Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky b... View details
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgmen...
As seen through the eyes of his children, this is the legendary, wrenching story of lawyer Atticus Finch, who takes on a case that cuts deeply into the heart of racism in the 1930s Deep South. Mature content*
* Title may contain language or content c... View details
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious abou...
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized-and sometimes outraged-millions of readers. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitze... View details
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifte...
This classic novel tells the tale of an unusual friendship between two very different men: the mentally challenged and sometimes violent Lennie, and his loyal yet reluctant caretaker George. Finding comfort in one another's company, George and Lennie... View details
A FEW MILES south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight b...
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature-and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.
"If you really want to he... View details
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me...
A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
With an introduction by Richard Hughes
Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of... View details
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tre...
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and sin... View details
People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did ...
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Searchers, the revelatory story behind the classic movie High Noon and the toxic political climate in which it was created.
It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring scr... View details
In February 1934—the heart of an angry Chicago winter in the midst of the Great Depression—one of those aspiring young writers loaded his bags into a secondhand Plymouth and began the long, punishing ...
Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his companion, the slave Jim, as they journey down the Mississippi river after running away from Huck's alcoholic father and Jim's... View details
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There w...
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... View details
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...