"The Diary of a Resurrectionist" by James Blake Bailey offers a gripping glimpse into the life of a resurrectionist during a time when body snatching was a grim necessity for medical advancement. Through the eyes of the author, readers are transported to the early 19th century, where the demand for cadavers for anatomical study led to morally ambiguous practices. Bailey's detailed accounts reveal the challenges and dangers faced by those who engaged in this illicit trade, providing a uniqu...

The “Diary of a Resurrectionist” here reprinted is only of a fragmentary character. It is, however, unique in being an actual record of the doings of one gang of the resurrection-men in London. Many persons have expressed a wish that so interesting a document should be published; permission having been obtained to print the Diary, an endeavour has been made to gratify this wish. To make the reprint more interesting, and to explain some of the allusions in the Diary, an account of the resur...

John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s Cheever is a stunning example of the biographer’s art and a brilliant tribute to an essential author.

Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty is the first biography of acclaimed American novelist and story writer Richard YatesCelebrated in his prime, forgotten in his final years, only to be championed anew by our greatest contemporary authors, Richard Yates has always exposed readers to the unsettling hypocrisies of our modern age. Classic novels such as Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade are incomparable chronicles of the quiet and not-so...

From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend—a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other.Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend—the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Wi...

A masterful collection of short stories exposing the seamy undercurrents of small-town American life from Charles Jackson, celebrated author of The Lost Weekend.A selection of Jackson’s finest tales, The Sunnier Side and Other Stories explores the trials of adolescence in America during the tumultuous years of the early twentieth century. Set in the town of Arcadia in upstate New York, the stories in this collection address the unspoken issues—homosexuality, mastu...

The classic tale of one man’s struggle with alcoholism, this revolutionary novel remains Charles Jackson’s best-known book—a daring autobiographical work that paved the way for contemporary addiction literature.It is 1936, and on the East Side of Manhattan, a would-be writer named Don Birnam decides to have a drink. And then another, and then another, until he’s in the midst of what becomes a five-day binge. The Lost Weekend moves with unstoppable speed, propelled by a hea...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood.In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. ...

Winner of the National Book AwardThe publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction.There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.O'Connor published her first stor...

In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” A...

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life.Considered the greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressi...

**From the award-winning, *New York Times-*bestselling author of Matrix and Brawler: an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception.NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF THE ATLANTIC’S GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS,...