From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.
Set in Vietnam in the 1950s, during the last days of French colonial rule, THE QUIET AMERICAN was based partly on Graham Greene's own experiences in Vietnam as a correspondent for the London Times. The book's narrator is an English journalist named Fowler who lives in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, but is unable to convince his Cathol...more
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) by William Somerset Maugham is the complex story of Charles Strickland, a man who abandons his family and his secure life as an English businessman to pursue an uncertain but meaningful existence as an artist, from Paris slums to the lush fertility of Tahiti, and into the glory of the creative wilderness. Inspired ...more
The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic US operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA", claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best". Switters isn't really an invali...more
A modern retelling of the legendary Arthurian tales from one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers Morte d’Arthur was one of the first books that John Steinbeck enjoyed reading as a child, and it became a favorite story to read to his own children. Here now is Steinbeck’s only work of fantasy literature—his modernization of Malory’...more
In Why We Run, biologist, award-winning nature writer, and ultramarathoner Bernd Heinrich explores a new perspective on human evolution by examining the phenomenon of ultraendurance and makes surprising discoveries about the physical, spiritual -- and primal -- drive to win. At once lyrical and scientific, Why We Run shows Heinrich's signature blen...more
Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each ...more
E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life -- his elderly aunt and two young daughters -- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magica...more
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, stra...more
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