'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 because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Central Africa. Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sundries, sold to the natives. The place is 'a bend in the river'; it is Africa. The time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have withdrawn or been forced to withdraw and the scene is one of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered, or partially assumed as a sort of decoration.
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9780394505732
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Hardcover
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
By Spark, Muriel
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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9780452261792
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Paperback
Heart of Darkness
By Conrad, Joseph
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, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion.. Heart of Darkness grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power.. Apparently a sailors yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. Heart of Darkness is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul..
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9780679428015
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Hardcover
Maltese Falcon
By Hammett, Dashiell
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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9780679740940
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Print book
The Great Gatsby
By Fitzgerald, F Scott
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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9784871878401
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Book
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
By Joyce, James
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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9780312089870
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Hardcover
Lolita
By Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
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 century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. With an introduction by Martin Amis.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
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9780679410430
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Hardcover
The Sound and the Fury
By Faulkner, William
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 Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the idiot Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason.
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9780679600176
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Hardcover
Catch-22
By Heller, Joseph
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 Observer. Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions hes assigned, hell be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Since its publication in 1961, no novel has matched Catch-22s intensity and brilliance in depicting the brutal insanity of war. This 50th-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Hellers masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical responses and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers from Joseph Hellers personal archive; and a selection of advertisements from the original publishing campaign that helped turn Catch-22 into a cultural phenomenon. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.
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9781451621174
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Audiobook
Sons and Lovers
By Lawrence, D H
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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9780760701867
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Book
The Grapes of Wrath
By Steinbeck, John
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 farm family, the Joads - driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one mans fierce reaction to injustice, and of one womans stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbecks powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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9780142000663
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Paperback
The Way of All Flesh
By Butler, Samuel
"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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9780140430127
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Paperback
1984
By Orwell, George
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 and haunting vision of the world - so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of entire generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions - a legacy that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
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9780452262935
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Paperback
I, Claudius
By Graves, Robert
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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9780553064094
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Book
To the Lighthouse
By Woolf, Virginia
"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 The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
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9780156907392
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Paperback
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Mccullers, Carson
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 work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers) , finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.
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9780618526413
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Print book
Slaughterhouse-Five
By Vonnegut, Kurt
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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9780385333849
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Paperback
Invisible Man
By Ellison, Ralph
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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9780679600152
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Print book
Native Son
By Wright, Richard
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. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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9780060929800
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Paperback
Henderson the Rain King
By Bellow, Saul
"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 comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson’s awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe—but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life.This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Adam Kirsch.
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9780143105480
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Book
Appointment in Samarra
By O'hara, John
A twentieth-century classic, Appointment in Samarrais 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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9780375719202
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Paperback
U.S.A.
By Passos, John Dos
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 detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events which serve as a backdrop.
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9781883011147
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Print book
Winesburg, Ohio
By Anderson, Sherwood
"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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9780679601463
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Book
A Passage to India
By Forster, E.m.
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 of the real India. However, when Aziz offers to take them on a tour of the Marabar caverns with his close friend Cyril Fielding, the excursion ends with a bombshell charge, sending Chandrapore into a racial frenzy.
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9780156711425
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Paperback
Tender Is the Night
By Fitzgerald, F. Scott
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 is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.
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9780684830506
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Hardcover
The Wings of the Dove
By James, Henry
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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9780679455127
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Book
Studs Lonigan
By Farrell, James T
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 years of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression. The three novels - Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day - offer a vivid sense of the textures of real life: of the institutions of Catholicism, the poolroom and the dance marathon, romance and marriage, gangsterism and ethnic rivalry, and the slang of the street corner. Cited as an inspiration by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Frank McCourt, Studs Lonigan stands as a masterpiece of social realism in the ranks of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.
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9781931082556
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Print book
Animal Farm
By Orwell, George
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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9780679420392
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Book
Sister Carrie
By Dreiser, Theodore
"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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9780679602507
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Book
A handful of dust
By Waugh, Evelyn
(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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9780316926140
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Book
As I Lay Dying
By Faulkner, William
"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 of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members - including Addie herself - as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic. This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
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9780679732259
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Print book
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
By Wilder, Thornton
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 Rey is of this kind." - The Independent (London) "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." This immortal sentence opens The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American literature, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a novel still read throughout the world.Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the tragic event. Deeply moved, he embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention, not chance, that led to the deaths of the five people crossing the bridge that day. Ultimately, his search leads to a timeless investigation into the nature of fate and love, and the meaning of the human condition.This beautiful edition includes a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and an afterword by Thornton Wilders nephew, Tappan, with illuminating documentary material about the novel and its rich literary history.
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9780060088873
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Hardcover
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
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 understand themselves.With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story." - The New York Times
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9780679601548
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Mass Market Paperback
The Heart of the Matter
By Greene, Graham
"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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9780142437995
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Book
Lord of the Flies
By Golding, William
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 and impose order quickly evolves from a battle against nature into a battle against their own primitive instincts. Golding's portrayal of the collapse of social order into chaos draws the fine line between innocence and savagery.
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9780399501487
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Audiobook
The Sun Also Rises
By Hemingway, Ernest
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 most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
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9780743297332
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Paperback
The Secret Agent
By Conrad, Joseph
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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9780192834775
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Book
The Rainbow
By Lawrence, D H
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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9780140188134
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Book
Tropic Of Cancer
By Miller, Henry
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.
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9780613706193
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Book
Darkness at Noon
By Koestler, Arthur
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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9780553265958
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Book
Under the Volcano
By Lowry, Malcolm
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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9780224029810
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Book
The Golden Bowl
By James, Henry
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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9780679417330
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Book
Howards End
By Forster, E M
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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9781619492882
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Paperback
Deliverance
By Dickey, James
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 most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance. This classic tale is vividly read by movie and TV star and Audie Award-winning narrator Will Patton.
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9780385313872
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Paperback
The naked and the dead
By Mailer, Norman
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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9780030677052
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Book
Portnoy's Complaint
By Roth, Philip
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. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- ) ] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fr Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
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9780679756453
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Paperback
Light in August
By Faulkner, William
"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." - William Faulkner Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner's most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
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9780679732266
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Paperback
On The Road
By Kerouac, Jack
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 Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty, " the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.
Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired every generation since its initial publication more than forty years ago.
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9780143112761
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Book
The Age of Innocence
By Wharton, Edith
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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9780140282160
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Book
Death Comes for the Archbishop
By Cather, Willa
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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9780394421544
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Book
The Wapshot Chronicle
By Cheever, John
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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9780060528874
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Paperback
The Catcher in the Rye
By Salinger, J. D.
Anyone who has read J.D. Salingers 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. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. . Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.. There are many voices in this novel: childrens voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holdens voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
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9780316769532
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Paperback
A Clockwork Orange
By Burgess, Anthony
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 take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?" This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgesss introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
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9780393312836
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Paperback
The House of Mirth
By Wharton, Edith
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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9780760719978
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Book
Justine
By Durrell, Lawrence
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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9780140153194
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Print book
A House for Mr. Biswas
By Naipaul, V S
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul's brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswasis 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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9780375707162
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Paperback
The Day of the Locust
By West, Nathanael
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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9781604443561
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Book
A Farewell to Arms
By Hemingway, Ernest
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, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.
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9780684837888
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Hardcover
Finnegans Wake
By Joyce, James
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 as a Young Man". --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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9780670315376
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Hardcover
Kim
By Kipling, Rudyard
HARDCOVER TALL OCTAVO
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9780895773432
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Hardcover
Room with a View
By Forster, E M
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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9780899666075
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Book
Brideshead Revisited
By Waugh, Evelyn
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. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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9780816134007
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Hardcover
The Adventures of Augie March
By Bellow, Saul
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 Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is—to say the least—eccentric.
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9780143039570
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Paperback
Angle of Repose
By Stegner, Wallace
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 who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Wards investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery - personal, historical, and geographical - that endures as Wallace Stegners masterwork: an illumination of yesterdays reality that speaks to todays.
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9780140169300
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Paperback
The Death of the Heart
By Bowen, Elizabeth
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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9780385720175
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Paperback
Lord Jim
By Conrad, Joseph
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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9780679405443
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Book
Ragtime
By Doctorow, E L
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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9780679600886
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Book
The Call of the Wild
By London, Jack
?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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9781598530582
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Paperback
Midnight's Children
By Rushdie, Salman
(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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9780679444626
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Ironweed
By Kennedy, William J.
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; he ran away again after accidentally—and fatally—dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present...
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9780140070200
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Book
The Magus
By Fowles, John
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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9780316290920
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Hardcover
Wide Sargasso Sea
By Rhys, Jean
"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 in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set in the Caribbean, its heroine is Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Rochester. In this best-selling novel, Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
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9780393310481
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Paperback
Sophie's Choice
By Styron, William
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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9780816156504
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The Sheltering Sky
By Bowles, Paul
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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9780679729792
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Paperback
The Magnificent Ambersons
By Tarkington, Booth
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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9780844614434
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Book
Ulysses
By Joyce, James
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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1587262851
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Print book
Pale Fire
By Nabokov, Vladimir
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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9780141185262
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Paperback
Moviegoer
By Percy, Walker
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, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a ''search'' for something more important, some spiritual truth to anchor him. Binx's life floats casually along until one fateful Mardi Gras week, when a bizarre series of events leads him to his unlikely salvation. In his half-brother Lonnie, who is confined to a wheelchair and soon to die, and his stepcousin Kate, whose predicament is even more ominous, Binx begins to find the sort of ''certified reality'' that had eluded him everywhere but at the movies.
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9780394437033
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Hardcover
From Here to Eternity
By Jones, James
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 almost anyone, yet hes risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officers wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood . . .and, possibly, their death.. In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldiers life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no ther the honor and savagery of men.
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9780385333641
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Paperback
Main Street
By Lewis, Sinclair
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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9780553214512
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Paperback
Tobacco Road
By Caldwell, Erskine
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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9788087888902
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Print book
Postman Always Rings Twice
By Cain, James Mallahan
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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9780891908159
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Book
The Ginger Man
By Donleavy, J P
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
A Bend in the River
By Naipaul, V.s.
'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 because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Central Africa. Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sundries, sold to the natives. The place is 'a bend in the river'; it is Africa. The time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have withdrawn or been forced to withdraw and the scene is one of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered, or partially assumed as a sort of decoration.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
By Spark, Muriel
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
Heart of Darkness
By Conrad, Joseph
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, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion.. Heart of Darkness grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power.. Apparently a sailors yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. Heart of Darkness is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul..
Maltese Falcon
By Hammett, Dashiell
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.
The Great Gatsby
By Fitzgerald, F Scott
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
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
By Joyce, James
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
Lolita
By Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
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 century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. With an introduction by Martin Amis.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Sound and the Fury
By Faulkner, William
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 Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the idiot Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason.
Catch-22
By Heller, Joseph
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 Observer. Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions hes assigned, hell be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Since its publication in 1961, no novel has matched Catch-22s intensity and brilliance in depicting the brutal insanity of war. This 50th-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Hellers masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical responses and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers from Joseph Hellers personal archive; and a selection of advertisements from the original publishing campaign that helped turn Catch-22 into a cultural phenomenon. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.
Sons and Lovers
By Lawrence, D H
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
The Grapes of Wrath
By Steinbeck, John
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 farm family, the Joads - driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one mans fierce reaction to injustice, and of one womans stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbecks powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The Way of All Flesh
By Butler, Samuel
"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
1984
By Orwell, George
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 and haunting vision of the world - so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of entire generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions - a legacy that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
I, Claudius
By Graves, Robert
This is a 1985 hardback with leather-look maroon with gold embossed cover in excell cond, ex library with stamps, but looks new & unread
To the Lighthouse
By Woolf, Virginia
"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 The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Mccullers, Carson
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 work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers) , finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.
Slaughterhouse-Five
By Vonnegut, Kurt
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.
Invisible Man
By Ellison, Ralph
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
Native Son
By Wright, Richard
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. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Henderson the Rain King
By Bellow, Saul
"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 comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson’s awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe—but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story, Henderson the Rain King is also a profound look at the forces that drive a man through life.This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Adam Kirsch.
Appointment in Samarra
By O'hara, John
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
U.S.A.
By Passos, John Dos
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 detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events which serve as a backdrop.
Winesburg, Ohio
By Anderson, Sherwood
"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
A Passage to India
By Forster, E.m.
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 of the real India. However, when Aziz offers to take them on a tour of the Marabar caverns with his close friend Cyril Fielding, the excursion ends with a bombshell charge, sending Chandrapore into a racial frenzy.
Tender Is the Night
By Fitzgerald, F. Scott
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 is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.
The Wings of the Dove
By James, Henry
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
Studs Lonigan
By Farrell, James T
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 years of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression. The three novels - Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day - offer a vivid sense of the textures of real life: of the institutions of Catholicism, the poolroom and the dance marathon, romance and marriage, gangsterism and ethnic rivalry, and the slang of the street corner. Cited as an inspiration by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Frank McCourt, Studs Lonigan stands as a masterpiece of social realism in the ranks of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.
Animal Farm
By Orwell, George
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
Sister Carrie
By Dreiser, Theodore
"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
A handful of dust
By Waugh, Evelyn
(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
As I Lay Dying
By Faulkner, William
"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 of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members - including Addie herself - as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic. This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
By Wilder, Thornton
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 Rey is of this kind." - The Independent (London) "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." This immortal sentence opens The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American literature, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a novel still read throughout the world.Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the tragic event. Deeply moved, he embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention, not chance, that led to the deaths of the five people crossing the bridge that day. Ultimately, his search leads to a timeless investigation into the nature of fate and love, and the meaning of the human condition.This beautiful edition includes a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and an afterword by Thornton Wilders nephew, Tappan, with illuminating documentary material about the novel and its rich literary history.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James
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 understand themselves.With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story." - The New York Times
The Heart of the Matter
By Greene, Graham
"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
Lord of the Flies
By Golding, William
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 and impose order quickly evolves from a battle against nature into a battle against their own primitive instincts. Golding's portrayal of the collapse of social order into chaos draws the fine line between innocence and savagery.
The Sun Also Rises
By Hemingway, Ernest
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 most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
The Secret Agent
By Conrad, Joseph
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
The Rainbow
By Lawrence, D H
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.
Tropic Of Cancer
By Miller, Henry
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.
Darkness at Noon
By Koestler, Arthur
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
Under the Volcano
By Lowry, Malcolm
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
The Golden Bowl
By James, Henry
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
Howards End
By Forster, E M
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
Deliverance
By Dickey, James
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 most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance. This classic tale is vividly read by movie and TV star and Audie Award-winning narrator Will Patton.
The naked and the dead
By Mailer, Norman
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
Portnoy's Complaint
By Roth, Philip
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. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- ) ] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fr Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
Light in August
By Faulkner, William
"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." - William Faulkner Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner's most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
On The Road
By Kerouac, Jack
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 Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty, " the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired every generation since its initial publication more than forty years ago.
The Age of Innocence
By Wharton, Edith
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
Death Comes for the Archbishop
By Cather, Willa
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
The Wapshot Chronicle
By Cheever, John
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
The Catcher in the Rye
By Salinger, J. D.
Anyone who has read J.D. Salingers 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. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. . Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.. There are many voices in this novel: childrens voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holdens voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
A Clockwork Orange
By Burgess, Anthony
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 take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?" This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgesss introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
The House of Mirth
By Wharton, Edith
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
Justine
By Durrell, Lawrence
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
A House for Mr. Biswas
By Naipaul, V S
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
The Day of the Locust
By West, Nathanael
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
A Farewell to Arms
By Hemingway, Ernest
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, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.
Finnegans Wake
By Joyce, James
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 as a Young Man". --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Kim
By Kipling, Rudyard
HARDCOVER TALL OCTAVO
Room with a View
By Forster, E M
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.
Brideshead Revisited
By Waugh, Evelyn
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. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Adventures of Augie March
By Bellow, Saul
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 Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is—to say the least—eccentric.
Angle of Repose
By Stegner, Wallace
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 who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Wards investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery - personal, historical, and geographical - that endures as Wallace Stegners masterwork: an illumination of yesterdays reality that speaks to todays.
The Death of the Heart
By Bowen, Elizabeth
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
Lord Jim
By Conrad, Joseph
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
Ragtime
By Doctorow, E L
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
The Call of the Wild
By London, Jack
?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
Midnight's Children
By Rushdie, Salman
(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
Ironweed
By Kennedy, William J.
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; he ran away again after accidentally—and fatally—dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present...
The Magus
By Fowles, John
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
Wide Sargasso Sea
By Rhys, Jean
"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 in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set in the Caribbean, its heroine is Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Rochester. In this best-selling novel, Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
Sophie's Choice
By Styron, William
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
The Sheltering Sky
By Bowles, Paul
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.
The Magnificent Ambersons
By Tarkington, Booth
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,
Ulysses
By Joyce, James
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
Pale Fire
By Nabokov, Vladimir
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
Moviegoer
By Percy, Walker
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, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a ''search'' for something more important, some spiritual truth to anchor him. Binx's life floats casually along until one fateful Mardi Gras week, when a bizarre series of events leads him to his unlikely salvation. In his half-brother Lonnie, who is confined to a wheelchair and soon to die, and his stepcousin Kate, whose predicament is even more ominous, Binx begins to find the sort of ''certified reality'' that had eluded him everywhere but at the movies.
From Here to Eternity
By Jones, James
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 almost anyone, yet hes risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officers wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood . . .and, possibly, their death.. In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldiers life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no ther the honor and savagery of men.
Main Street
By Lewis, Sinclair
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
Tobacco Road
By Caldwell, Erskine
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
Postman Always Rings Twice
By Cain, James Mallahan
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
The Ginger Man
By Donleavy, J P
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