Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy

Samuel Butler was an individualistic Victorian era writer who published a variety of works. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, considerable studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history as well as criticism. Butler even made prose translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" which remain some of the most popular to this day. His authority on literature came through his posthumous novel, "The...

[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...

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, heartwrenching, 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...

"In 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy." "Under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room, his account of his four-month...

"In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village "scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues." For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In "King Billy Is a Gentleman,"...

"Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rock's stunning auto-biographical novel begins in the 90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin, where the narrator, a man recently graduated from college, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and...

"A major publishing event: the previously untranslated story of a family's moral reckoning and a daughter's fall from grace, from the renowned author of The Lover and The War"--

Presents the previously unpublished original scroll edition of Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" which Kerouac wrote over a three-week period in 1951 on eight sheets of tracing paper that he taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. Includes the real names of the friends that inspired the book's storyline.

"...On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village, the family, and the past he had sworn to leave behind. A bestseller in France; challenged and vindicated in the courts; History of Violence is a short nonfiction novel in the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold...