The Collected Stories


Eudora Welty - 1980
      Including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected ones, these forty-one stories demonstrate Eudora Welty's talent for writing from diverse points-of-view with “vision that is sweet by nature, always humanizing, uncannily objective, but never angry” (Washington Post).A curtain of green and other stories.Lily Daw and the three ladies --A piece of news --Petrified man --The key --Keela, the outcast Indian maiden --Why I live at the P.O. --The whistle --The hitch-hikers --A memory --Clytie --Old Mr. Marblehall --Flowers for Marjorie --A curtain of green --A visit of charity --Death of a traveling salesman --Powerhouse --A worn path --The wide net and other stories.First love --The wide net --A still moment --Asphodel --The winds --The purple hat --Livvie --At the landing --The golden apples.Shower of gold --June recital --Sir Rabbit --Moon Lake --The whole world knows --Music from Spain --The wanderers --The bride of the Innisfallen and other stories.No place for you, my love --The burning --The bride of the Innisfallen --Ladies in spring --Circe --Kin --Going to Naples --Uncollected stories.Where is the voice coming from? --The demonstrators.

Peyton Place


Grace Metalious - 1956
    At the centre of the novel are three women, each with a secret to hide: Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife; her daughter Allison, whose dreams are stifled by small-town small-mindedness; and Selena Cross, her gypsy-eyed friend from the wrong side of the tracks.

Sanctuary


William Faulkner - 1931
    From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, beautiful, bored and vulnerable, to Harace Benbow, a lawyer of honor and decency wishing for more in his life, and Gowan Stevens, college student with a weakness for drink, Faulkner writes of changing social values and order. A sinister cast peppered with social outcasts and perverts perform abduction, murder, and mayhem in this harsh and brutal story of sensational and motiveless evil. Students of Faulkner have found an allegorical interpretation of "Sanctuary" as a comment on the degradation of old South's social order by progressive modernism and materialistic exploitation. Popeye and his co-horts represent this hurling change that is corrupting the historic traditions of the South, symbolized by Horace Stevens, which are no longer able to protect the victimized Negro and poor white trash due to middle-class apathy and inbred violence.

Inherit the Wind


Jerome Lawrence - 1955
    The accused was a slight, frightened man who'd deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed & roared imprecations & abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely restraining themselves. America's freedom was at stake.

An American Tragedy


Theodore Dreiser - 1925
    On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream. Extraordinary in scope and power, vivid in its sense of wholesale human waste, unceasing in its rich compassion, 'An American Tragedy' stands as Theodore Dreiser's supreme achievement.Based on an actual criminal case, 'An American Tragedy' was the inspiration for the film 'A Place in the Sun', which won six Academy Awards and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff.

A Moveable Feast


Ernest Hemingway - 1964
    Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald - he recalls the time when, poor, happy, and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation. Written during the last years of Hemingway's life, his memoir is a lively and powerful reflection of his genius that scintillates with the romance of the city.

Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics


Anonymous - 1996
    When a former congressional aide becomes part of the staff of the governor of a small Southern state, he watches in horror, admiration, and amazement, as the governor mixes calculation and sincerity in his not-so-above-board campaign for the presidency.From the Hardcover edition.

Sophie's Choice


William Styron - 1979
    Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Oracle Night


Paul Auster - 2003
    It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book - only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

The Good War: An Oral History of World War II


Studs Terkel - 1984
    No matter how gruesome the memories are, relatively few of the interviewees said they would have been better off without the experience. It was a central and formative experience in their lives. Although 400,000 Americans perished, the United States itself was not attacked again after Pearl Harbor, the economy grew, and there was a new sense of world power that invigorated the country. Some women and African Americans experienced new freedoms in the post war society, but good life after World War II was tarnished by the threat of nuclear war.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?


Edward Albee - 1962
    A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening's end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play's razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as "a brilliantly original work of art--an excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come."

A Mencken Chrestomathy


H.L. Mencken - 1949
    L. Mencken is to be confronted with the sad realization that most of what we find in newspapers and journals today is mere sludge. While an Alexander Cockburn or a Christopher Hitchens can churn out a brilliant, at times almost sublime piece of invective, the sad fact is that for all their talent, they are mere polemicists. Mencken, however, was a true contrarian, and, for that reason, he had far more scope for his talents. It would be quite fair to call him a true American genius whose range and Mark Twain-like skepticism leave the reader sometimes convulsed with laughter, sometimes completely enraged, but always transfixed with admiration.In this volume of more than 600 pages, Mencken has collected more than 100 choice passages, ranging from men, women, and southerners to religion, politics, music, literature, and the arts. This selection is a pure delight, and, while not every piece entertains, one cannot help but be awed by this true polymath and regret not having him around today.Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six of the PREJUDICES series, A BOOK OF BURLESQUES, IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, NOTES ON DEMOCRACY, MAKING A PRESIDENT, A BOOK OF CALUMNY, TREATISE ON RIGHT AND WRONG—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all.Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.The author chose selections form his out of print writings: his books, magazines and newspaper pieces.(from Barnes & Noble)

Living History


Hillary Rodham Clinton - 2003
    Yet few beyond her close friends and family have ever heard her account of her extraordinary journey. She writes with candor, humor and passion about her upbringing in suburban, middle-class America in the 1950s and her transformation from Goldwater Girl to student activist to controversial First Lady.Living History is her revealing memoir of life through the White House years. It is also her chronicle of living history with Bill Clinton, a thirty-year adventure in love and politics that survives personal betrayal, relentless partisan investigations and constant public scrutiny.Hillary Rodham Clinton came of age during a time of tumultuous social and political change in America. Like many women of her generation, she grew up with choices and opportunities unknown to her mother or grandmother. She charted her own course through unexplored terrain -- responding to the changing times and her own internal compass -- and became an emblem for some and a lightning rod for others. Wife, mother, lawyer, advocate and international icon, she has lived through America's great political wars, from Watergate to Whitewater.The only First Lady to play a major role in shaping domestic legislation, Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled tirelessly around the country to champion health care, expand economic and educational opportunity and promote the needs of children and families, and she crisscrossed the globe on behalf of women's rights, human rights and democracy. She redefined the position of First Lady and helped save the presidency from an unconstitutional, politically motivated impeachment. Intimate, powerful and inspiring, Living History captures the essence of one of the most remarkable women of our time and the challenging process by which she came to define herself and find her own voice -- as a woman and as a formidable figure in American politics.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men


James Agee - 1941
    Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives today stands as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

The Portable Dorothy Parker


Dorothy Parker - 1944
    This collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century's most quotable authors.