The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction


Kate Chopin - 2003
    The novel’s frank portrayal of a woman’s emotional, intellectual, and sexual awakening shocked the sensibilities of the time and destroyed the author’s reputation and career. Many years passed before this short, pioneering work was recognized as a major achievement in American literature.Set in and around New Orleans, The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother who, determined to control her own life, flouts convention by moving out of her husband’s house, having an adulterous affair, and becoming an artist.Beautifully written, with sensuous imagery and vivid local descriptions, The Awakening has lost none of its power to provoke and inspire. Additionally, this edition includes thirteen of Kate Chopin’s magnificent short stories.--back coverStories Included in the Volume:The AwakeningEmancipation: A Life FableA Shameful AffairAt the ‘Cadian BallDésirée’s BabyA Gentleman of Bayou TêcheA Respectable WomanThe Story of an HourAthénaïseA Pair of Silk StockingsElizabeth Stock’s One StoryThe StormThe GodmotherA Little Country Girl

Alice Adams


Booth Tarkington - 1921
    Ultimately, her ambitions are tempered by the realities of her situation, which she learns to accept with grace and style. Alice's resiliency of spirit makes her one of Booth Tarkington's most compelling characters. A fascinating story that won the Pulitzer Prize. This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.

Andersonville


MacKinlay Kantor - 1955
    The 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the Andersonville Fortress and its use as a concentration camp-like prison by the South during the Civil War.

Foreign Affairs


Alison Lurie - 1984
    Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.Also in London is Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner, a handsome, flat broke, newly separated, and thoroughly miserable young man trying to focus on his own research. Instead, he is distracted by a beautiful and unpredictable English actress and the world she belongs to. Both American, both abroad, and both achingly lonely, Vinnie and Fred play out their confused alienation and dizzying romantic liaisons in Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Smartly written, poignant, and witty, Foreign Affairs remains an enduring comic masterpiece.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love


Oscar Hijuelos - 1989
    Two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. It is the era of the mambo, and Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth—a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss and memory and desire.

The Keepers of the House


Shirley Ann Grau - 1964
    Extraordinary family lore has been passed down to Abigail Howland, but not all of it. When shocking facts come to light about her late grandfather William’s relationship with Margaret Carmichael, a black housekeeper, the community is outraged, and quickly gathers to vent its fury on Abigail. Alone in the house the Howlands built, she is at once shaken by those who have betrayed her, and determined to punish the town that has persecuted her and her kin. Morally intricate, graceful and suspenseful, The Keepers of the House has become a modern classic.

Journey in the Dark


Martin Flavin - 1943
    By turns admirable, pitiable, tough, noble, weak, futile, and brilliantly effective, a lonely man going nowhere in the dark, Sam Braden mirrors thousands like him who have put their familiar stamp upon the American way of life.He wanted wealth, and he got it. He wanted to belong to the social world in which the Wyatts moved so easily, and in time he did. Most of all he wanted Eileen Wyatt, and this too he achieved, but only after a fashion. To explain this average man who had wanted success above everything, and who achieved an enviable degree of it and yet who never escaped from the prison of his loneliness, Martin Flavin takes the reader back to the friendly, democratic world that existed along the Mississippi in the Eighties, to the influences which shaped the boy and fixed the pattern of the man.

One of Ours


Willa Cather - 1922
    Claude Wheeler, the sensitive but aspiring protagonist, has ready access to his family's fortune but refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his uncaring father and pious mother, and rejected by a wife whose only love is missionary work, Claude is an idealist without ideals to cling to. Only when his country enters the Great War does he find the meaning of his life.

The Philip K. Dick Collection


Philip K. Dick - 2009
    Dick’s best science fiction novels:The Man in the High Castle • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? • Ubik • Martian Time-Slip • Dr. Bloodmoney • Now Wait for Last Year • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said • A Scanner Darkly • A Maze of Death • VALIS • The Divine Invasion • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

His Family


Ernest Poole - 1917
    His Family is the story of a sixty-year-old New York man who reflects on his life and the lives of his three daughters. The women represent three separate types - one maternal, the second devoted to social movements, and the third living a happy and carefree existence - and the father sees something of himself in each.

Arrowsmith


Sinclair Lewis - 1925
    The books explores medical and scientific themes in a fictional way and it is difficult to think of an earlier book that does this. Although he was not a doctor, Sinclair Lewis's father was and he was greatly helped in the preparation of the manuscript by the science writer Paul de Kruif. It was de Kruif who brings a reality to the book that is almost biographical.This reality means that the books heralds the real impact of advances in drugs, public health, and immunology that were about to change the world. It also satirises those medical and scientific practitioners whose pursuit of fame and fortune, at the expense of truth, remains just as pertinent today.The book was first published in 1925 and was a popular and commercial success. It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 which was refused by Sinclair Lewis. He was later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—which he accepted.

Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story


Oliver La Farge - 1929
    At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American"-educated Navajo. As they experience all of the joys and uncertainties of first love, the couple must face a changing way of life and its tragic consequences.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories


Leo Tolstoy - 1886
    He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time. In the early story 'Family Happiness', Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In 'The Kreutzer Sonata' he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in 'The Devil' a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality.Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 1840224533 here.

A Visit from the Goon Squad


Jennifer Egan - 2010
    Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

The Caine Mutiny


Herman Wouk - 1951
    In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has become a perennial favorite of readers young and old, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, and has achieved the status of a modern classic.