain Lion and Little Ann dies of grief shortly thereafter. His innocence lost, Billy confronts adulthood.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir by the former slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. The work chronicles Douglass's life, beginning with his fractured family through his freedom. Douglass was bought and sold as a slave numerous times throughout his life, being beaten and humiliated by his owners. Douglass despised slavery and often resisted his mistreatment, helped other slaves to become literate and eventually escaped to the North. The memoir was widely read and became influential in the abolitionist movement.
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker in 1960s Maine who is wrongfully convicted for the murder of his wife and her lover. Told from the perspective of Red, another inmate at Shawshank State Penitentiary, the novella spans decades as Andy and Red become friends and Andy launders money for the corrupt prison staff. Major themes include dignity, hypocrisy, and the persistence of the human spirit.
The Red and the Black is a novel about a lower-class man named Julien Sorel who's intelligence and cunning allow him to climb through the ranks of society. After entering into an affair with Madame de Renal, he ends up in a seminary and, after accidently helping his political opponents, monarchical legitimists, he enters into a love affair with his employer's daughter. After Madame de Renal warns his employer that he is dangerous, he shoots her, is sent to prison and, despite his lover's attempts to rescue him, is executed.
The Red Pony, Chrysanthemums, and Flight are three works of fiction by American author John Steinbeck. The Red Pony is a series of short stories about life on a ranch. Chrysanthemums deals with a woman's attempts to own her identity and to succeed as a gardener. Flight is the story of Pepe, a young French boy who murders a man in an argument and is himself hunted down and shot.
Dream of the Red Chamber is the story of Jia Baoyu, a free-spirited heir to the wealthy Jia clan in Quing China. Jia's struggle to connect with his betrothed forms the central narrative of a story concerned primarily with the declining fortunes of the Jia family and with the rapid collapse of the family's individual members into psychosis and despair. This decline is used to highlight the collapse of the Quing Dynasty itself.
Wilfred Owen: Poems is an anthology of English poet and World War I veteran Wilfred Owen's best-known poetic work. Poems like Futility and Anthem for Doomed Youth reflect on Owen's brutal experiences in the trenches of the war. Owen was profoundly affected by his time serving in the British armed forces and suffered his entire life from what was almost certainly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His poems are an early example of Modernist rejection of the meaning of war.