The Triumph of the Thriller
How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction
Written by Patrick Anderson

Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: February 6, 2007
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-48123-8 (0-345-48123-2)

There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence... Read more >

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair

Written by Anthony Arthur

Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: June 6, 2006
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6151-8 (1-4000-6151-2)

Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In... Read more >

Those Bones Are Not My Child
A Novel
Written by Toni Cade Bambara

Format: Trade Paperback, 688 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 24, 2000
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-77408-2 (0-679-77408-4)

In a suspenseful novel of uncommon depth and intensity, Toni Cade Bambara renders a harrowing portrait of a city under siege. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were... Read more >

Fahrenheit 451

Written by Ray Bradbury

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: August 27, 1996
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-41001-6 (0-345-41001-7)

Winner of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

A novel of the future in which censorship has gone wild. Acclaimed as a modern classic in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984, this novel predicts a chilling but believable future.

Internationally acclaimed with more than 5 million... Read more >

Too Brief a Treat
The Letters of Truman Capote
Written by Truman Capote
Edited by Gerald Clarke

Format: Hardcover, 512 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: September 21, 2004
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-50133-3 (0-375-50133-9)

Truman Capote was hailed as one the most meticulous writers in American letters–a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from his chaotic life. While the measure of Capote as a writer is best taken through his work, Capote the person is best understood... Read more >

Call If You Need Me
The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
Written by Raymond Carver

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 9, 2001
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72628-6 (0-375-72628-4)

A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL

A literary event: Raymond Carver's complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the recently discovered "last" stories, found a decade after Carver's death and published here in book form for the first time.

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four... Read more >

Caramelo

Written by Sandra Cisneros

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-74258-6 (0-679-74258-1)

The celebrated author of The House on Mango Street gives us an extraordinary new novel, told in language of blazing originality: a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose voices create a dazzling weave of humor, passion, and poignancy—the very stuff of life.

Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of... Read more >

The Ox-Bow Incident

Written by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Introduction by Wallace Stegner

Format: Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: April 27, 2004
Price: $5.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7258-0 (0-8129-7258-9)

Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally... Read more >

House of Leaves
The Remastered Full-Color Edition
Written by Mark Z. Danielewski

Format: Trade Paperback, 736 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: March 7, 2000
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70376-8 (0-375-70376-4)

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd... Read more >

Prize Stories 2001
The O. Henry Awards
Edited by Larry Dark

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 28, 2001
Price: $23.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-49878-4 (0-385-49878-0)

Established early in the last century as a memorial to O. Henry, throughout its history this annual collection has consistently offered a remarkable sampling of contemporary short stories. Each year, stories are chosen from large and small literary magazines, and a panel of distinguished writers is enlisted to award top prizes... Read more >

Melville
His World and Work
Written by Andrew Delbanco

Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 2006
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70297-6 (0-375-70297-0)

With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses unparalleled historical and critical perspective to... Read more >

Chinese Apples
New and Selected Poems
Written by W.S. Di Piero

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: July 14, 2009
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71143-5 (0-375-71143-0)

Now in paperback: the “lovely and evocative book” (San Francisco Chronicle) of poems both new and old that celebrates a quarter century of passionate engagement with real life and its transformation into poetic form: the pull of faith and the poet’s suspicion of transcendence, urban worlds and the mysterious jazz of... Read more >

The Quest of the Silver Fleece
A Novel
Written by W.E.B. Dubois

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Harlem Moon
On Sale: September 14, 2004
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1845-9 (0-7679-1845-2)

INTRODUCTION BY ARNOLD RAMPERSAD, cognizant dean for humanities at Stanford University.

The Quest of the Silver Fleece was the first novel to come from world-famous sociologist and civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. A controversial title of its time, the novel chronicles the complex interactions between Northern financing and Southern politics as it... Read more >

Ella Minnow Pea
A Novel in Letters
Written by Mark Dunn

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 17, 2002
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72243-8 (0-385-72243-5)

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and... Read more >

Look at Me
A Novel
Written by Jennifer Egan

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: October 8, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-72135-6 (0-385-72135-8)

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a... Read more >

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Written by Dave Eggers

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 13, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72578-4 (0-375-72578-4)

"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a fine book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Eggers' most powerful prose is often his most straightforward, relying on old-fashioned truth telling for its punch." —The New York Times Book Review

The literary sensation of the year, a book that... Read more >

You Shall Know Our Velocity

Written by Dave Eggers

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 1, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3354-6 (1-4000-3354-3)

In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. It reminds us once again what an important, necessary talent Dave Eggers is.

“Headlong, heartsick... Read more >

Conspiracy of Fools
A True Story
Written by Kurt Eichenwald

Format: Trade Paperback, 784 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: December 27, 2005
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1179-5 (0-7679-1179-2)

One of BusinessWeek's Top 10 Business Books of 2005

In late 2001, the Enron Corporation imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. But for all that has been written about the Enron debacle, no one has yet to a full... Read more >

Lincoln and Whitman
Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington
Written by Daniel Mark Epstein

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 11, 2005
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-45800-1 (0-345-45800-1)

Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives, and both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the Civil War. In this radiant... Read more >

Legends and Tales of the American West

Written by Richard Erdoes

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: September 1, 1998
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70266-2 (0-375-70266-0)

From Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane to Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Frank and Jesse James, here are more than 130 colorful stories of the pioneers, cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, prospectors, and lawmen who settled the wild west, creating a uniquely American hero and a fascinating folk mythology.

In... Read more >

The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination

Written by Harold Frederic
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: May 14, 2002
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-76035-8 (0-375-76035-0)

Published in 1896, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination is a profound psychological portrait of the spiritual undoing of a guileless Methodist minister who is taken in by a rural townspeople’s various progressive ideas, from liberalism to bohemianism, only to be spurned by them for being too conventional. Described by... Read more >

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003

Edited by Laura Furman

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3131-3 (1-4000-3131-1)

“Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.” —The Atlantic Monthly

Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The... Read more >

Bee Season
A Novel
Written by Myla Goldberg

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: May 15, 2001
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-49880-7 (0-385-49880-2)

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling... Read more >

Angel of Harlem
A Novel
Written by Kuwana Haulsey

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: May 30, 2006
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-76133-1 (0-375-76133-0)

Inspired by the extraordinary events of Dr. May Chinn’s life, Angel of Harlem is a deeply affecting story of love and transcendence. Weaving seamlessly scenes from the battlefields of the Civil War, during which her father escaped from slavery, to the Harlem living rooms and kitchen tables where May is sometimes... Read more >

soulscript
A Collection of Classic African American Poetry
Written by June Jordan

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Harlem Moon
On Sale: November 2, 2004
Price: $10.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1846-6 (0-7679-1846-0)

Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward come together for a moving anthology, edited and organized by the late, revered poet June Jordan.

First published in 1970, soulscript is a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the most eloquent voices in the art. Selected for their literary... Read more >