Of Mice and Men is a poignant narrative that captures the journey of two outsiders, George and his intellectually disabled friend Lennie, as they cling to the hope of carving out a place for themselves in a world that often seems heartless. The duo, bound by their shared dream of one day owning their own piece of land, find themselves toiling on a ranch in California's Salinas Valley.

Their aspirations are threatened by the harsh realities they face, including cruelty, misunderstanding, and envy. Lennie, a man of immense physical strength yet gentle at heart, becomes entangled in a series of events that test the limits of their friendship and the fragility of their dreams. Steinbeck's narrative weaves themes of camaraderie, the pursuit of shared goals, and the plight of America's marginalized individuals into a story that continues to resonate with readers across generations.

The Adventures of Augie March introduces us to Augie, an exuberant narrator-hero who is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. From the very first line, Augie captivates us with his free-spirited approach to life: "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."

With a style reminiscent of Dickens, Saul Bellow fills this novel with a rich tapestry of characters and experiences. Augie is a "born recruit," making himself available for a series of occupations, and then proudly rejecting each as unworthy. His journey is filled with colorful companions—plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and "hole-and-corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures.

Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life. His quest for reality, fulfillment, and love takes him from the depths of poverty to the peaks of worldly success, standing as an irresistible, poignant incarnation of the American idea of freedom.

This novel is written in the cascades of brilliant, biting, ravishing prose that would come to be known as “Bellovian,” re-writing the language of Bellow’s generation.

Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is James Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. This novel 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.

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem. This "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times) opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

The Stories of John Cheever is a remarkable collection of sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."

This collection spans the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, showcasing tales that have helped define the short story form. Cheever’s crowning achievement is his ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, acknowledging that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment.

On the Road is a quintessential novel of America and the Beat Generation. It chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, a sideburned hero of the snowy West. As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience.

Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. This classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat" and has inspired every generation since its initial publication.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.

Cities of the Plain is the concluding volume of The Border Trilogy, crafted by the National Book Award-winning author Cormac McCarthy. This magnificent novel serves as a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier.

Set in 1952, the story follows John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, who work as ranch hands in New Mexico, near the proving grounds of Alamogordo and the cities of El Paso and Juarez. Their lives are filled with trail drives, horse auctions, and stories told by campfire light. They cherish this life, knowing it is about to change forever.

The change is triggered when John Grady falls in love with a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute, setting in motion a chain of violent and unstoppable events. The novel is haunting in its beauty, filled with sorrow, humor, and awe. Cities of the Plain is a genuine American epic, capturing the essence of a world on the brink of transformation.

Breakfast of Champions is a story featuring one of Kurt Vonnegut's most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout. Trout discovers, much to his dismay, that a Midwest car dealer has taken his fiction for reality. What ensues is a satirical romp that deftly critiques American society.

Vonnegut takes aim at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and environmental pollution, challenging the reader to see past the absurdity and recognize the underlying truths.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors—a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb—Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness.

Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe and who we say we are. It's a darkly comedic narrative that challenges our perceptions and invites us to explore the chaotic dance of fate and consequence.

Main Street, the story of an idealistic young woman's attempts to reform her small town, brought Sinclair Lewis immediate acclaim when it was published in 1920. It remains one of the essential texts of the American scene.

Carol Milford dreams of living in a small, rural town. But Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, isn't the paradise she'd imagined. As a work of social satire, this complex and compelling look at small-town America in the early 20th century has earned its place among the classics.

Satirizing small-town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis's most famous book, contributing to his eventual Nobel Prize for Literature. It relates the life and struggles of Carol Milford Kennicott as she comes into conflict with the small-town mentality of the residents of Gopher Prairie.

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, "These Is My Words" belongs to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon--from child to determined young adult to loving mother--she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose.

Rich in authentic everyday details and alive with truly unforgettable characters, "These Is My Words" brilliantly brings a vanished world to breathtaking life again.

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic and one of the world's great antiwar books, centers on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes the novel as a result of a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. The novel combines elements of historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in the life story of Billy Pilgrim.

Billy, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee, experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he also experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five established Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as a cult hero in American literature, a status that has only strengthened over time despite censorship challenges. The novel's political edginess, genre-bending inventiveness, frank violence, and transgressive wit have inspired generations of readers to see the world differently and speak out.

More than fifty years after its initial publication during the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety remains darkly humorous and profoundly affecting, serving as an enduring beacon through our own era's uncertainties.

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia — a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist, Charles Croker, once a college football star, is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality.

Charlie has a 29,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt.

Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, an idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.

Back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Canon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.

Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates — Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker’s deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to this hilarious and telling novel — Tom Wolfe’s most outstanding achievement to date.

The extraordinary gifts for evocation and insight and the stunning talent for storytelling that earned Rick Bragg a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 are here brought to bear on the wrenching story of his own family's life. It is the story of a violent, war-haunted, alcoholic father and a strong-willed, loving mother who struggled to protect her three sons from the effects of poverty and ignorance that had tainted her own life. It is the story of the life Bragg was able to carve out for himself on the strength of his mother's encouragement and belief.

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. At the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives—and the country that shaped and nourished them—with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. This poignant and moving tale is filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache. It's crowded with life, people, and vivid incidents.

The story follows the young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg. The daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are portrayed with raw honesty and are tenderly threaded with family connectedness. Betty Smith's work is a brilliant literary piece that captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.

A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield - the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote his ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right.

In what is arguably his greatest work, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.

Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

Today, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In 'The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald', Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction.

The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks."

These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context. Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. This essential collection is a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature.

Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown. The book explores the theme of government surveillance of electronically stored information on the private lives of citizens, and the possible civil liberties and ethical implications of using such technology.

When the NSA's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage—not by guns or bombs—but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.

Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.

The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’ essay “The World I Live In.”

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the ’40s and ’50s.

Bob Slocum was living the American dream. He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house... and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all — all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until... something happened.

Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain — recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22.

The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm in Mt. Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five year span of this ambitious novel, the Mulvaneys will slide, almost imperceptibly at first, from the pinnacle of happiness, transformed by the vagaries of fate into a scattered collection of lost and lonely souls.

It is the youngest son, Judd, now an adult, who attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys' former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that occasioned the family's tragic downfall. Each of the Mulvaneys endures some form of exile- physical or spiritual - but in the end they find a way to bridge the chasms that have opened up among them, reuniting in the spirit of love and healing.

Cold Mountain is a novel about a soldier’s perilous journey back to his beloved near the Civil War's end. At once a love story and a harrowing account of one man’s long walk home, Cold Mountain introduces a new talent in American literature.

Based on local history and family stories passed down by Frazier’s great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded Confederate soldier, Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada. His odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada’s struggle to revive her father’s farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman and Ada confront the vastly transformed world they’ve been delivered.

Frazier reveals insight into human relations with the land and the dangers of solitude. He also shares with the great 19th-century novelists a keen observation of a society undergoing change. Cold Mountain recreates a world gone by that speaks to our time.

"Sometimes it all comes over me," young Abbie said to her fiancé, "that I can do big things. It's ahead of me...kind of like a light in the woods that shines and stays far away." And when I read verse or hear music...or...sing...it beckons me on, and my throat hurts with wanting to do something great."

Abbie Deal did do something great, even if it wasn't what she had dreamed of. Years later, when her children, raised in a rude sod hut, were prosperous men and women of a thriving state, she could say proudly, "I've seen everything...and I've hardly been away from this yard." I've seen the feeble beginnings of a raw state and the civilization that developed there, and I've been part of the beginning and part of the growth.

But it's funny," she added, "I was always too busy filling up the youngsters and getting patches on the overalls to notice that I was part of the epic."

A strong and vigorous picture of pioneer life. The magnificent story of a young girl who went West as a bride—and helped to build a nation.

The classic novel of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.

In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose by Truman Capote that delves into the chilling true story of the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. On November 15, 1959, the Clutters were brutally killed, with no apparent motive and scant clues left behind. Capote's reconstruction of the crime, the ensuing investigation, and the eventual capture, trial, and execution of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, is both suspenseful and empathetically narrated.

The narrative draws a vivid and humanizing portrait of the killers, depicting them as reprehensible yet frighteningly human. Through Capote's skilled journalistic approach combined with a powerfully evocative narrative, readers are offered a gripping and poignant insight into the nature of violence in America.

Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican immigrants Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Fight Club follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, the protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. Then he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.

In this novel, Chuck Palahniuk offers a dark and provocative look into the depths of the human psyche, delivering a tale that is as unsettling as it is compelling. With biting satire and a unique voice, Fight Club has become a modern classic, exploring themes of identity, consumerism, and the search for meaning in a contemporary world.

In Gustave Doré, one of the most prolific and successful book illustrators of the late 19th century, Edgar Allan Poe's renowned poem The Raven found perhaps its most perfect artistic interpreter. Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written.

This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed, masterly engravings from a rare 19th-century edition of the poem. Relevant lines from the poem are printed on facing pages and the complete text is also included. Admirers of Doré will find ample evidence here of his characteristic ability to capture the mood and meaning of a work of literature in striking imagery; lovers of The Raven will delight in seeing its mournful musing on love and loss given dramatic pictorial form.

In Our Time is a remarkable collection of short stories and vignettes by Ernest Hemingway, marking his American debut and earning him instant fame. First published in 1925, it was lauded by literary giants like Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The collection is celebrated for its simple and precise language, conveying a wide range of complex emotions.

Within its pages, readers will find several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler." These stories introduce the hallmarks of Hemingway's style: a lean, tough prose enlivened by an ear for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic, suggesting, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and clarity of heart.

Recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to understanding Hemingway's later works. Its themes of alienation, loss, and grief are conveyed through a style known as Hemingway's "theory of omission" or iceberg theory, making it an essential read for any literature enthusiast.

On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment, the tenuous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William Maxwell delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past.

Desolation Angels is a vivid, semi-autobiographical novel by the renowned Beat Generation author, Jack Kerouac. This book is part of his celebrated Duluoz Legend series.

Kerouac takes us on a journey through a key year of his life, starting from his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade mountains of Washington state. The story follows his fictional self, Jack Duluoz, as he transitions from the isolation of the mountains to the vibrant life of bars, jazz clubs, and parties in San Francisco.

The novel captures Kerouac's travels across the world, from Mexico City to New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London, in the company of his thinly disguised Beat cohorts like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. Through their poetry, parties, mountain vigils, and spiritual contemplation, Kerouac presents a tale filled with energy and humanity.

Desolation Angels reflects Kerouac's own psychological struggles and his disillusionment with the Buddhist philosophy he once embraced. It’s a story about living, traveling, adventuring, and embracing life without regrets.

Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin - he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills - meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love.

The novella, the first book published by Philip Roth, explores issues of both class and Jewish assimilation into American culture.

My ntonia, authored by Willa Cather, is a profound narrative set in the Nebraska heartland. This novel, the third in the Great Plains Trilogy, unfolds through the eyes of Jim Burden, a character whose voice is tinged with affection and admiration.

Readers are catapulted into the diverse experiences of immigrant life, where the bonds of community are both insistent and deep. A cast of compelling characters guides us through this journey: Russian brothers haunted by a tragic memory, ntonia's father who yearns for his homeland, and her mother, whose priorities often seem misplaced. At the core of this pastoral society is the enchanting ntonia, whose free spirit captivates all who know her.

Jim Burden's narrative is one of personal reflection as he remembers his youth and the poignant moments he shared with ntonia. Their relationship, oscillating between platonic affection and a deeper connection, offers a window into ntonia's life, her challenges, and her victories.

What if a woman who knows nothing about sports inherits a professional football team? The Windy City definitely isn't ready for Phoebe Somerville, the outrageous, curvaceous New York knockout who's taking over their hometown team. And Phoebe is definitely not prepared for the Stars' head coach Dan Calebow, a sexist jock taskmaster with a one-track mind.

Calebow is everything Phoebe abhors. And the sexy boss is everything Dan despises - a meddling bimbo who doesn't know a pigskin from a pitcher's mound. So why is he drawn to the shameless sexpot like a heat-seeking missile? And why does the coach's good ol' boy charm leave cosmopolitan Phoebe feeling awkward, tongue-tied...and ready to fight?

The mismatched pair spark fireworks of all sorts in this sexy, heartwarming, and hilarious story of two stubborn people who believe in playing for keeps.

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.

Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.

Outer Dark is a stark and evocative novel set in an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. This compelling story follows a woman who bears her brother's child, a boy. The brother, in a cruel act, leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes.

Discovering her brother's deceit, she embarks on a journey alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers. Their paths lead headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Outer Dark is a profound parable that speaks to the human condition and society's darkest corners. McCarthy's masterful prose paints a vivid picture of a world both mythical and hauntingly real.

Angels in America is a powerful narrative told through two full-length plays: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. In this poignant story, Tony Kushner explores the lives of a handful of people trying to make sense of the world amidst the AIDS crisis.

The central character, Prior, is a man living with AIDS. His lover, Louis, has left him and becomes involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative. Joe's wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown.

These personal stories are woven together with that of Roy Cohn, a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue. Cohn is depicted as struggling to remain in the closet while seeking personal salvation through his beliefs.

Set against the backdrop of America in the mid-1980s, the play addresses themes of life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell, offering a bold and emotional exploration of human experiences.

J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor—a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses—and misuses—whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him—a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn.

Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures—shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music—burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world... the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others... the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths—voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios—a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction.

The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words—through our lives—while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

Postcards is the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime running from a terrible crime that forever incapacitates him from forming intimate connections. Blood's journey begins in 1944, taking him from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm across the vast landscapes of America.

From New York to California, passing through Ohio, Minnesota, Montana, British Columbia, North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico, Loyal must live a hundred lives to survive. He delves into mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. Meanwhile, his family suffers great losses, particularly the hard-won values of endurance and pride, legacies of generations rooted in intimacy with the land.

Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed, mapping their world with the historical accuracy and narrative skill reminiscent of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It stands as a new American classic.

Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:

• Car Crash While Hitchhiking
• Two Men
• Out on Bail
• Dundun
• Work
• Emergency
• Dirty Wedding
• The Other Man
• Happy Hour
• Steady Hands at Seattle General
• Beverly Home

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another, gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn, or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, "respectable" people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them "bad" and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless "bad habits," individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham in this pioneering study.

In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many "good" people engaged in activities that many, including themselves, considered "bad." What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct.

Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification—to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how "swinging" Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society?

This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures.

Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam—and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.

Absalom, Absalom! is considered by many to be William Faulkner's masterpiece. Although the novel's complex and fragmented structure poses considerable difficulty to readers, the book's literary merits place it squarely in the ranks of America's finest novels.

The story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable family. His ambition and extreme need for control bring about his ruin and the ruin of his family. Sutpen's story is told by several narrators, allowing the reader to observe variations in the saga as it is recounted by different speakers. This unusual technique spotlights one of the novel's central questions: To what extent can people know the truth about the past?

Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.

These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s career and overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. His eye is set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.

By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the greatest practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the story of two women in the 1980s: gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women—of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama.

This Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offered good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. As the story unfolds, readers are transported to a time and place where the past's warmth colors the present.