books tagged “american lit” (American lit)

books tagged “american lit”

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The Ambassadors
by Henry James, Sandra Kemp

ISBN 0460871609 (0-460-87160-9)
Softcover, Everyman

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Book summary:
The Ambassadors, which Henry James considered his best work, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on him. Strether also becomes involved in a very Jamesian "relation" with the fascinating Miss Maria Gostrey, a fellow American and informal Sacajawea to her compatriots. Clearly Paris has "improved" Chad beyond recognition, and convincing him to return to the U.S. is going to be a very, very hard sell. Suspense, of course, is hardly James's stock-in-trade. But there is no more meticulous mapper of tone and atmosphere, nuance and implication. His hyper-refined characters are at their best in dialogue, particularly when they're exchanging morsels of gossip. Astute, funny, and relentlessly intelligent, James amply fulfills his own description of the novelist as a person upon whom nothing is lost. --Rhian Ellis [via]
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The American
by Henry James

ISBN 0395051630 (0-395-05163-0)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div

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Book summary:
In this classic collision of the New World with Old Europe, James weaves a fable of thwarted desire that shifts between comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama.

[via]
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American Pastoral
by Philip Roth

ISBN 0395860210 (0-395-86021-0)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence. [via]
More editions of American Pastoral:
- American Pastoral: ISBN 0395860210 (0-395-86021-0)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner, Kenneth Dewey

ISBN 0449209881 (0-449-20988-1)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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More editions of Angle of Repose:
- Angle of Repose: ISBN 0449209881 (0-449-20988-1)
  Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand

ISBN 0451191145 (0-451-19114-5)
Softcover, Signet

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Book summary:
At last, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is available to her millions of loyal readers in trade paperback.

With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club [via]
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The Best American Short Stories, 1999
by Amy Tan, Katrina Kenison

ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. "Mother preferred Zulu servants." "It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring." "Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?"
The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."
Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne [via]
More editions of The Best American Short Stories, 1999:
- The Best American Short Stories, 1999: ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

ISBN 048642684X (0-486-42684-X)
Softcover, Dover Pubns

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Book summary:
Part of the "Everyman" series which has been re-set with wide margins for notes and easy-to-read type. Each title includes a themed introduction by leading authorities on the subject, life-and-times chronology of the author, text summaries, annotated reading lists and selected criticism and notes. [via]
More editions of The Blithedale Romance:
- The Blithedale Romance: ISBN 0460874039 (0-460-87403-9)
  Softcover, Tuttle Pub
- The Blithedale Romance: ISBN 048642684X (0-486-42684-X)
  Softcover, Dover Pubns
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Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

ISBN 0452273056 (0-452-27305-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.
This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan

ISBN 0399146857 (0-399-14685-7)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

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Book summary:
At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.
A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."
Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting:
I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.
Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins [via]
More editions of The Bonesetter's Daughter:
- The Bonesetter's Daughter: ISBN 0399146431 (0-399-14643-1)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
- The Bonesetter's Daughter: ISBN 0399146857 (0-399-14685-7)
  Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
The Book of Daniel
by E. L. Doctorow

ISBN 0449214303 (0-449-21430-3)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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Book summary:
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.

His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.

Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new lifemarriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.

In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.

It is a confession of his most intimate relationshipswith his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him.

It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniels interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.

It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the caselawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.

It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this countryits sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.

It is The Book of Daniel. [via]
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut

ISBN 0440131480 (0-440-13148-0)
Softcover, Dell Publishing

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Book summary:
"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.
Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count. [via]
More editions of Breakfast of Champions:
- Breakfast of Champions: ISBN 0440131480 (0-440-13148-0)
  Softcover, Dell Publishing
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Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko

ISBN 0451138929 (0-451-13892-9)
Softcover, New Amer Library

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Book summary:
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A Navajo family on a New Mexico reservation struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II. [via]
More editions of Ceremony:
- Ceremony: ISBN 0451138929 (0-451-13892-9)
  Softcover, New Amer Library
China Men
by Maxine Hong Kingston

ISBN 0394424638 (0-394-42463-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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- China Men: ISBN 0394424638 (0-394-42463-8)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Collected Poems Emily Dickenson : Cha Riv
by Outlet Book Company Staff, Random House Value Publishing Staff

ISBN 0517415143 (0-517-41514-3)
Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing

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- Collected Poems Emily Dickenson : Cha Riv: ISBN 0517415143 (0-517-41514-3)
  Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing
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Collected Poems Of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mabel Loomis Todd

ISBN 0517362422 (0-517-36242-2)
Hardcover, Random House Value Pub

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Book summary:
A beautiful collection of poems by Emily Dickinson. [via]
More editions of Collected Poems Of Emily Dickinson:
- Collected Poems Of Emily Dickinson: ISBN 0517362422 (0-517-36242-2)
  Hardcover, Random House Value Pub
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Complete Poems and Selected Essays
by Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Gray

ISBN 0460872613 (0-460-87261-3)
Softcover, Tuttle Pub

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Book summary:
This book is part of the "Everyman" series which has been re-set with wide margins and easy-to-read type and includes a themed introduction, a chronology of the life and times of the author, a plot summary, annotated reading list and critical response. This selection presents all of Poe's poetry, and includes the less well known poems written before he was 20, among them "To Helen", which Poe said was written in boyhood for the woman whose death caused him "with half his heart to inhabit other worlds". The selected essays are illuminating in relation to Poe's life and times. [via]
More editions of Complete Poems and Selected Essays:
- Complete Poems and Selected Essays: ISBN 0460872613 (0-460-87261-3)
  Softcover, Tuttle Pub
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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe

ISBN 0394716787 (0-394-71678-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
All of the tales by the master of the detective and the macabre story. 53 of his best-known poems plus essays and criticisms. [via]
More editions of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe:
- The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: ISBN 0394716787 (0-394-71678-7)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Confidence Man
by Herman Melville, Hershel Parker, Mark Niemeyer

ISBN 039397927X (0-393-97927-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
The text of The Confidence-Man reprinted here is again that of the first American edition (1857), slightly corrected.
The Second Edition features significantly expanded explanatory annotations, particularly of biblical allusions.

"Contemporary Reviews" includes nineteen commentaries on The Confidence-Man, eight of them new to the Second Edition. Better understood today are the concerted attacks on Melville by, especially, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist reviewers.

A new section, "Biographical Overviews," embodies the transformation of knowledge about Melvilles life that has occurred over the last three decades. This section provides a wide range of readings of Melvilles life by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dennis Marnon, and Hershel Parker, among others.

"Sources, Backgrounds, and Criticism" is thematically organized to inform readers about movements and social developments central to Melvilles America and to this novel, including utopias, cults, cure-alls, Transcendentalism, Indian hating, the Bible, and popular literature.

A Selected Bibliography is also included. [via]
More editions of Confidence Man:
- Confidence Man: ISBN 0451520181 (0-451-52018-1)
  Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
- Confidence Man: ISBN 039397927X (0-393-97927-X)
  Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by Edgar Allan Poe, Random House Value Publishing Staff

ISBN 0517643588 (0-517-64358-8)
Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing

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More editions of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination:
- Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Mystery and Imagination: ISBN 0517643588 (0-517-64358-8)
  Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing
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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
by Tom Robbins

ISBN 0395245109 (0-395-24510-9)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
Listeners follow Sissy Hankshaw's odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax. Unabridged. 12 CDs.
[via]
More editions of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues:
- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: ISBN 039524305X (0-395-24305-X)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: ISBN 0395245109 (0-395-24510-9)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan

ISBN 0399134204 (0-399-13420-4)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

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Book summary:
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]
More editions of The Joy Luck Club:
- The Joy Luck Club: ISBN 0399134204 (0-399-13420-4)
  Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
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Little Men
by Louisa May Alcott, Barbarese, J. T. (AFT)

ISBN 0451529359 (0-451-52935-9)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
Jo March, the heroine of Little Women, is back in a charming sequel to that beloved book. She and her husband open their hearts to a host of endearing little mischief-makers in an effort to teach them "how to help themselves and be useful men." A heartwarming classic.
[via]
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Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys
by Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens

ISBN 0448110180 (0-448-11018-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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More editions of Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys:
- Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys: ISBN 0448110180 (0-448-11018-0)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
The Marble Faun
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

ISBN 0486434117 (0-486-43411-7)
Softcover, Dover Pubns

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Book summary:
This novel tells the story of Donarells, an Italian Count bearing an uncanny resemblance to the faun of Praxiteles, the sculptor Kenyon and two young art students, Miriam and Hilda. The author also wrote "Scarlet Letter". [via]
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The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy

ISBN 0449911705 (0-449-91170-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational. [via]
More editions of The Moviegoer:
- The Moviegoer: ISBN 0394437039 (0-394-43703-9)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- The Moviegoer: ISBN 0449911705 (0-449-91170-5)
  Softcover, Ballantine Books
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature Since 1945
by Nina Baym

ISBN 0393979016 (0-393-97901-6)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present. This volumeVolume Ecovers American literature from 1945 to 2002. [via]
More editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature Since 1945:
- The Norton Anthology of American Literature Since 1945: ISBN 0393979016 (0-393-97901-6)
  Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820: Literature to 1820
by Nina Baym

ISBN 0393978982 (0-393-97898-2)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
Previous editions are cited in Books for College Libraries, 3d ed. . In this sixth edition of the anthology, the former Volumes 1 and 2 have been divided into five individual volumes. Volume A covers American literature to 1820. A wide variety of literature is represented, including Native American [via]
More editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820: Literature to 1820:
- The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820: Literature to 1820: ISBN 0393978982 (0-393-97898-2)
  Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865: American Literature 1820-1865
by Nina Baym

ISBN 0393979059 (0-393-97905-9)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present. This volumeVolume Bcovers American literature from 1820 to 1865. [via]
More editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865: American Literature 1820-1865:
- The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865: American Literature 1820-1865: ISBN 0393979059 (0-393-97905-9)
  Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Paradise
by Toni Morrison

ISBN 0452280397 (0-452-28039-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1998: Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim "the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.
Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death. [via]
More editions of Paradise:
- Paradise: ISBN 0452280397 (0-452-28039-7)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Rabbit Redux
by John Updike

ISBN 0449911934 (0-449-91193-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
"A triumph."

NEWSDAY

The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story. Harry Angstrom--known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters--finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order.

From the Paperback edition. [via]
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Rabbit, Run
by John Updike

ISBN 0449911659 (0-449-91165-9)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one-time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'. [via]
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Ragtime
by E.L. Doctorow

ISBN 0452279070 (0-452-27907-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
An account of the interrelated lives of the families of a New Rochelle manufacturer, an immigrant socialist, and a Harlem musician and their involvements with period notables is set against the backdrop of early twentieth-century American history. Reprint. [via]
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois

ISBN 0451526031 (0-451-52603-1)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.
With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]
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Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by Edgar Allan Poe, Graham Clarke

ISBN 0460873423 (0-460-87342-3)
Softcover, Everyman

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Book summary:
Award-winning fantasy illustrator Gary Kelley writes, "I have selected three of Edgar Allan Poe's best short stories.... I chose 'The Fall of the House of Usher' for its classic Gothic images and its dark, melancholic central characters, including the house itself. 'The Black Cat' is ... appealing to me for its use of mystery and foreboding that takes us to a horrifying climax. 'The Cask of Amontillado' ... my personal favorite, [is] a simple narrative of revenge set in the contrasting worlds of carnival and catacomb." Click on the book's cover for a closer look, but the reproduction doesn't really do justice to the richness of color in Kelley's shadowy, atmospheric paintings. (The cat's eye is green, and its tongue is pink.) This gorgeous edition has 20 full- and double-page paintings, including a melancholy portrait of Poe; each page of text is surrounded by subtle decorative frames. The images of Roderick and Madeleine Usher are especially effective. [via]
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Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley

ISBN 0449907481 (0-449-90748-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
A thousand acres, a piece of land of almost mythic proportions. Upon this fertile, nourishing earth, Jane Smiley has set her rich, breathtakingly dramatic novel of an American family whose wealth cannot stay the hand of tragedy. It is the intense, compelling story of a father and his daughters, of sisters, of wives and husbands, and of the human cost of a lifetime spent trying to subdue the land and the passions it stirs. The most critically acclaimed novel of the literary season, a classic story of contemporary American life, A THOUSAND ACRES is destined to be read for years to come.
"It has been a long time since a novel so surprised me with its power to haunt . . . . Its genius grows from its ruthless acceptance of the divided nature of every character . . . . This gives A THOUSAND ACRES the prismatic quality of the greatest art." -- Chicago Tribune
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of Thousand Acres:
- A Thousand Acres : A Novel: ISBN 0394577736 (0-394-57773-6)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Thousand Acres: ISBN 0449907481 (0-449-90748-1)
  Softcover, Ballantine Books
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The Town
by William Faulkner

ISBN 0394424522 (0-394-42452-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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Book summary:
This is the second volume of Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South.

Like its predecessor The Hamlet and its successor The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes' ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and of profundity.

From the Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of The Town:
- The Town: ISBN 0394424522 (0-394-42452-2)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller

ISBN 0451526058 (0-451-52605-8)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. [via]
More editions of Tropic of Cancer:
- Tropic of Cancer: ISBN 0394604350 (0-394-60435-0)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
- Tropic of Cancer: ISBN 0451526058 (0-451-52605-8)
  Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
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Walden And Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau, Paul Lauter

ISBN 0395980771 (0-395-98077-1)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div

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Book summary:

Henry David Thoreau's masterwork, Walden, is a collection of his reflections on life and society. His simple but profound musingsas well as Civil Disobedience, his protest against the government's interference with civil libertyhave inspired many to embrace his philosophy of individualism and love of nature.

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Walden Or, Life in the Woods and "on the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
by Henry David Thoreau

ISBN 0451527070 (0-451-52707-0)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
A philosophy of life and observations on government included in these famous books. [via]
More editions of Walden Or, Life in the Woods and "on the Duty of Civil Disobedience":
- Walden Or, Life in the Woods and "on the Duty of Civil Disobedience": ISBN 0451523776 (0-451-52377-6)
  Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
- Walden Or, Life in the Woods and "on the Duty of Civil Disobedience": ISBN 0451527070 (0-451-52707-0)
  Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
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Washington Square
by Henry James

ISBN 0451524993 (0-451-52499-3)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
The shy and sweet daughter of a well-to-do physician, Catherine Sloper seems destined for lifelong spinsterhood until the sudden appearance of a dashing suitor who proposes marriage. Her adored father suspects the would-be fiance of fortune-hunting and threatens her with disinheritance, forcing Catherine to choose between lover and father.
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Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut

ISBN 0440194784 (0-440-19478-4)
Softcover, Dell Publishing

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Book summary:
Welcome To The Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnueguts shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision. [via]
More editions of Welcome to the Monkey House:
- Welcome to the Monkey House: ISBN 0440194784 (0-440-19478-4)
  Softcover, Dell Publishing
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Where the Red Fern Grows
by Wilson Rawls

ISBN 0440412676 (0-440-41267-6)
Softcover, Yearling Books

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Book summary:

Book Details:
- Format: Hardcover
- Publication Date: 1/1/2000
- Pages: 328
- Reading Level: Age 12 and Up
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Wild Palms
by William Faulkner

ISBN 039470262X (0-394-70262-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Harry Wilbourne and his lover Charlotte escape from the snare of Chicago and the security that the city holds after he has performed an abortion on her. But the shades of the prison house, of death, seem to close around them as they turn their backs on life to conserve their love. [via]
More editions of Wild Palms:
- The Wild Palms: ISBN 0394605136 (0-394-60513-6)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
- Wild Palms: ISBN 039470262X (0-394-70262-X)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Woman Warrior
by Maxine Hong Kingston

ISBN 0394723929 (0-394-72392-9)
Hardcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
'A brilliant memoir ...it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it ...Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior's voice, and as eloquent as any artist's' Jane Kramer, New York Times Book Review 'This is a delightful book ...tells more than I ever imagined about the strangeness of being Chinese and a woman; it also gives a superb account of what it's like simply to be alive' Victoria Radin, New Society 'A strange, enchanting book ...As a manual of self-discovery through the channels and terrors of one's own rejected communal memory, it is unbeatable' Clancy Sigal, Guardian 'As a dream -- of the "female avenger" -- it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword ...reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God' John Leonard, New York Times 'A book of fierce clarity and originality' Newsweek [via]
More editions of The Woman Warrior:
- The Woman Warrior: ISBN 0394723929 (0-394-72392-9)
  Hardcover, Vintage Books
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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
by Maxine Hong Kingston

ISBN 0394400674 (0-394-40067-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]
More editions of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts:
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts: ISBN 0394400674 (0-394-40067-4)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group