ONE OF THE GREATEST AMERICAN SHORT STORY COLLECTIONSIn 1955, with this short story collection, Flannery O'Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O'Connor's unique, grotesque view of life-- infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation.With these classic stories-- including "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People," "The Displaced Person," and seven other acclaimed tales-- O'Connor earned a permanent place in the hearts of American readers."Much savagery, compassion, farce, art, and truth have gone into these stories. O'Connor's characters are wholeheartedly horrible, and almost better than life. I find it hard to think of a funnier or more frightening writer." -- Robert Lowell"In these stories the rural South is, for the first time, viewed by a writer who orthodoxy matches her talent. The results are revolutionary." -- The New York Times Book ReviewFlannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, but lived most of her life in the South, where she became an anomaly among post-World War II authors-- a Roman Catholic woman whose stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God's grace in everyday life. Her work-- novels, short stories, letters, and criticism-- received a number of awards, including the National Book Award.

From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love—“a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsIn the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon.”—The Washington Post Book WorldSOON TO BE A HULU SERIES • Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadIt’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.After that, things get much, much worse.With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .

A Pregnant Woman Leaves Her Husband And Moves To St. Elizabeth's, A Catholic Home For Unwed Mothers In Kentucky, To Begin A New Life.

A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience. Marilyn Robinson's acclaimed coming of age story set in Idaho mountain lake country.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times. It is also the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone.Evoking these lives—and the country that shaped and nourished them—with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

in Celebration Of The Fifteenth Anniversary Of Its Original Publication, Carol Shields's Pulitzer Prize—winning Novel Is Now Available In A Penguin Classics Deluxe Editionone Of The Most Successful And Acclaimed Novels Of Our Time, This Fictionalized Autobiography Of Daisy Goodwill Flett Is A Subtle But Affecting Portrait Of An Everywoman Reflecting On An Unconventional Life. What Transforms This Seemingly Ordinary Tale Is The Richness Of Daisy's Vividly Described Inner Life—from Her Earliest Memories Of Her Adoptive Mother To Her Awareness Of Impending Death.publishers Weeklyany Performer Has Her Work Cut Out For Her When A Novel Takes Place In Several Settings With Inhabitants Possessing Distinctive Regional Accents. Shield's Pulitzer Prize-winning Novel Takes The Listener From The Plains Of Central Canada To Bloomington, Ind., And The Orkney Islands. Botsford Is An Excellent Performer With A Smooth And Easy-to-listen-to Reading Voice, But She Doesn't Have A Gift For Imitating Linguistic Variations. The Women Of Daisy's Bloomington Circle Have Southern Lilts Worthy Of Gone With The Wind. Readers Would Expect The Voices Of This Coterie To Age As Daisy Does, But No Accommodation Is Made For This Possibility. Within Each Locale The Voices Are Quite Distinct, Though The Voice Of Daisy, The Center Of The Novel, Stands Out Least Of All, Appropriately Enough, For In This Work We See Her Life Through The Eyes Of Others. This Is An Important And Deft Novel And It's About Time That It Was Recorded, Even In This Overly Abridged Version. Shields's Writing Still Makes This Worth A Listen. Available As A Penguin Paperback. (oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

From the bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird: The modern classic that spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list and that Oprah.com calls one of the best memoirs of a generation.Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. "Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents' loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. "God is the color of water," Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life's blessings and life's values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth's determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college—and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

Freshman year at Merryweather High is not going well for Melinda Sordino. She busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, and now her friends—and even strangers—all hate her. So she stops trying, stops talking. She retreats into her head, and all the lies and hypocrisies of high school become magnified, leaving her with no desire to talk to anyone anyway. But it’s not so comfortable in her head, either—there’s something banging around in there that she doesn’t want to think about. She can’t just go on like this forever. Eventually, she’s going to have to confront the thing she’s avoiding, the thing that happened at the party, the thing that nobody but her knows. She’s going to have to speak the truth.

A gripping, best-selling narrative based on one refugee's story of escape from war-torn Sudan. In a heartrending and astonishing novel, Eggers illuminates the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States. We follow his life as he's driven from his home as a boy and walks, with thousands of orphans, to Ethiopia. Valentino's travels bring him in contact with government soldiers, janjaweed-like militias, liberation rebels, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation-and unexpected romances. In this audiobook, written with expansive humanity and surprising humor, we come to understand the nature of the conflicts in Sudan, the refugee experience in America, the dreams of the Dinka people, and the challenge one man faces in a world collapsing around him.

In A Personal Memoir, The Author Describes Her Relationships With The Two Men Closest To Her--her Father And His Brother, Joseph, A Charismatic Pastor With Whom She Lived After Her Parents Emigrated From Haiti To The United States. Part 1. He Is My Brother. Have You Enjoyed Your Life? ; Brother, I'm Dying ; What Did The White Man Say? ; Heartstrings, Shoestrings ; We're All Dying ; Good-bye ; Giving Birth ; The Return ; One Papa Happy, One Papa Sad ; Gypsy -- Part 2. For Adversity. Brother, I Can Speak ; The Angel Of Death And Father God ; You're Not A Policeman ; Brother, I Leave You With A Heavy Heart ; Beating The Darkness ; Hell ; Limbo ; No Greater Shame ; Alien 27041999 ; Tomorrow ; Afflictions ; Let The Stars Fall ; Brother, I'll See You Soon ; Transition. Edwidge Danticat. National Book Critics Circle Award For Autobiography, 2007

Winner of:The Pulitzer PrizeThe National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel PrizeA Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the YearOne of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsOscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this “spectacular” (The Washington Post) novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.“An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—PeopleA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, The Guardian Slate, BookPage, LibraryReads, Kirkus ReviewsLucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.