The Canterbury Tales

Written by Geoffrey Chaucer
Translated by Burton Raffel
Introduction by John Miles Foley

Format: Trade Paperback, 672 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: November 10, 2009
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7845-2 (0-8129-7845-5)

Beyond its importance as a literary work of unvarnished genius, Geoffrey Chaucer’ s unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language–and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny. But despite the brilliance of Chaucer’s work, the continual evolution of our... Read more >

The Awakening

Written by Kate Chopin

Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: August 31, 2010
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-1-935554-12-7 (1-935554-12-3)

Condemned as “sordid” and “immoral” on its publication in 1899, this story of a woman trapped in her marriage effectively ended Chopin’s career but was revived as a proto-feminist classic in the 1970s. What Newsweek calls Chopin's “prophetic psychology” insures its timeliness today. Read more >

Unconfessed

Written by Yvette Christianse

Format: Trade Paperback, 360 pages
Publisher: Other Press
On Sale: September 17, 2007
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59051-281-4 (1-59051-281-2)

Pen/Hemingway Award Finalist

Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed–and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force. They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave woman of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg... Read more >

Ready Player One
A Novel
Written by Ernest Cline

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: June 5, 2012
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-88744-3 (0-307-88744-8)

The Common Reading Committee at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has selected Ready Player One for their Freshmen Read Fall 2012 title
Winner, ALA Alex Award 2012

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and... Read more >

Ready Player One

Written by Ernest Cline

Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Crown
On Sale: August 16, 2011
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-88743-6 (0-307-88743-X)

Winner of the 2012 Alex Award
A 2011 School Library Journal "Best Adult Book 4 Teens"

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages... Read more >

America Noir
Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era
Written by David Cochran

Format: Trade Paperback, 280 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: June 22, 2010
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-218-8 (1-58834-218-2)

In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone featured victims of vast, faceless, bureaucratic... Read more >

Ballistics
Poems
Written by Billy Collins

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: February 16, 2010
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7561-1 (0-8129-7561-8)

A Billy Collins poem is instantly recognizable. “Using simple, understandable language,” notes USA TODAY, the two-term U.S. Poet Laureate “captures ordinary life—its pleasure, its discontents, its moments of sadness and of joy.” His everyman approach to writing resonates with readers everywhere and generates fans who would otherwise never give a poem... Read more >

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

Written by Joseph Conrad

Format: Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: May 1, 1982
Price: $4.95
ISBN: 978-0-553-21214-3 (0-553-21214-1)

In Conrad's haunting tale, Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the enigmatic Kurtz. Travelling to the heart of the African continent, he discovers how Kurtz has gained his position of power and influence over the local people. Marlow's struggle to fathom his experience... Read more >

Lord Jim

Written by Joseph Conrad

Format: Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: February 1, 1981
Price: $5.95
ISBN: 978-0-553-21361-4 (0-553-21361-X)

Lord Jim is a classic story of one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world which made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also the book in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of his... Read more >

The Secret Agent
A Simple Tale
Written by Joseph Conrad
Edited by Peter Mallios
Introduction by Robert D. Kaplan

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: December 14, 2004
Price: $10.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7305-1 (0-8129-7305-4)

In reexamining The Secret Agent in a post-9/11 world, Robert D. Kaplan praises Joseph Conrad’s “surgical insight into the mechanics of terrorism,” calling the book “a fine example of how a savvy novelist may detect the future long before a social scientist does.”

This intense 1907 thriller–a precursor to works by... Read more >

Adolphe

Written by Benjamin Constant
Translated by Carl Wildman

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: August 31, 2010
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-1-935554-09-7 (1-935554-09-3)

Adolphe is a privileged and refined young man, bored by the stupidity he perceives in the world around him. After a number of meaningless conquests, he at last encounters Ellenore, a beautiful and passionate older woman. Adolphe is enraptured and gradually wears down her resistance to his declarations of love. But... Read more >

Fifty Great American Short Stories

Written by Milton Crane

Format: Paperback, 672 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: August 1, 1984
Price: $6.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-27294-9 (0-553-27294-2)

The genius of American writing as shown in a wide range of stories by acclaimed authors including O.Henry, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Sarah Orne Jewett, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Collier, James Agee, John Cleever, Irwin Shaw, Carson McCullers and others.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
“The Adventure of the German Student” by Washington... Read more >

I Heard the Owl Call My Name

Written by Margaret Craven

Format: Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Dell
On Sale: January 15, 1980
Price: $6.99
ISBN: 978-0-440-34369-1 (0-440-34369-0)

This bestselling classic of Native American literature captures the essence of the modern Native American experience with compassion, poignancy and compelling drama. It tells the story of a new generation of Native Americans in an ancient village in which the old culture of totems and potlatch is rapidly being replaced by... Read more >

The Passage: A Novel

Written by Justin Cronin

Format: Trade Paperback, 800 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: May 17, 2011
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-50497-5 (0-345-50497-6)

This paperback edition includes:

* A sneak preview of The Twelve, coming in 2012
* A revealing interview with author Justin Cronin

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • Esquire • U.S. News &... Read more >

Paradise

Written by Dante
Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Translated by Anthony Esolen

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: February 13, 2007
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7726-4 (0-8129-7726-2)

“If there is any justice in the world of books, [Esolen’s] will be the standard Dante . . . for some time to come.”–Robert Royal, Crisis

In this, the concluding volume of The Divine Comedy, Dante ascends from the devastation of the Inferno and the trials of Purgatory. Led by his beloved... Read more >

Paradise

Written by Dante
Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Translated by Anthony Esolen

Format: Hardcover, 544 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: November 2, 2004
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-64269-5 (0-679-64269-2)

The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot. "The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."

The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world... Read more >

Sister Carrie

Written by Theodore Dreiser

Format: Paperback, 560 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: January 1, 1982
Price: $5.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-21374-4 (0-553-21374-1)

Theodore Dreiser had a hardscrabble youth and the years of newspaper work behind him when he began his first novel, Sister Carrie, the story of a beautiful Midwestern girl who makes it big in New York City. Published by Doubleday in 1900, it gained a reputation as a shocker, for Dreiser... Read more >

The Birth of Venus
A Novel
Written by Sarah Dunant

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: November 30, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6897-2 (0-8129-6897-2)

2005 BOOK SENSE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD, ADULT NON-FICTION

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a... Read more >

The Dud Avocado

Written by Elaine Dundy
Introduction by Terry Teachout

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: June 5, 2007
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-232-2 (1-59017-232-9)

Elaine Dundy’s semi-autobiographical comic novel follows the misadventures of an American girl who impulsively quits college and heads off to conquer Paris in the 1950s.

Sally Jay Gorce sets out to become an actress, but what she really wants to do is experience the wide world, and to “make her wits... Read more >

The 19th Wife
A Novel
Written by David Ebershoff

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: June 2, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7415-7 (0-8129-7415-8)

It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of her family’s polygamous history is revealed, including... Read more >

Middlemarch

Written by George Eliot

Format: Paperback, 1088 pages
Publisher: Bantam Classics
On Sale: February 1, 1985
Price: $6.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-21180-1 (0-553-21180-3)

Strangled by the confining terms of her late husband's will, an idealistic young woman throws herself into the struggle for medical reforms advocated by a visionary doctor. Considered by many to be Eliot's finest work and one of the greatest Victorian novels--a magisterial and multilayered recreation of English life. Read more >

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Written by Ralph Ellison
Preface by Saul Bellow
Edited by John Callahan

Format: Trade Paperback, 904 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6826-2 (0-8129-6826-3)

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions... Read more >

The Good Body

Written by Eve Ensler

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Villard
On Sale: November 8, 2005
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7473-7 (0-8129-7473-5)

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a “good body.” “In the 1950s,” Eve writes, girls were “pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore... Read more >

Grief Lessons
Four Plays by Euripides
Written by Euripides
Translated by Anne Carson
Introduction by Anne Carson

Format: Trade Paperback, 312 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics
On Sale: September 16, 2008
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-59017-253-7 (1-59017-253-1)

Euripides reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. His plays were shocking: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless—women and children, slaves and barbarians—for whom tragedy was not... Read more >

A Good and Happy Child
A Novel
Written by Justin Evans

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: April 22, 2008
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-35128-9 (0-307-35128-9)

Thirty-year-old George Davies can’t bring himself to hold his newborn son. After months of accepting his lame excuses and strange behavior, his wife has had enough. She demands that he see a therapist, and George, desperate to save his unraveling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, reluctantly agrees... Read more >