The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of
conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a
critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in
1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the
roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and
hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty
languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper
Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a
masterpiece of American literature.
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.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic,
and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish
hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life
when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two
emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape
of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house
empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of
three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy
degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and
snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing
fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby KillickClaw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy
Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).
As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels
from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy
Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals
foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the muchzippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets.
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 of an affluent American
family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car
into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy
and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma
Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of
the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters,
including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a
point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
There are people who want to ruin the lives of others for their own personal gain, and when
twenty-four-year-old Ashleigh Whitfield becomes the target of one of these evil eyes, her
destiny quickly changes. In this fast-paced tale of love and murder, readers are taken back
into the life of Ashleigh Whitfield weeks before her tragic murder. When she finds out that
her family isn't at all what she thought it was... When she finds out that her best friend,
Jonathon, is looking for more than friendship... When she finds out that someone, or
something, is after her... Who is orchestrating these strange summer months of new love,
questionable trust, and exorbitant fear? Will Jonathon figure out what's really going on?
RABBIT, RUN
“Brilliant and poignant . . . By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright prose,
[Updike] makes Rabbit’s sorrow his and out own.”
–The Washington Post
“Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable
observer of thoughts and feelings.”
–The Village Voice
RABBIT REDUX
“ ‘Great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence,
wit, imagination, and feeling–a great and beautiful thing . . .’ these hyperboles (quoted from
a letter written long ago by Thomas Mann) come to mind after reading John Updike’s Rabbit
Redux.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made
bearable by wit. . . . A masterpiece.”
“POIGNANT . . . FUNNY . . . THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST IS ONE OF HER BEST. . . . [TYLER] HAS
NEVER BEEN STRONGER.”
–The New York Times
Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is
grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he
meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular
world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.
“BITTERSWEET . . . EVOCATIVE . . . It’s easy to forget this is the warm lull of fiction; you halfexpect to run into her characters at the dry cleaners . . . Tyler [is] a writer of great
compassion.”
–The Boston Globe
“Tyler has given us an endlessly diverting book whose strength gathers gradually to become
a genuinely thrilling one.”
–Los Angeles Times
From the bestselling author of The Shipping News comes Postcards, the tale of the Blood
family, New England farmers who must confront the twentieth century -- and their own
extinction. As the family slowly disintegrates, its members struggle valiantly against the
powerful forces of loneliness and necessity, seeking a sense of home and place forever lost.
Loyal Blood, eldest son, is forced to abandon the farm when he takes his lover's life, thus
beginning a quintessentially American odyssey of solitude and adventure. Yearning for love,
yet forced by circumstance to be always alone, Loyal comes to symbolize the alienation and
frustration behind the American dream.
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or
because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of
my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of
Owen Meany."
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little
League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that
kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen
Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is
extraordinary.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is
the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time.
Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical
Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who
resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the
seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic
attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
This edition includes a new foreword by Kesey, a new text introduction by Robert Faggen,
and line drawings the author made when writing the book, many never before published.
National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the
slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and
adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in
“flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in
Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm.
Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at
her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never
enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of
slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a
daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may
never exorcise that abandonment.
Lancelot Lamar is a disenchanted lawyer who finds himself confined in a mental asylum with
memories that don't seem worth remembering. It all began the day he accidentally
discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter, a discovery which sent Lancelot
on modern quest to reverse the degeneration of America. Percy's novel reveals a shining
knight for the modern age--a knight not of romance, but of revenge.
No other writer can match the impressive oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates. High Lonesome: New
and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers short fiction from the acclaimed author's seminal
collections and includes eleven new tales that further demonstrate the breathtaking artistry
and striking originality of an incomparable talent who "has imbued the American short story
with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces" (Chicago Tribune).
When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies,
she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its
assessment of her characters’ drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a
voice of her generation. Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque. Subtle, wry, and
unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the
myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four
decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood
and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.
Each Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch
it up, eager to know what’s happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious noman’s-land known as interpersonal relations." With an unparalleled gift for dialogue and
laser wit, she delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time. Ann Beattie: The
New Yorker Stories is the perfect initiation for readers new to this iconic American writer.
Winner of the 1961 National Book Award
The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern
literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.
The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with
the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he
cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself
dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable
moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a harebrained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him
reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony
and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.
Henry James' classic tale of romance in urban nineteenth-century America, "Washington
Square" is edited with an introduction and notes by Martha Banta in "Penguin Classics".
When timid and plain Catherine Sloper is courted by the dashing and determined Morris
Townsend, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter,
delivers an ultimatum: break off her engagement, or be stripped of her inheritance. Torn
between her desire to win her father's love and approval and her passion for the only man
who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes
all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James' masterly
novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York
society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed. This edition of "Washington
Square" includes a chronology, suggested further reading, notes and an introduction
discussing the novel's lasting influence and James' depiction of the quiet strength of his
heroine. Henry James (1843-1916) son of a prominent theologian, and brother to the
philosopher William James, was one of the most celebrated novelists of the fin-de-siecle. His
novella "Daisy Miller" (1878) established him as a literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic,
and his other novels in "Penguin Classics" include "Washington Square" (1880), "The Portrait
of a Lady" (1881), "The Awkward Age" (1899), "The Wings of the Dove" (1902), "The
Ambassadors" (1903) and "The Golden Bowl" (1904). If you enjoyed "Washington Square",
you might like Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth", also available in "Penguin Classics".
""Washington Square" is a perfectly balanced novel...a work of surpassing refinement and
interest". (Elizabeth Hardwick). "Perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully
invaded the feminine field and produced a work comparable to Jane Austen's". (Graham
Greene).
"It is rare that I literally laugh out loud while I'm reading, but Janzen's voice—singular,
deadpan, sharp-witted and honest—slayed me." —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray,
Love
Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough
that her husband of fifteen years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same
week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her
life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite
family's home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda's
good-natured mother suggested she get over her heartbreak by dating her first cousin—he
owned a tractor, see.)
Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith, love, family, and aging—
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to
touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead.
The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century.This P.S.
edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews,
recommended reading, and more.
Through it is often categorized as a coming-of-age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much
more than that. Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud
American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of
the century. The story begins in 1912, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where elevenyear-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a blissful Saturday
collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few
pennies. Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in
the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among
everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a
recurring symbol of the Nolan's self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.
Those dreams sustain every member of the extended Nolan family, not just the children.
Their mother Katie scrubs floors and works as a janitor to provide the family with free
lodging. She is the primary breadwinner because her husband Johnny, a singing waiter, is
often drunk and out of work. Yet there is no dissension in the Nolan household. Katie
married a charming dreamer and she accepts her fate, but she vows that things will be
better for her children. Her dream is that they will go to college and that Neeley will become
a doctor. Intelligent and bookish, Francie seems destined to fulfill this ambition - Neeley less
so.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) her own pragmatic nature, Francie feels a stronger affinity
with her ne'er-do-well father than with her self-sacrificing mother. In her young eyes, Johnny
can make wishes come true, as when he finagles her a place in a better public school outside
their neighborhood. When Johnny dies an alcohol-related death, leaving behind the two
school-aged children and another on the way, Francie cannot quite believe that life can carry
on as before. Somehow it does, although the family's small enough dreams need to be
further curtailed. Through Katie's determination, Francie and Neeley are able to graduate
from the eighth grade, but thoughts of high school give way to the reality of going to work.
Their jobs, which take them for the first time across the bridge into Manhattan, introduce
them to a broader view of life, beyond the parochial boundaries of Williamsburg. Here
Francie feels the pain of her first love affair. And with determination equal to her mother's,
she finds a way to complete her education. As she heads off to college at the end of the
book, Francie leaves behind the old neighborhood, but carries away in her heart the beloved
Brooklyn of her childhood.
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into
a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a
slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many
memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And
Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose
tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as
taut as a rope.
The New York Trilogy is the series that made New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster
a renowned writer of metafiction and genre-rebelling detective fiction. The New York
Review of Books has called his work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary
literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, these uniquely stylized detective
novels include City of Glass in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call
in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case
that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself.
In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on
Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as
well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and
nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.
This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc
Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning
graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.
“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything
else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a
novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological
directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and
compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his
identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one
Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and
moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in
the way Americans understand themselves.
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one
Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote
of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New
Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low
comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
The paperback edition of one of the most acclaimed novels of the year -- a love story & legal
drama that received five starred reviews and multiple honors.
Marcelo Sandoval hears music no one else can hear--part of the autism-like impairment no
doctor has been able to identify--and he's always attended a special school where his
differences have been protected. But the summer after his junior year, his father demands
that Marcelo work in his law firm's mailroom in order to experience "the real world."
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August
of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent
driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the GreekAmerican Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in
Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the
race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe,
Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty
family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most
audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is
an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American
literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books 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 he’s assigned,
he’ll 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.
This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new
introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman
Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph
Heller’s personal archive; and much more.
This classic collection—the only one-volume selection of Arthur Miller's work available—
presents a rich cross section of writing from one of our most influential and humane
playwrights, containing in full his masterpieces The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. This
essential collection also includes the complete texts of After the Fall, The American Clock,
The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass, winner of the Olivier Award for Best Play of 1995, as well
as excerpts from Miller's memoir Timebends. An essay by Harold Clurman and Christopher
Bigsby's introduction discuss Miller's standing as one of the greatest American playwrights of
all time and his importance to twentieth-century literature.
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people-people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up.
Carver celebrates these men and women.
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an
introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay
"The World I Live In."
It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power
and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee
Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how
the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal
brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica
Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one
of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as
the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.
Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur
Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A
Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic
dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new
edition of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small
Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the
prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St.
Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age–and has to live with the consequences
for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself and the
kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in
love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic that will
touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter
family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces.
There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture,
trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing
empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into
the nature of American violence.