In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation t...more
"It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," Milo laments. "[T]here's nothing for me to do, nowhere I'd care to go, and hardly anything worth seeing." This bored, bored young protagonist who can't see the point to anything is knocked out of his glum humdrum by the sudden and curious appearance of a tollbooth in his bedroom. ...more
Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away f...more
Hesse's classic tells of the turmoil of Emil Sinclair, a docile young man who is drawn by his schoolmates into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention.
In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation t...more
In an unspecified future symbolic world of the twenty-third century, Joseph Knecht achieves and rejects his long-sought ideal of uniting thought and action in isolated Castalia, where scholar-players of the Glass Bead Game perpetuate all spiritual values, in a new edition of the Nobel laureate's final novel. Reprint.
A brilliant psychological portrait of a troubled young man’s quest for self-awareness, this coming-of-age novel achieved instant critical and popular acclaim upon its 1919 publication. A landmark in the history of 20th-century literature, it reflects the author’s preoccupation with the duality of human nature and the pursuit of spiritual fullfi...more
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the e...more
In his first novel since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work--the story of the friendship between the eponymous "wonder boys"--Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Tripp, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.