书名：The Scarlet Letter  红字
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1340
作者：Nathaniel Hawthorne
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2009
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531353
商品尺寸：10.6 x 2.1 x 17.1 cm
包装：平装
页数：274 （以实物为准）

The Scarlet Letter《红字》是美国19世纪杰出的浪漫主义小说家霍桑的首部长篇小说，也是其代表作之一。小说讲述了发生在北美殖民时期的恋爱悲剧。不仅是美国浪漫主义小说的代表作，同时也被称作是美国心理分析小说的开创篇。
推荐理由：
1.美国19世纪浪漫主义经典之作，被海明威列入“提高艺术水平的文学书目”，美国中学规定学生必读十部名著之一；
2.其隐晦的主题思想、超常的形式及巧妙的文学艺术手法使其一直成为文学界研究的对象；
3.小说涉及婚外情话题及女性主义思想，是对当时基督教价值判断的颠覆和挑战；
4.轻型环保纸印刷，小巧轻便，方便随身携带阅读。
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is an 1850 work of fiction in a historical setting, written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book is considered to be his “masterwork” andregarded as the first real heroine of American fiction.

小说以殖民时期新英格兰生活为背景，通过一个受不合理婚姻束缚的少妇海丝特·白兰因犯”通奸”罪被监禁、示众和长期隔离的故事，暴露了政教合一体制统治下殖民地社会的冷酷虚伪，探讨了有关罪恶和人性的道德、哲理问题。
Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

纳撒尼尔·霍桑是美国心理分析小说的开创者，也是美国文学史上首位写作短篇小说的作家，被称为美国19世纪伟大的浪漫主义小说家。其代表作包括长篇小说《红字》《七角楼房》，短篇小说集《重讲一遍的故事》《古宅青苔》《雪影》等。其中《红字》已成为世界文学经典，亨利·詹姆斯、爱伦·坡、赫尔曼·麦尔维尔等文学大师都深受其影响。
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and biographer. His work centres on his New England home and often features moral allegories with Puritan inspiration, with themes revolving around inherent good and evil. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic Movement and, more specifically, Dark Romanticism.

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeplecrowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burialground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.