Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring ... View details
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, a...
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as reno... View details
The worst was that she was always caught and dragged back, dirty, with wild eyes that had seen freedom. She would curse her captors, and even the tough old-timers had to laugh at the names she made up...
In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his frie... View details
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip da...
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential boo... View details
Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . The first little washes flashing like thick...
Hammett Prize - Int'l. Assn. of Crime Writers Nominee
The basis for the blockbuster motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island by New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane is a gripping and atmosp... View details
TEDDY DANIELS’S FATHER had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the bank in ’31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight alo...
This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop cult... View details
The New York office was not familiar with the Vincent Black Shadow: they referred me to the Los Angeles bureau—which is actually in Beverly Hills just a few long blocks from the Polo Lounge—but when I...
First there was the insomnia.
Then there were the support groups that helped him sleep.
Then Marla Singer turned up, muscled in on ascending bowel cancer and ruined everything.
Then he met Tyler Durden.... View details
TYLER GETS ME a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. Peop...
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it... View details
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up...
A young girl retreats from the real world into a world of fantasy and madness.... View details
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.
Now a Hulu limited series starring Christopher Abbott, George Clooney, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie.
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a co... View details
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could trea...