The Picture of Dorian Gray
A portrait ages so that its sitter need not. Wilde gives the bargain almost no mechanical explanation and spends the novel on something more interesting: the way a life lived without consequence changes a person's taste, then their friendships, then their capacity to stop.
The preface is a manifesto about art and criticism and is worth reading twice. The book was used as evidence against Wilde in 1895, which makes Lord Henry's epigrams considerably less light than they first appear.
Public-domain status
First published in 1890. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so this work has been free to republish there since 1971.
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