LETRAS

A Farewell to Arms is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most popular books, a masterpiece that is not only among the greatest novels to come out of World War I but also one of the most profoundly moving in the American canon. Based on Hemingway’s own experience volunteering with the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, and written when he was only thirty, it tells the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. For Frederic, Catherine’s kindness and beauty shore him up against the carnage of battle; for Catherine, Frederic’s strength and devotion are a lifeboat in the sea of grief over her first love. Through injury, surgery, and the psychic fallout of war, they maintain an overwhelming desire to be together, even as forces conspire to keep them apart. Hemingway captures the intensity of both love and war with the taut immediacy and spare, understated eloquence that are his hallmarks, reminding us why this novel—his first bestseller—endures as a favorite, and why the Nobel laureate ranks among our most treasured writers.

When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms. Shocked yet thrilled by Grey’s singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success—his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family—Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Grey’s secrets and explores her own dark desires.

Obsessed with creating life, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. This chilling gothic tale, begun when Mary Shelley was just nineteen years old, would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and is now the inspiration of a film adaptation written and directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth.