(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power ...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 stree...more
Evelyn Waugh's best-loved novel and the basis for the PBS television production, Brideshead Revisited, the epic story of a great Catholic family in a doomed aristocratic age.
Beautiful, intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to luxury, Lily Bart is the heroine of this Wharton masterpiece. But it is her very taste and moral sensibility that render her unfit for survival in this world.
Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress. Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and Sherman spirals downward in a sudden fall f...more
Oliver Twist's famous cry of the heart--"Please, sir, I want some more"--has resounded with generations of readers of all ages. The author poured his own youthful experience of Victorian London's unspeakable squalor into this realistic depiction of a spirited young innocent's unwilling but inevitable recruitment into a scabrous gang of thieves. Mas...more
Having never seen the famous 1970s television series based on Graves' historical novel of ancient Rome and being generally uneducated about matters both ancient and Roman, I wasn't prepared for such an engaging book. But it's a ripping good read, this fictional autobiography set in the Roman Empire's days of glory and decadence. As a history lesso...more
From one of America's most original and startlingly imaginative writers, a novel with "all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller."--The New York Times. A fireman and a gambler enter a poker game with two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card." What results is the product of a world of fiendish bargains an...more