First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the brothers. Includes the...

Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back?

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him. A story of Americans living on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability.

Presents an experimental novel depicting a dream of world history, with characters from literature and history appearing and disappearing, written in a dream language that is a comical mixture of all the languages of Europe.

With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the...

Tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. While at Oxford, Charles Ryder meets boyish, flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, who introduces Charles to a charmed and glamorous way of life that continues until Sebastian's health deteriorates.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the World War II, "The Naked and the Dead" received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its 1948 publication and has since become part of the American canon.

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...

Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattled family, this book is a portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.

An account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.