F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel features Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy, spoiled, and snobbish young man from the Midwest who attends Princeton University to acquire a refined sense of the proper “social” values. Lacking all sense of purpose, he interests himself primarily in literary cults, vaguely “liberal” student activities, and a series of flirtations with some rather predatory young ladies. Partially autobiographical, This Side of Paradise was credited with having inven...

Few works have captured the seamy side of American urban life with such graphic immediacy as Frank Norris’ McTeague. Heredity and environment play the role of fate in this portrayal of human degradation in turn-of-the-century San Francisco.McTeague, a successful but naive dentist, marries Trina, introduced to him by her cousin Marcus Schouler. When Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, and increases the sum by shrewd investment, Schouler, who had wanted to marry Trina himself, f...

Few works have so firmly established their position in American literature as The Education of Henry Adams. As a man of extraordinary gifts and learning and a member of one of the greatest American families, Henry Adams wrote an insightful exploration of himself and the tumultuous age in which he lived. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, he "revealed a phase of American history with unparalleled boldness and truth."In spite of his illustrious background and Harvard schooling...

Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of déjà vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.

Dr. Julie Walker wakes on a summer morning in San Francisco to find a city in chaos. Today Californians are voting on a controversial ballot initiative that will change history. With the future of the state and the nation uncertain, the streets have erupted into violence.Injured, Julie must make her way across the city by foot to the Veterans Administration Hospital, where her sister, recently returned from Afghanistan, is in labor. At the hospital a brutal scene is unfolding as a ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, is a savage and haunting satire of the young, rootless postwar generation who live intent only on the pursuit of wealth and decadent pleasure. Anthony Patch is a 1920s socialite and the presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune. His marriage to the beautiful but selfish Gloria is idyllic at first, but the union slowly disintegrates as reality sets in and their sole goal becomes Anthony's grandfather's fortune. Gloria's bea...

The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind's spiritual flu. But first he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen—and discover why so many living people are actually dead.A...

Will Barrett of Linwood, North Carolina, is a depressed widower with a peculiar tendency to fall down in strange places. Allison, the girl in the greenhouse, has just escaped from a mental institution and is working hard to make a new life for herself. When their paths cross in a most unusual manner, a relationship begins that will help restore two struggling outcasts to new life.What follows is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will undertakes his own Pascalian wage...

Three women. Three generations. Three secrets.**A Stonewall Honor Book!**Katie's life is falling apart: her best friend thinks she's a freak, her mother, Caroline, controls every aspect of her life, and her estranged grandmother, Mary, appears as if out of nowhere. Mary has dementia and needs lots of care, and when Katie starts putting together Mary's life story, secrets and lies are uncovered: Mary's illegitimate baby, her zest for life and freedom and me...

In her national bestseller Alice I Have Been, Melanie Benjamin imagined the life of the woman who inspired Alice in Wonderland. Now, in this jubilant new novel, Benjamin shines a dazzling spotlight on another fascinating female figure whose story has never fully been told: a woman who became a nineteenth century icon and inspiration—and whose most daunting limitation became her greatest strength.“Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead, I wou...

Lancelot Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering—until a visit from an old friend and classmate gives him the opportunity to recount his journey of dark violence.It began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter. That discovery touched off his obsession to reverse the degeneration of modern America and begin a new age of chivalry and romance. With ever in...

A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.James MacLaren, once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the Bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die ...