Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by a taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure in In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices...

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heart wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in...

A strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway's American debut.
When In Our Time was first published in 1925, it was widely praised for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and earned Hemingway a place among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including...

The most notable work of fiction from our most beloved modernist poet, The Enormous Room was one of the greatest—yet still not fully recognized— American literary works to emerge out of World War I. Drawing on E. E. Cummings’s experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, this novel takes us through a series of mishaps that led to the poet’s being arrested for treason and imprisoned. Out of this trauma Cummings produced a work like...

In the spring of 1943, during a stint in the merchant marine, twenty-one-year-old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. Written seven years before The Town and the City officially launched...

Having escaped an Australian maximum security prison, a disillusioned man loses himself in the slums of Bombay, where he works for a drug mafia kingpin, smuggles arms for a crime lord, forges bonds with fellow exiles, and finds love with an elusive woman. A first novel.

Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to re-live the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of a young Brazilian man, Paulo, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties, who share a journey of self-discovery aboard the Magic Bus, as it travels from Amsterdam to Kathmandu in 1970. In his most autobiographical...

"The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored for generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo's hand, cried over little Beth's untimely death, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Aspiring writers have found inspiration in Jo's devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature's most beloved women. In her...

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' Haunting, moving, evocative, The Go-Between is L.P. Hartley's heartbreaking novel about social constraints and childhood innocence. During the long hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston is invited to stay for a month at a lordly, aristocratic manor in Norfolk. There he falls in love with his friend's older sister, who commissions him to ferry secret messages to the local farmer, her...

"Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener finds herself confronted by her complicated family heritage. Visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces each nearly identical to her own and recognizes herself in them – but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. Wiener’s 'grand' contribution to history: the near...