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How Many Books on the "Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels" List Have You Read?
Time Magazine's All-Time best 100 English language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100book...
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100book...
want to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
by Harper Lee
4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 avg rating — 1,408,603 ratings
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that r...more
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.(less)
1984
by George Orwell
by George Orwell
4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 avg rating — 916,581 ratings
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while the year 198...more
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while the year 1984 has come and gone, Orwell's narrative is timelier than ever. 1984 presents 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 multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions. A legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time.(less)
The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)
by J.R.R. Tolkien
by J.R.R. Tolkien
4.41 of 5 stars 4.41 avg rating — 208,850 ratings
A fantastic starter set for new Tolkien fans or readers interested in rediscovering the magic of Mid...more
A fantastic starter set for new Tolkien fans or readers interested in rediscovering the magic of Middle-earth, this three-volume box set features paperback editions of the complete trilogy -- The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King -- each with art from the New Line Productions feature film on the cover.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a genuine masterpiece. The most widely read and influential fantasy epic of all time, it is also quite simply one of the most memorable and beloved tales ever told. Originally published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings set the framework upon which all epic/quest fantasy since has been built. Through the urgings of the enigmatic wizard Gandalf, young hobbit Frodo Baggins embarks on an urgent, incredibly treacherous journey to destroy the One Ring. This ring -- created and then lost by the Dark Lord, Sauron, centuries earlier -- is a weapon of evil, one that Sauron desperately wants returned to him. With the power of the ring once again his own, the Dark Lord will unleash his wrath upon all of Middle-earth. The only way to prevent this horrible fate from becoming reality is to return the Ring to Mordor, the only place it can be destroyed. Unfortunately for our heroes, Mordor is also Sauron's lair. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is essential reading not only for fans of fantasy but for lovers of classic literature as well...(less)
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
by J.D. Salinger
3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 avg rating — 1,099,758 ratings
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish,...more
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme ? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully 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: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's 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.(less)
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 1,165,854 ratings
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary...more
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.(less)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)
by Hiawyn Oram
by Hiawyn Oram
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating — 1,741 ratings
Narnia: A magical land full of wonder and excitement. A place where you will meet Aslan, the bravest...more
Narnia: A magical land full of wonder and excitement. A place where you will meet Aslan, the bravest of lions, and a beautiful but wicked Witch. There are lots of other fabulous creatures too: giants and dwarfs and animals that talk.
It all begins when four children -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- discover a strange old wardrobe. Stepping inside, they find that it's stranger still, because behind all the fur coats there is a wondrous land of trees and mountains, all glistening with snow.
The White Witch has spread an icy winter everywhere. Only Aslan can defeat her and reverse her wicked spell. The children must find the lion before it is too late. If they fail, the Witch will make them her prisoners forever.
In the fifty years since it was written, The Lion, the Witch And the Wardrobe has become one of the great classics of children's literature. Now younger children can share the magical experience, stepping into a world of enchantment that will forever lure them back.(less)
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
by William Golding
3.59 of 5 stars 3.59 avg rating — 913,233 ratings
William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral isl...more
William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible. Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature.
Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic.(less)
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
by George Orwell
3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 avg rating — 992,403 ratings
Tired of their servitude to man, a group of farm animals revolt and establish their own society, onl...more
Tired of their servitude to man, a group of farm animals revolt and establish their own society, only to be betrayed into worse servitude by their leaders, the pigs, whose slogan becomes: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Published in 1945, this powerful satire of the Russian Revolution under Stalin remains as vivid and relevant today as it was on its first publication.(less)
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
by Joseph Heller
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating — 273,930 ratings
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in Am...more
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.
At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.
Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane—a masterpiece of our time.(less)
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
by John Steinbeck
3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 avg rating — 269,262 ratings
John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western movement of...more
John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western movement of one family and a nation in search of work and human dignity. Perhaps the most American of American classics.
The novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity and a future. When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." The book won Steinbeck a large following among the working class, perhaps due to the book's sympathy to the workers' movement and its accessible prose style.
The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940.(less)
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
by Margaret Mitchell
4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 avg rating — 465,498 ratings
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War, Margaret Mitchell's epic love story is...more
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War, Margaret Mitchell's epic love story is an unforgettable tale of love and loss, of a nation mortally divided and its people forever changed. At the heart of all this chaos is the story of beautiful, ruthless Scarlett 'O' Hara and the dashing soldier of fortune, Rhett Butler.(less)
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
by Kurt Vonnegut
3.97 of 5 stars 3.97 avg rating — 472,551 ratings
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who beco...more
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor.(less)
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov
3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 avg rating — 285,625 ratings
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous a...more
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story 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. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.(less)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
by Ken Kesey
4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 avg rating — 247,353 ratings
In this classic of the 1960s, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, f...more
In this classic of the 1960s, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless oppnonents: Nurse Ratched, back by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax.(less)
A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
by Anthony Burgess
3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating — 216,315 ratings
A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror...more
A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title.
In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where 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 Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked".(less)
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
by Judy Blume
by Judy Blume
3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 avg rating — 91,863 ratings
Margaret Simon, almost twelve, has just moved from New York City to the suburbs, and she's anxious t...more
Margaret Simon, almost twelve, has just moved from New York City to the suburbs, and she's anxious to fit in with her new friends. When she's asked to join a secret club she jumps at the chance. But when the girls start talking about boys, bras, and getting their first periods, Margaret starts to wonder if she's normal. There are some things about growing up that are hard for her to talk about, even with her friends. Lucky for Margaret, she's got someone else to confide in... someone who always listens.(less)
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
by Kazuo Ishiguro
3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 avg rating — 145,091 ratings
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel tha...more
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy – now thirty-one years old – lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed – even comforted – by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance – and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.(less)
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
by Ian McEwan
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 194,140 ratings
Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides al...more
Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.(less)
Watchmen
by Alan Moore
by Alan Moore
4.31 of 5 stars 4.31 avg rating — 195,144 ratings
This Hugo Award-winning graphic novel chronicles the fall from grace of a group of super-heroes plag...more
This Hugo Award-winning graphic novel chronicles the fall from grace of a group of super-heroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the super-hero is dissected as the heroes are stalked by an unknown assassin.
One of the most influential graphic novels of all time and a perennial best-seller, Watchmen has been studied on college campuses across the nation and is considered a gateway title, leading readers to other graphic novels such as V for Vendetta, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and The Sandman series.(less)
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 160,482 ratings
The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway’s mas...more
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.(less)
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
by Chinua Achebe
3.52 of 5 stars 3.52 avg rating — 106,672 ratings
THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo,...more
THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.
The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.(less)
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
by Virginia Woolf
3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 avg rating — 74,498 ratings
Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's l...more
Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old."Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since. "Mrs. Dalloway also contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century." --Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours(less)
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
by Toni Morrison
3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 avg rating — 136,074 ratings
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a s...more
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, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.(less)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
by Ralph Ellison
3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating — 62,547 ratings
First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare...more
First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.
As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.(less)
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
by Jack Kerouac
3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 avg rating — 140,929 ratings
In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose acc...more
In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject—the search for a place as an outsider in America. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.
"Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac." —Luther Nichols, San Francisco Examiner
"Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation." —Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times
@Didn’tTypeOnTP! For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac. From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less(less)
The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
by Raymond Chandler
by Raymond Chandler
4.07 of 5 stars 4.07 avg rating — 38,888 ratings
When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesom...more
When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.
“Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”
—Ross Macdonald(less)
A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
by E.M. Forster
3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 25,940 ratings
A picture of the clash between ruler and ruled and of the prejudices and misunderstandings that fore...more
A picture of the clash between ruler and ruled and of the prejudices and misunderstandings that foredoomed Britain's "jewel of the crown", this novel of society in India ranks high among the great literature of the 20th century.(less)
Possession
by A.S. Byatt
by A.S. Byatt
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 34,302 ratings
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarati...more
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom.(less)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
by Zora Neale Hurston
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 100,200 ratings
One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s belov...more
One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston’s masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published—perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.(less)
I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)
by Robert Graves
by Robert Graves
4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 avg rating — 20,174 ratings
From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54:
Considered a...more
From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54:
Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. Historical novel set in 1st-century-AD Rome by Robert Graves, published in 1934. The book is written as an autobiographical memoir by Roman emperor Claudius. Physically weak, afflicted with stammering, and inclined to drool, Claudius is an embarrassment to his family and is shunted to the background of imperial affairs. The benefits of his seeming ineffectuality are twofold: he becomes a scholar and historian, and he is spared the worst cruelties inflicted on the imperial family by its own members during the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. Palace intrigues and murders surround him. Claudius' informal narration serves to emphasize the banality of the imperial family's endless greed and lust. The story concludes with Claudius ascending to the imperial throne. A sequel, Claudius, the God and His Wife Messalina (1935), covers Claudius' years as Roman emperor.(less)
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 75,945 ratings
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Co...more
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
This edition follows the text of The Sound and the Fury as corrected in 1984. It includes an editor's note by Noel Polk on the corrections following the text.(less)
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood*
by Margaret Atwood*
3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 avg rating — 60,558 ratings
"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge"
More than fifty years on, Ir...more
"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge"
More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...(less)
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
by Virginia Woolf
3.73 of 5 stars 3.73 avg rating — 44,140 ratings
The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Light...more
The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of one family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and it greatest triumph--the human capacity for change. A moving portrait in miniature of family life, it also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.
There are very few exceptional and miraculous novels that have the power to change their readers forever. To the Lighthouse is one of them.(less)
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley #3)
by John le Carré
by John le Carré
3.96 of 5 stars 3.96 avg rating — 16,812 ratings
In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he cre...more
In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carre brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.(less)
All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
by Robert Penn Warren
4.05 of 5 stars 4.05 avg rating — 25,821 ratings
More than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-er...more
More than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—it’s not much of one—of goodness in a sinful world. Willie Stark, Warren’s lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the onetime Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. Jack Burden is his press agent, who carries out the boss’s orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that’s simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.(less)
The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
by John Fowles
3.81 of 5 stars 3.81 avg rating — 18,588 ratings
In this contemporary, Victorian-style novel Charles Smithson, a nineteenth-century gentleman with gl...more
In this contemporary, Victorian-style novel Charles Smithson, a nineteenth-century gentleman with glimmerings of twentieth-century perceptions, falls in love with enigmatic Sarah Woodruff, who has been jilted by a French lover.
Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England.
Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.(less)
Light in August
by William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 avg rating — 25,610 ratings
Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulk...more
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.(less)
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
by William S. Burroughs
3.47 of 5 stars 3.47 avg rating — 32,570 ratings
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important no...more
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.(less)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
by Carson McCullers
3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 avg rating — 37,761 ratings
With the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twen...more
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, and an enduring masterpiece.
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 (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Brilliantly 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, to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.(less)
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
by Neal Stephenson
3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 avg rating — 100,530 ratings
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metav...more
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.(less)
Ragtime
by E.L. Doctorow
by E.L. Doctorow
3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 avg rating — 14,636 ratings
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapes...more
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.(less)
Native Son
by Richard Wright
by Richard Wright
3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 avg rating — 36,077 ratings
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or pett...more
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.(less)
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
by David Foster Wallace
4.35 of 5 stars 4.35 avg rating — 23,516 ratings
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway ho...more
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the Enfield Tennis Academy search for the master copy of a movie so dangerously entertaining that its viewers die in a state of catatonic bliss. Explores essential questions about what entertainment is, why we need it, and what it says about who we are.(less)
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
by Evelyn Waugh
3.98 of 5 stars 3.98 avg rating — 32,893 ratings
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the g...more
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.(less)
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
by Cormac McCarthy
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating — 34,016 ratings
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridi...more
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.Publisher's Note: The 25th Anniversary Edition has been reset, causing the text to reflow. Page references based on earlier editions will no longer apply, so Vintage Books has compiled the following chart as a conversion aid. Download the chart by copying and pasting the following link into your browser:http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/BloodMeridianPageReference.pdf(less)
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
by Don DeLillo
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 36,773 ratings
A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the stor...more
A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an "airborne toxic event" that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.(less)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
by Muriel Spark
3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 avg rating — 12,533 ratings
Jean Brodie is a teacher with advanced and unconventional ideas that put her at odds with the other...more
Jean Brodie is a teacher with advanced and unconventional ideas that put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, as she endeavours to shape the lives of the select group of girls who form her "set".(less)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
by Thornton Wilder
3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 avg rating — 10,442 ratings
This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documenta...more
This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.This new edition of Wilder's 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.(less)
Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
by Salman Rushdie
4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 avg rating — 44,035 ratings
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriou...more
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century.(less)
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
by Willa Cather
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 12,300 ratings
There is something epic--and almost mythic--about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, alt...more
There is something epic--and almost mythic--about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief.
In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, although he must contend with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. One of these events Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.(less)
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
by Richard Yates
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 35,982 ratings
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talent...more
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.(less)
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
by Jean Rhys
3.5 of 5 stars 3.50 avg rating — 21,092 ratings
Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre...more
Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.(less)
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
by Graham Greene
3.98 of 5 stars 3.98 avg rating — 11,453 ratings
In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outla...more
In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.(less)
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
by Jonathan Franzen
3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 avg rating — 69,236 ratings
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately...more
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man—or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.(less)
Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
by Philip Roth
3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 avg rating — 20,377 ratings
Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical a...more
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 fur 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.(less)
Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)
by William Gibson
by William Gibson
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 114,220 ratings
The Matrixis a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of ever...more
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the century's most potent visions of the future.(less)
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
by Philip Roth
3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 avg rating — 20,739 ratings
To decipher the late 1960′s through the story of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of t...more
To decipher the late 1960′s through the story of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of those years, Roth calls again upon the saturnine side of his disposition. It answers to the purpose as never before. Good-looking, prosperous Swede, who has inherited his father’s glove factory in Newark, N.J., and married a former beauty queen, is not stupid, merely fulfilled. Is it this that gives him insufficient means to comprehend the Newark riots of 1967 or the transformation of his beloved daughter into a venomous teenage radical, a child capable of cold-blooded terrorism? Roth’s own means are more than sufficient. A writer who is unafraid to linger in the minds of furious men, he leads us fearlessly through this man’s grief, bewilderment and rage.(less)
Red Harvest
by Dashiell Hammett
by Dashiell Hammett
4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 avg rating — 8,379 ratings
When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the...more
When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.(less)
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
by Zadie Smith
3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 avg rating — 48,772 ratings
On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust...more
On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.
Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families—one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad —devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"— weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.
Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes —faith, race, gender, history, and culture— and triumphs.(less)
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
by Thomas Pynchon
3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 avg rating — 27,204 ratings
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide cons...more
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.(less)
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
by Malcolm Lowry
3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 avg rating — 8,074 ratings
Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Here the consul's debilit...more
Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Here the consul's debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life. Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul's life - the Day of the Dead, 1938. His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. Yvonne's mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half-brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. Under the Volcano remains one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition and one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.(less)
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
by Kingsley Amis
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 8,922 ratings
Kingsley Amis has written a marvelously funny novel describing the attempts of England's postwar gen...more
Kingsley Amis has written a marvelously funny novel describing the attempts of England's postwar generation to break from that country's traditional class structure. When it appeared in England, Lucky Jim provoked a heated controversy in which everyone took sides. Even W. Somerset Maugham reviewed the book, happily with great favor: "Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observations so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the classes with which his novel is concerned."(less)
The Heart Of The Matter
by Graham Greene
by Graham Greene
3.97 of 5 stars 3.97 avg rating — 10,978 ratings
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD
Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime West African state,...more
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD
Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.(less)
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
by Jerzy Kosiński
3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 avg rating — 7,462 ratings
Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure...more
Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Called by the Los Angeles Times "one of the most imposing novels of the decade," it was eventuallly translated into more than thirty languages. A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, The Painted Bird is a dark masterpiece that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is the first, and the most famous, novel by one of the most important and original writers of this century.(less)
Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
by John Updike
3.54 of 5 stars 3.54 avg rating — 21,777 ratings
Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—o...more
Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.(less)
Play It as It Lays
by Joan Didion
by Joan Didion
3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 avg rating — 7,653 ratings
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an...more
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.(less)
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
by Thomas Pynchon
4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 avg rating — 14,814 ratings
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity’s Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustive...more
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity’s Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce’s Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (split award). That same year, the Pulitzer Prize fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene". (Kihss 1974) (No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded and finalists were not announced before 1980.) In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.(less)
A House for Mr Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
by V.S. Naipaul
3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating — 6,890 ratings
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul's brilliant career, A House for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettabl...more
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 been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous and endless struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.(less)
Go Tell it on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
by James Baldwin
3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating — 12,855 ratings
"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." G...more
"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.(less)
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating — 15,912 ratings
In Pale Fire, Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive g...more
In Pale Fire, Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry, one-upmanship, and political intrigue.“This centaur work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century.” — Mary McCarthy(less)
The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
by Nathanael West
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 7,719 ratings
The Day of the Locustis a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream t...more
The Day of the Locustis a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires--from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.(less)
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
by Walker Percy
3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 avg rating — 9,747 ratings
Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the...more
Winner of the 1961 National Book AwardThe 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 hare-brained 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.(less)
The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
by Doris Lessing
3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 avg rating — 6,949 ratings
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one with a b...more
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one with a black cover she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one records her political life, her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.(less)
Appointment in Samarra
by John O'Hara
by John O'Hara
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 4,671 ratings
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Missi...more
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines. But he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor and a couple of reckless gestures. (Now Julian, don’t throw that drink in the well-connected Irishman’s face. Don’t make that pass at the gangster’s mistress.) That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the lowlifes. In O’Hara they could be happening to you.(less)
Money
by Martin Amis
by Martin Amis
3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 avg rating — 7,688 ratings
Time Magazine included the book in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 200...more
Time Magazine included the book in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, fast food, drugs, porn and more, Money is ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage; a tale of life lived without restraint, of money and the disasters it can precipitate.(less)
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
by Henry Miller
3.7 of 5 stars 3.70 avg rating — 23,658 ratings
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obsce...more
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, �one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”(less)
The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
by William Styron
3.92 of 5 stars 3.92 avg rating — 5,618 ratings
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only...more
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...
The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, William Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations - and hopes - which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.(less)
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
by Marilynne Robinson
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 14,495 ratings
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up hap...more
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.(less)
Ubik
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 avg rating — 21,279 ratings
Glen Runciter is dead. Or is everybody else? Someone died in an explosion orchestrated by Runciter's...more
Glen Runciter is dead. Or is everybody else? Someone died in an explosion orchestrated by Runciter's business competitors. And, indeed, it's the kingly Runciter whose funeral is scheduled in Des Moines. But in the meantime, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering - and sometimes scatological - messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping in ways that suggest that their own time is running out. Or already has. Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again(less)
Herzog
by Saul Bellow
by Saul Bellow
3.77 of 5 stars 3.77 avg rating — 7,504 ratings
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life...more
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart.(less)
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
by Evelyn Waugh
3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 avg rating — 9,261 ratings
Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where...more
Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.(less)
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead
by Christina Stead
3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 avg rating — 1,416 ratings
Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous e...more
Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly not relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness they complain of is extreme.(less)
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
by Paul Bowles
3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating — 9,225 ratings
The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating stor...more
The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.
A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.(less)
Deliverance
by James Dickey
by James Dickey
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 14,435 ratings
The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the...more
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.(less)
The Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
by Richard Ford
3.7 of 5 stars 3.70 avg rating — 6,624 ratings
As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely w...more
As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.(less)
Call It Sleep
by Henry Roth
by Henry Roth
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 3,227 ratings
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical accl...more
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world. Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the “dangerously imaginative” child coming of age in the slums of New York.(less)
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
by Saul Bellow
3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 avg rating — 6,643 ratings
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago...more
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American fiction. (For the record, Bellow was born in Canada.) Or it would be if Ishmael had been more like Tom Jones with a philosophical disposition. With this teeming book Bellow returned a Dickensian richness to the American novel. As he makes his way to a full brimming consciousness of himself, Augie careens through numberless occupations and countless mentors and exemplars, all the while enchanting us with the slapdash American music of his voice.(less)
The Sot-Weed Factor
by John Barth
by John Barth
4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 avg rating — 2,997 ratings
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired...more
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.
On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.(less)
The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris & Goodbye to Berlin
by Christopher Isherwood
by Christopher Isherwood
4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 avg rating — 3,759 ratings
The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin make up this 1945 reissue of Christopher Isherwood's fi...more
The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin make up this 1945 reissue of Christopher Isherwood's finest novels. Both are set in 1930s Berlin during the rise of Hitler. Based in part on the author's experience as an English tutor in Germany, each one is a theatric mélange of fact and fiction, a rousing and provocative intersection of history and fantasy. The Last of Mr. Norris depicts the debauchery of an aging criminal caught in the struggle between the Nazis and the Communists. Goodbye to Berlin, an account of young man who explores his sexual identity in the city's nightclubs, is narrated by Isherwood himself and is considered among the most significant political novels of the twentieth century. Together the stories detail the tenuous existence of marginal people who are unaware of the political horrors to come.(less)
At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O'Brien
by Flann O'Brien
3.97 of 5 stars 3.97 avg rating — 4,372 ratings
A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, l...more
A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.
Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction. It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature.(less)
A Death in the Family
by James Agee
by James Agee
3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 avg rating — 5,896 ratings
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an Americ...more
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.
On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay's wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.
"An utterly individual and original book...one of the most deeply worked out expressions of human feeling that I have ever read."--Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review
"It is, in the full sense, poetry....The language of the book, at once luminous and discreet...remains in the mind."--New Republic
"People I know who read A Death in the Family forty years ago still talk about it. So do I. It is a great book, and I'm happy to see it done anew."--Andre Dubus, author of Dancing After Hours and Meditations From A Moveable Chair(less)
Loving
by Henry Green
by Henry Green
3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 avg rating — 975 ratings
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country hous...more
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces of authority to create an anarchic environment of self-seeking behaviour, pilfering, gossip and love.
With an Introduction by Philip Hensher(less)
A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
by Anthony Powell
by Anthony Powell
4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 1,659 ratings
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century...more
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars.Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World(less)
Under the Net
by Iris Murdoch
by Iris Murdoch
3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 avg rating — 4,073 ratings
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.
Jake, hack writer and spo...more
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.
Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’ he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog and a political riot in a film-set of ancient Rome. Jake, fascinated, longs to learn Hugo’s secret. Perhaps Hugo’s secret is Hugo himself? Admonished, enlightened, Jake hopes at last to become a real writer.(less)
The Assistant
by Bernard Malamud
by Bernard Malamud
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 3,386 ratings
Introduction by Jonathan RosenBernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the s...more
Introduction by Jonathan RosenBernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store.Like Malamud’s best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers.(less)
Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
by Robert Stone
3.73 of 5 stars 3.73 avg rating — 2,289 ratings
In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thi...more
In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.(less)
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser
by Theodore Dreiser
3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 avg rating — 14,919 ratings
A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, "An American Tragedy" is the culmination of T...more
A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, "An American Tragedy" is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser's elementally powerful fictional art. Taking as his point of departure a notorious murder case of 1910, Dreiser immersed himself in the social background of the crime to produce a book that is both a remarkable work of reportage and a monumental study of character. Few novels have undertaken to track so relentlessly the process by which an ordinary young man becomes capable of committing a ruthless murder, and the further process by which social and political forces come into play after his arrest. In Clyde Griffiths, the impoverished, restless offspring of a family of street preachers, Dreiser created an unforgettable portrait of a man whose circumstances and dreams of self-betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence. Around Clyde, Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed fictional portrait of early twentieth-century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption. The sheer prophetic amplitude of his bitter truth-telling, in idiosyncratic prose of uncanny expressive power, continues to mark Dreiser as a crucially important American writer. "An American Tragedy," the great achievement of his later years, is a work of mythic force, at once brutal and heartbreaking.(less)
Falconer
by John Cheever
by John Cheever
3.64 of 5 stars 3.64 avg rating — 2,840 ratings
Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and puni...more
Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.(less)
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen
by Elizabeth Bowen
3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 avg rating — 2,264 ratings
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately ex...more
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 devastating gift for divining human motivations.In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London.There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and her fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal--and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.(less)
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