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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
2) Cat's cradle
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The Day the World Ended Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place...
3) The robe
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A Roman tribune, Marcellus Gallio, supervises the crucifixion of three men in Jerusalem. The time is 33 A.D. He wins a robe, the only possession of one of the three, in a dice game, but is greatly affected by the words of the dying man and becomes half mad with fear and guilt. A lavish epic of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
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Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front (1923) is a stirring rumination of family, art, and the shortcomings of possession. The story, which is set on the eve of the First World War reflects the author's own experience living in France when the "Great War" broke out. The delineation of Wartime Paris is one of great power and evocation, yet it is the immensely personal father-son relationship that is at the heart of this tragic novel.
The novel begins in...
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From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of...
6) The chosen
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In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences (Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jew with an intellectual, Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and rightful heir to a Hasidic rebbe), the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship. Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss,...
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Like the blues--sweet, sad, and full of truth--this masterful work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love--the affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of the black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous Tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realistic tale......
8) Rabbit, run
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"Contemporary in setting and tone, and brilliant in its evocation of everyday life in America, the novel is about Harry Angstrom ('Rabbit'), a salesman who, on an impulse, leaves home, his alcoholic wife, Janice, and his child, Nelson, to find freedom. After several escapades and a liaison with an ex-prostitute, he returns to his wife and child and attempts to settle down again. In this novel, Updike conveys the longings and frustrations of family...
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In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In...
10) The great escape
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It was a split-second operation as delicate and as deadly as a time bomb. It demanded the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred American and British air force officers, every single one of them, every minute, every hour, every day, and every night for more than a year. With only their bare hands and the crudest of homemade tools, they sank shafts, built underground railroads, forged passports, drew maps, faked weapons, and
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Death Comes For The Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape suggest why Willa Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier. Told with a directness that overlays its profound artistry, this story of the nineteenth century missionary priest Father...
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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 friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial...
14) Tobacco Road
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Originally published in 1932, Caldwell's novel told the story of the Lester family, poor Georgia sharecroppers who no longer farmed the land, but lived by whatever means possible. Caldwell's picture of the rural South challenged notions of the dignified and polite Antebellum South and depicted an image that was grotesque, violent, and morally bankrupt. Southern readers immediately found Caldwell's novel needlessly exaggerated and offensive, while...
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Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.
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When an enigmatic monolith is found buried on the moon, scientists are amazed to discover that it's at least 3 million years old. Even more amazing, after it's unearthed the artifact releases a powerful signal aimed at Saturn. What sort of alarm has been triggered? To find out, a manned spacecraft, the Discovery, is sent to investigate. Its crew is highly trained--the best--and they are assisted by a self-aware computer, the ultra-capable HAL 9000....
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"A repackaged edition of the revered author's retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche -- what he and many others regard as his best novel. C. S. Lewis -- the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics -- brilliantly reimagines the story of Cupid and Psyche. Told from...
20) Jacob's room
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Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922) differs from its two predecessors in its experimental, abstract approach to writing. Jacob Flanders' life is examined largely through the impressions and accounts of others in his life, mostly women, creating a portrait of a young man both representative of and victimized by Edwardian society. The novel coincided with Woolf's emerging interest in feminism and is critical of the righteous patriarchy...