In 1983 Little, Brown and Company's posthumous publication of this book electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. A collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia with astonishing power and grace, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake has remained continuously in print and is a perennial favorite among aspiring writers, participants in creative writing programs, and students of contemporary American fiction. "Trilobites", the first of Pancake's stories to be published in The Atlantic, elicited an extraordinary immediate response from readers and continues to be widely anthologized.

    "Benito Cereno" -- a subversive satire -- of grows out of a true story of mutiny among the enslaved . . .1."The Piazza"2."Bartleby the Scrivener" (first published in Putnam's November and December 1853)3."Benito Cereno" (first published in Putnam's October, November and December 1855)4."The Lightning-Rod Man" (first published in Putnam's August 1854)5."The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles" (first published in Putnam's March, April, and May 1854)6."The Bell-Tower" (first published in Putnam's August 1855)

    A joke at first; but then he was caught up, terrifyingly, in a vision of suffering, and he sought a way out, turning first here, then there—Art, Sex, Religion. Shrike, the cynical editor, the friend and enemy, compulsively destroyed each of his friend’s gestures toward idealism. Together, in the city’s dim underworld, Shrike and Miss Lonelyhearts turn round and round in a loathsome dance, unresolvable, hating until death…The Day of the LocustTo Hollywood comes Tod Hackett, hoping for a career in scene designing, but he finds the way hard and falls in with others—extras, technicians, old vaudeville hands—who are also in difficulty. Around him he sees the great mass of inland Americans who have retired to California in expectation of health and ease. But boredom consumes them, their own emptiness maddens them; they search out any abnormality in their lust for excitement—drugs, perversion, crime. In the end only blood will serve; unreasoned, undirected violence. The day of the locust is at hand…

    The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

    He's all Marine --- fighter pilot, king of the clouds, and absolute ruler of his family. Lillian is his wife -- beautiful, southern-bred, with a core of velvet steel. Without her cool head, her kids would be in real trouble. Ben is the oldest, a born athlete whose best never satisfies the big man. Ben's got to stand up, even fight back, against a father who doesn't give in -- not to his men, not to his wife, and certainly not to his son. Bull Meecham is undoubtedly Pat Conroy's most explosive character -- a man you should hate, but a man you will love.

    The famous Gibbsville stories, more than fifty of theminclude such stunners as "The Doctor's Son," "Imagine Kissing Pete," "Fatimas and Kisses," "The Cellar Domain," and "The Bucket of Blood." Again, O'Hara's Pennsylvania Protectorate, as he called itin reality, the coal region of his hometown, Pottsville, in Schuylkill Countycomes to socially and sexually complicated life. Here are the miners in the company towns, the country club set, the shopkeepers, the bartenders, the barbers, and the collegians. It is a world as varied, vibrant, and complete as Faulkner's Yoknapatawphna County or Thomas Wolfe's Altamount. Presented in this Book-of-the-Month Club Selection are four decades of the best work by the author who Bennett Cerf declared one of America's most underrated writers."

    Nathan Coulter begins Wendell Berry's sequence of novels about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky- a setting that is taking its place alongside Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and Winesburg, Ohio, as one of our most distinctive and recognizable literary locales.

    A powerful and passionate tale is set on a southern army post --a human hell inhabited by a sexually disturbed officer, his animalistic wife, her lover, and the driven young private who forces the drama to its climax...

    After a nine-year affair with Jake, a married man, Kate Ennis decides to escape. She takes off, looking for something beautiful and quiet by the sea, but finds herself in a pitch dark and driving rain on a lonely Irish road. It is only months later that she learns that she may have committed a crime, but by then she is home, once more negotiating with Jake for time, for attention, and for love."

    The time is World War II. The family is the Macauley's -- a mother, sister, and three brothers whose struggles and dreams reflect those of America's second-generation immigrants.. In particular, fourteen-year-old Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of wartime death, love, and money brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most naked and raw. Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and more livable than out own.

    After a highly controversial trial, the couple go to the electric chair for treason despite worldwide protests. Decades later their son, Daniel, grown to young manhood, tries to make sense of their lives and deaths - and their legacy to him. Like millions of other Americans, he is attempting to reconcile an America based on the highest human ideals with the tragedy of his parents. This is the framework for E.L. Doctorow's dazzling masterpiece, as he fictionalizes an actual social and political drama to create an intensely moving, searching, and illuminating tale of two decades, two generations, and a troubled legacy of passion and purpose, martyrdom and meaning.

    Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In 'The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald', Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context.Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. This essential collection is a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature.

    These nineteen stories resonate with all the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of fertile land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; and the ways the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.

    A young PR man working at General Electric sold his first magazine piece. By the time he'd sold his third, he decided to quit his job and join the likes of Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and make a living as a full-time writer. That young man was Kurt Vonnegut.Bagombo Snuff Box collects Vonnegut’s favourite stories from the postwar years that sharpened his dark, vaudevillian and quietly subversive voice. Here we see the mind-bending wit and central themes of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-read for Vonnegut aficionados new and old.

    During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory are double-edged-by praying for victory they are also praying for the destruction of the enemy... for the destruction of human life. Originally rejected for publication in 1905 as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine," this antiwar parable remained unpublished until 1923, when Twain's literary executor collected it in the volume Europe and Elsewhere. Handsomely illustrated by the artist and war correspondent Philip Groth, The War Prayer remains a relevant classic by an American icon.