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  Modern Library's Best Novels of the 20th Cent  
A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul - Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition
Format: Hardcover

'Brilliant and terrifying' - "Observer". I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river...
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark
Format: Paperback

Muriel Spark's classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged Penguin Essentials edition. 'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .' Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Mi
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Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad - Everyman's Library
Format: Hardcover

In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz,...
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Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett
Format: Print book

A treasure worth killing for, a tough private eye with his own code of ethics, and a beautiful but treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime add up to a haunting gem of detective fiction, now fully dramatized.
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The Great Gatsby

F Scott Fitzgerald
Format: Book

The Great Gatsby is regarded as "The Great American Novel". A first edition of "The Great Gatsby" came up for auction on June 10, 2009 and was knocked down for the astounding price of $155,000. The picture in that auction catalog has been used to create the c
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A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

James Joyce
Format: Hardcover

A novel written in Joyce's characteristic free indirect speech style, A Portrait is a major example of the Knstlerroman (an artist's Bildungsroman) in English literature. Joyce's novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he beg
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Lolita

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov - Everyman's Library
Format: Hardcover

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause clbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth...
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The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text with Faulkner's Appendix

William Faulkner - Modern Library
Format: Hardcover

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeFrom the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Selected Short StoriesThe...
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Catch-22

Joseph Heller - Simon & Schuster Audio
Format: Audiobook

Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest - and most celebrated - novels of all time. In recent years, it has been named to "best novels" lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London...
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Sons and Lovers

D H Lawrence
Format: Book

When Sons and Lovers was first seen by its reading public in 1913, its publishers had in fact, out of caution and timidity, shortened Lawrence's originally submitted version by about ten percent--cuts that are restored in this new ``uncensored and uncut'' edition. Complexity of ch
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The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)

John Steinbeck - Penguin Books
Format: Paperback

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized - and sometimes outraged - millions of readers.First published in 1939, Steinbecks Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma...
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The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler
Format: Paperback

"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."With The Way of All Flesh, Samue
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1984

George Orwell - New American Library
Format: Paperback

View our feature on George Orwell's 1984.Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell's narrative is more timely that ever. 1984 presents a "negative utopia," that is at once a startling...
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I, Claudius

Robert Graves
Format: Book

This is a 1985 hardback with leather-look maroon with gold embossed cover in excell cond, ex library with stamps, but looks new & unread
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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Format: Paperback

"Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality." - Eudora Welty, from the Introduction...
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers - Houghton Mifflin
Format: Print book

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest...
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Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel

Kurt Vonnegut - Dial Press Trade Paperback
Format: Paperback

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
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Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison
Format: Print book

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established
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Native Son

Richard Wright - Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Format: Paperback

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic....
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Henderson the Rain King

Saul Bellow - Penguin Classics; Revised edition
Format: Book

"It blazes as fiercly and scintillatingly as a forest fire. There is life here; a great rage to live more fully. In this it is a giant among novels." (San Francisco Examiner)Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed...
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Appointment in Samarra: A Novel

John O'Hara
Format: Paperback

A twentieth-century classic, Appointment in Samarra is the first and most widely read book by the writer Fran Leibowitz called "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald."In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with
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U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money

John Dos Passos - Libr. of America
Format: Print book

Unique for its epic scale and panoramic social sweep, Dos Passos' masterpiece comprises three novels--"The 42nd Parallel," "1919," and "The Big Money"--which create an unforgettable collective portrait of modern America. This one-volume edition includes...
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Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson
Format: Book

"Here [is] a new order of short story," said H.L. Mencken when Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own." Indeed, Sherwood Anders
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A Passage to India

E.M. Forster - Grapevine
Format: Paperback

Dr. Aziz is a young Muslim physician in Chandrapore, a British Indian town. Mrs Moore, an English woman, meets him in the courtyard of a nearby mosque one evening; she and her younger travelling companion Adela are dissatisfied with cramped British colonial society and want to explore more...
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Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Charles Scribner's Sons; Classic Edition edition
Format: Hardcover

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night...
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The Wings of the Dove

Henry James
Format: Book

Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the
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Studs Lonigan

James T Farrell - Library of America
Format: Print book

An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character - a would-be "tough guy" and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago's South Side - through the turbulent...
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Animal Farm

George Orwell
Format: Book

Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become
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Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser
Format: Book

"American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin," said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser's great first novel, transformed the conventional "fallen woman" story into a bold and truly innovative p
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A handful of dust

Evelyn Waugh
Format: Book

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life
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As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text

William Faulkner - Vintage; Reissue edition
Format: Print book

"I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall." - William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's harrowing account...
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel

Thornton Wilder - Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Format: Hardcover

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize"As close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature." - Russell Banks"There are books that haunt you down the years, books that seem to touch and stir something deep inside you. . . . Wilders The Bridge of San Luis...
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Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International)

James Baldwin - Vintage
Format: Mass Market Paperback

In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwins rendering of his protagonists spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans...
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The Heart of the Matter:

Graham Greene
Format: Book

"Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork..." Graham Greene's masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter, tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West
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Lord of the Flies

William Golding - Listening Library
Format: Audiobook

William Golding's classic novel of primitive savagery and survival is one of the most vividly realized and riveting works in modern fiction. The tale begins after a plane wreck deposits a group of English school boys, aged six to twelve on an isolated tropical island. Their struggle to survive...
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The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway - Scribner
Format: Paperback

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's...
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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

Joseph Conrad
Format: Book

In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verlac, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an an
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The Rainbow: Cambridge Lawrence Edition

D H Lawrence
Format: Book

The surviving text of The Rainbow is collated to provide a text as close as possible to that which the author wrote. Also included are explanatory notes to historical references and allusions and a chronology of the book itself.
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Tropic Of Cancer

Henry Miller
Format: Book

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.
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Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler
Format: Book

Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crime
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Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry
Format: Book

Reprint. Light wear to boards. Content is clean and bright apart from a few small finger marks to front endpaper and title page. Good DJ in protective wrapper but has been taped to pastedown. Ex Library with stamps/labels, etc
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The Golden Bowl

Henry James
Format: Book

The wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his shy daughter, Maggie, live in Europe, closely tied through their love of art and their mutual admiration. Maggie's future seems assured when she becomes the wife of a charming, though impoverished, Italian prince. But when Adam mar
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Howards End

E M Forster
Format: Paperback

Regarded by numerous critics as Forster's masterpiece, Howards End is a novel that explores the many intricacies of class relations in English society during the turn of the century. Centering around three families representing England's working class and wealthy elite, the novel
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Deliverance

James Dickey - Audible Studios
Format: Paperback

Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine) The smash-hit best seller that inspired the acclaimed 1972 film starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox is now available in unabridged audio for the very first time. The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states...
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The naked and the dead

Norman Mailer
Format: Book

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction crea
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Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth - Vintage
Format: Paperback

The groundbreaking novel that propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, Philip Roth's masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. Portnoy's Complaint n....
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Light in August

William Faulkner - Vintage Books
Format: Paperback

"Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."...
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On The Road

Jack Kerouac
Format: Book

Essential Edition handsomely packaged with french flaps, rough fronts, high-quality paper, and a distinctive cover look On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West. " As "Sal...
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The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton
Format: Book

With her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920) , Wharton recreated the Old New York of her own childhood, in a moving tale of passion and desire. "Edith Wharton is a writer who brings glory to the name of America, and this is her best book. It is one of the best
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Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather
Format: Book

Trade issue of what many consider to be the best of the author's late novels: Cather's classic character study of two Frenchmen trying to organize a Catholic Diocese on the frontier of New Mexico. Always high on lists of American classics. There is a printing error on page 20 of t
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The Wapshot Chronicle

John Cheever
Format: Paperback

When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New
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The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger - Little, Brown and Company
Format: Hardcover

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories, particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme--With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children....
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A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess - W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Paperback

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgesss nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals...
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The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton
Format: Book

Published in 1905 to enormous critical and financial success, the House of Mirth is the book that made Edith Wharton famous and marked the beginning of the author's mature phase of novel writing. This is a comedy of manners that turns into grim tragedy as Lily Bart, the novel's ce
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Justine

Lawrence Durrell
Format: Print book

The time is the eve of the World War II. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing novel, their pursuits lead only to bedrooms in whi
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A House for Mr. Biswas

V S Naipaul
Format: Paperback

The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul's brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has be
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The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West
Format: Book

The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, its overarching themes deal with the alienation and desperation of a broad group of odd individuals who exist at the fringes of the Hollywood movie in
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A Farewell to Arms (Scribner Classics)

Ernest Hemingway - Scribner
Format: Hardcover

The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley,...
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Finnegans Wake

James Joyce - The Viking Press
Format: Hardcover

Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist...
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Kim

Rudyard Kipling - The Reader's Digest Association, Inc
Format: Hardcover

HARDCOVER TALL OCTAVO
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Room with a View

E M Forster
Format: Book

A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Forster's skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of foreign cultures, as he portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy. One of Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.
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Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder : A Novel

Evelyn Waugh - G K Hall & Co; Large Prnt edition
Format: Hardcover

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit....
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The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow - Penguin Classics; Revised edition
Format: Paperback

As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous, The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great...
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Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner - Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Format: Paperback

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century.Wallace Stegners uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian...
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The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen
Format: Paperback

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastat
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Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad
Format: Book

Lord Jim is a classic story of one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world which made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also the book in which its author, through a brilliant ad
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Ragtime: A Novel

E L Doctorow
Format: Book

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home
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The Call of the Wild

Jack London
Format: Paperback

?No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild.?--H. L. Mencken One of the greatest American storytellers, Jack London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time and remains widely read throughout the world. Hi
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie
Format: Book

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947 - and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing
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Ironweed: A Novel

William J. Kennedy - Penguin; Reprint edition
Format: Book

Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike;...
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The Magus: A Revised Version

John Fowles
Format: Hardcover

A man trapped in a millionare's deadly game of political and sexual betrayal. Filled with shocks and chilling surprises, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature. In it, a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching position on a Greek island whe
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Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel

Jean Rhys - W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition
Format: Paperback

"A considerable tour de force by any standard."—?New York Times Book ReviewJean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman...
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Sophie's Choice

William Styron
Format: Book

In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Sting
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The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles
Format: Paperback

The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II examines the way Americans apprehend an alien culture and the way their incomprehension destroys them.
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The Magnificent Ambersons

Booth Tarkington
Format: Book

Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on standardized tests, Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page,
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Ulysses

James Joyce
Format: Print book

The Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) believed that patterns of human behavior, unconsciously drawn from history of myth, endlessly repeat themselves. So when he decided to tell the story of three Dubliners on one ordinary day, he loosely fashioned their wanderings after t
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Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov
Format: Paperback

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, with its wildly original narrative structure, is a postmodern masterpiece from the author of Lolita, skewering the politics of academia, the struggle for interpretation, and the infinite subjectivity of human experience, published in Penguin Modern Cl
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Moviegoer

Walker Percy - Knopf
Format: Hardcover

A winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer established Walker Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller. It is the tale of Binx Bolling, a small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries,...
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From Here to Eternity

James Jones - Delta
Format: Paperback

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the companys boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than...
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Main Street

Sinclair Lewis
Format: Paperback

The first of Sinclair Lewis's great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's sixth novel attacked the confo
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Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell
Format: Print book

Enormously popular in the 1930s and 1940s, Erskine Caldwell brought to millions of Americans his bawdy, forcefully written, grimly comic stories of injustice and human irrationality, set chiefly in the South. "Tobacco Road" remains the book for which he is best remember
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Postman Always Rings Twice

James Mallahan Cain
Format: Book

An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one, grisly solution -- a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture o
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The Ginger Man

J P Donleavy
Format: Book

This is the dramatic story of J. P. Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a twentieth-century masterpiece: The Ginger Man. It is literary history combined with Donleavy's autobiography - from his childhood in the Bronx, education at Catholic schools
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