San Antonio College Library

The story of the Scortas opens in 1870 with Rocco Scorta Mascalzone, the bastard product of a rape, and a notorious scoundrel, whose legacy the family is forced to confront.

Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.

"At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've...

With her satire on Anglo-Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Politically risky, stylistically innovative, and wonderfully entertaining, the novel changes the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class, and boldly predicts the rise of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie.

"Dale Peck, Sr., grew up extremely poor in rural Long Island in the 1950s, sharing a one-room house with seven brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and an alcoholic father haunted by his past. When, at fourteen, he is more or less kidnapped by his father and taken to his uncle's farm in upstate New York, the change is remarkable. Dale grows strong and healthy from the strenuous work on the farm, and he develops a loving relationship with his uncle...

Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.

Presents the classic story of Tess, a young woman who finds herself the victim of men, fate, and forces beyond her control in nineteenth-century England, and includes a history of critical commentary on the novel, and five analytical essays.

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.