Popular Classics

Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction--evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. "Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America," wrote H. L. Mencken. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own."
With Commentary by Sherwood Anderson, Rebecca West,

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
So begins "Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the "most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works," and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as "irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be."

James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, "Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says "Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes "Harper's. "Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the "San Francisco Chronicle d

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of this timeless classic with a special edition featuring a new foreword by the author and a message that is as relevant today as when it was first published. Since the late 1940s, Ray Bradbury has been revered for his works of science fiction and fantasy. With more than 4 million copies in print, Fahrenheit 451 - originally published in 1953 - remains his most acclaimed work. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a short novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen" burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch". Today, when libraries and schools are still "burning" certain books, Fa

An orphan who endures a harsh childhood, Jane Eyre becomes governess at Thornfield Hall in the employment of the mysterious Mr. Rochester. Jane's moral pilgrimage and the maturity of Charlotte Bronte's characterization are celebrated aspects of the novel, as is its imagery and narrative power. Rapidly reprinted following its first publication in 1847, Jane Eyre still enjoys huge popularity as one of the finest novels in the English language.

Emily Bronte's only novel appeared to mixed reviews in 1847, a year before her death at the age of thirty. In the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, and in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors of its setting, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with a disregard for convention, an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology that make it one of the greatest novels of passion ever written.

Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, My Antonia recreates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of the narrator, the ideal of strong and resourceful womanhood and a figure of salvation.

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 streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence."
--Ross Macdonald

The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers with its treatment of sex and suicide. In a departure from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class convention are the themes of this now-classic novel. The book was influenced by French writers ranging from Flaubert to Maupassant, and can be seen as a precursor of the impressionistic, mood-driven novels of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Variously called "vulgar, " "unhealthily introspective, " and "morbid, " the book was neglected for several decades, not least because it was written by a "regional" woman writer. This edition also

The most powerful Civil War stories ever written, this is the finest and most horrific depiction of front line combat anywhere. Haunting and evocative, the protagonist's mesmerizing transformation from an eager recruit itching for a taste of combat to a battle-shocked survivor who knows the full horror of war remains an unforgettable reading experience.

"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.

Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) - Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics. In his prologue Dos Passos writes: "U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column o

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Dostoevsky's drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman's murder into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.
Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that, for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of char?acterization and vision is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dosto?evsky's masterpieces, "Crime and Punishment" can bear any amount of rereading without losing a drop of its power over our imaginations.
Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsk

He's rude, arrogant, cold, unfriendly, and easily bored. But nobody minds, because Sherlock Holmes is a genius at solving mysteries. This collection of some of Holmes's most intriguing cases includes unabridged tales of blackmail, lost fortunes, and, of course, murder.

Sixty years after REBECCA was first published, Daphne du Maurier's unsurpassed masterpiece continues to enthrall readers with romance and suspense, as the second Mrs. de Winter narrates the haunting events surrounding her marriage to Maxim de Winter and her growing obsession with his first wife, the beautiful, now dead Rebecca. Includes excerpts from the author's personal notes and essays, exclusive to this edition.

A 19th-century boy, floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, becomes involved with a feuding family two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt, who mistakes him for Tom.

"Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

This new edition celebrates the 10th anniversary of Walker's Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner. "If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field".--from Walker's new preface.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea?sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in

English novelist, historian and science writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) abandoned teaching and launched his literary career with a series of highly successful science-fiction novels. The Time Machine was the first of a number of these imaginative literary inventions. First published in 1895, the novel follows the adventures of a hypothetical Time Traveller who journeys into the future to find that humanity has evolved into two races: the peaceful Eloi -- vegetarians who tire easily -- and the carnivorous, predatory Morlocks.

After narrowly escaping from the Morlocks, the Time Traveller undertakes another journey even further into the future where he finds the earth growing bitterly cold as the heat and energy of the sun wane. Horrified, he returns to the present, but soon departs again on his final journey.

While the novel is

"The Optimist's Daughter" is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needs--tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented by affection.
Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, not afraid to flout convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, who opens his eyes and has the power to make him feel. He knows that in sweet-tempered May, he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry p

A novel that has fascinated readers for over a century, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who attains eternal youth while only his portrait grows old, hidden away in a locked room. Despite the young man's disintegration into a life of crime, his face never reflects the moral decay. Instead, the portrait records every deed by turning his once handsome features into a hideous mask.

With Tony Ross's splendid illustrations and extended captions unique to the Whole Story, The Picture of Dorian Gray provides background information that modern readers could otherwise access only through a broad range of supplemental research -- from biographical profiles of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries to depictions of London's art world in the late nineteenth century. This distinctive approach places The Pictur

Native Son tells the story of A young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.