Recommended Classics Books

The Eighth Day

Thornton Wilder

This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award-winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwri...

Paperback
Published: Jan 2007

Heaven's My Destination

Thornton Wilder

Drawing on such unique sources as the author's unpublished letters,business records, and obscure family recollections, Tappan Wilder'sAfterword adds a special dimension to the reissue of this hilarious tale about goodness in a fallen ...

Paperback
Published: Sep 2003

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Break...

Ruth Pennebaker

Joanie's ex-husband is having a baby with his new girlfriend. Joanie won't be having more babies, since she's decided never to have sex again. But she still has her teenaged daughter Caroline to care for. And thanks to the recession,...

Paperback
Published: Jan 2011

Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver

Set in Appalachia, Kingsolver's very pastoral novel tells the stories of three women who live close to the land. A wildlife biologist studying coyotes is fascinated by a young man with a passion for hunting. An intellectually inclined...

Paperback
Published: Oct 2001

The Optimist's Daughter

Eudora Welty

The Optimist's Daughter is a compact and inward-looking little novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner that's slight of page yet big of heart. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital fro...

Paperback
Published: Aug 1990

In the Land of Time: And Other Fantas...

Edward Dunsany

The first annotated edition of the Irish master of fantasy, 'who imagined colors, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe or of De Quincey' (W. B. Yeats). Lord Dunsany has gained a cu...

Paperback
Published: Feb 2004

Three Classic African-American Novels...

William L. Andrews

'Examining the scope and richness of African-American literature, this landmark collection gathers the first three novels written by African Americans in the 1850s. Includes "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, "Cl...

Paperback
Published: Jan 2003

Peter Camenzind

Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind, a young man from a Swiss mountain village, leaves his home and eagerly takes to the road in search of new experience. Traveling through Italy and France, Camenzind is increasingly disillusioned by the suffering he dis...

Paperback
Published: Dec 2003

Seize the Day

Saul Bellow

Although the different things in the book are by no means on the same level, the title story seems to me the most moving single piece of fiction that this young author has as yet written. It is all the more interesting because there i...

Paperback
Published: May 2003

The Miracle Worker

William Gibson

Helen Keller at age 12 was like a wild animal. Deaf, blind and utterly unable to communicate, she went through her young life alienated and terrified, struggling against all who tried to help her. Annie Sullivan was half-blind herself...

Paperback
Published: Jul 2002

Nick Adams Stories

Ernest Hemingway

The famous 'Nick Adams' stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.

Paperback
Published: Feb 1981

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other ...

Oscar Wilde

'Flamboyant fin-de-siecle literary figure Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage.Here in o...

Paperback
Published: Dec 1982

Amsterdam

Ian McEwan

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current ...

Paperback
Published: Nov 1999

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford Worl...

Ann Ward Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe's orphaned heroine Emily St. Aubert finds herself imprisoned in her evil guardian Count Montoni's gloomy medieval fortress in the remote Apennines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily str...

Paperback
Published: Jul 1998

The Razor's Edge

W. Somerset Maugham

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancee Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong r...

Paperback
Published: Sep 2003

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Perse...

Winifred Watson

'Why has it taken more than half a century for this wonderful flight of humor to be rediscovered?'-Guardian'The sweetest grown-up book in the world.'-Sunday Times'Everyone, no matter how poor or prim or neglected, has a second chance ...

Paperback
Published: Feb 2008

Classic Horror Stories: Sixteen Legen...

Charles A. Coulombe

Before electric lights and telephones, there were only candles and, at last, gas lights, to banish the darkness. And in that darkness might lurk - who knows? Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, witches, or even the Devil himself! Such st...

Paperback
Published: Sep 2003

To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's Classic Novel About Smuggling, Intrigue, and LoveTo Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling...

Paperback
Published: Mar 1996

Gertrude and Claudius

John Updike

John Updike takes the Hamlet story as the basis for this absorbing novel about power and lust in 12th-century Denmark. Using both Shakespeare's play and original historical sources, Updike concentrates his narrative on Danish history,...

Paperback
Published: Jul 2001

Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (Oxfor...

William Wordsworth

'Listen, Stranger!'Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to de...

Paperback
Published: Jul 2013

The Wall

John Hersey

Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a...

Paperback
Published: Mar 1988

The Head of the House of Coombe & Rob...

Frances Hodgson Burnett

"The Head of the House of Coombe" - Lord Coombe is considered to be the best-dressed man in London. During one of his social forays, he meets a selfish young woman named 'Feather' with the face of an angel and he slowly drif...

Paperback
Published: Dec 2020

Man and Wife (Oxford World's Classics...

Wilkie Collins

`This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questio...

Paperback
Published: Dec 1998

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

...[W]hen I entered Louisiana, my imagination was already trapped in speculation about the struggle for power in the world of politics--specifically in a Southern state....[I]f you were living in Louisiana, you knew you were living in...

Paperback
Published: Sep 1996

That Affair Next Door (Library of Con...

Anna Katharine Green

"This inaugural volume in the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, featuring the first woman sleuth in a series, is a must for genre buffs."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) The first book in the Library of Congres...

Paperback
Published: Apr 2020

A Wonderful Welcome to Oz: The Marvel...

L. Frank Baum

For more than a century, L. Frank Baum’s kingdom of Oz and its delightful denizens have enchanted readers of all ages. In this illustrated Modern Library edition, the bestselling novelist and children’s book writer Gregory...

Paperback
Published: Apr 2006

The Golden Days (The Story of the Sto...

Cao Xueqin

Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, this five-part story charts the changing fortunes of the Jia family. It sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, even murder - within the context of the Buddhis...

Paperback
Published: Mar 1974

The Reivers

William Faulkner

This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family's retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in a stolen motorcar. The astonishing a...

Paperback
Published: Sep 1992

Ceremony: (Classics Deluxe Edition) (...

Leslie Marmon Silko

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, retur...

Paperback
Published: Jan 2007

A Gathering of Old Men

Ernest J. Gaines

Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. 'Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Sou...

Paperback
Published: Jun 1992

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