The chronicle of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and young offers an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique

The semiautobiographical story of an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.

Discover the debut novel of James Lee Burke, before the creation of his now-famous Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux , as he weaves together the struggles of three very different men.
Toussaint Boudreaux, a black docker in New Orleans, puts up with his co-workers' racism because he has to, and moonlights as a prize-fighter in the hope of a better life-but the only break he gets lands him in penal servitude. J.P. Winfield, a hick with a...

Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922) differs from its two predecessors in its experimental, abstract approach to writing. Jacob Flanders' life is examined largely through the impressions and accounts of others in his life, mostly women, creating a portrait of a young man both representative of and victimized by Edwardian society. The novel coincided with Woolf's emerging interest in feminism and is critical of the righteous patriarchy...

"There's no such thing as the life you're "supposed" to have... You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we'd have? Well, it happened. In Tom Barren's 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks, and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed. because it wasn't necessary. Except Tom just can't seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that's before...

When her eldest son, Greg, is killed in a motorcycle accident, widowed florist Lee Reston turns to Chris Lallak, Greg's best friend and a young man many years her junior, for comfort.

When Benjamin Braddock graduates from a small eastern college and comes home to his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life. Benjamin has no idea. Feeling empty, embittered, and adrift, he stumbles into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's business partner. But then he falls in love with a woman closer to his own age: Mrs. Robinson's daughter. A scathingly entertaining tale of idealism and materialism,...

With schooling behind him, Josh wonders what else life holds. Should he continue his studies and become a pastor? Is he to help his aging grandpa and uncle on the farm? With his friends moving on, Josh feels like his life has drifted to a standstill.

Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky's masterpieces, Crime and Punishment...

"Oates's ostensible diary of the paroled sex offender Quentin P. provides a psychologically astute portrait of the way cold calculation and dark obsession combine in a serial killer to make him both horrifyingly successful and maddeningly elusive"--Back printed wrapper.