1. Ulysses
James Joyce
ISBN 0679600116
Est. list price: $21.95
A classic depiction of exile, estrangement, paralysis, and the disintegration of a society, Ulysses records the events of one average day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of three central figures.
2. Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
ISBN 0684830426
Est. list price: $24.50
A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology.
3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
ISBN 0679405755
Est. list price: $17.00
Follows Stephen Dedalus from his days as a student at the Clongowes Wood school, to his college years during which he challenges the conventions of his upbringing.
4. Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN 0679410430
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows.
5. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
ISBN 0899664237
Est. list price: $31.95
A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present--considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.
6. Sound And The Fury
William Faulkner
ISBN 0679600175
Est. list price: $15.50
The novel is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss., in the early 20th century. It describes the decay and fall of the aristocratic Compson family, and, implicitly, of an entire social order, from four different points of view.
7. Catch-22
Joseph Heller
ISBN 0671502336
Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.
8. Darkness At Noon
Arthur Koestler
ISBN 0553265954
Est. list price: $6.99
Darkness at Noon succeeds as political/historical novel, but even more so as a refreshing tale of the human spirit.
9. Sons And Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
ISBN 0679602682
Est. list price: $18.50
Drawing on both the physical setting and emotional atmosphere of his own childhood, Lawrence's evocation of a working-class life and of family conflicts is a literary masterpiece rich in insights into its author.
10. Grapes Of Wrath
John Steinbeck
ISBN 0679420401
Est. list price: $20.00
One of the greatest and most socially significant novels of the twentieth century, Steinbeck's controversial masterpiece indelibly captured America during the Great Depression through the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads. Intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.
11. Under The Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
ISBN 0060955228
Est. list price: $14.00
The Consul staggers from bar to bar hoping to find salvation. The dissolute life suits him until his former wife Yvonne returns with Hugh, the Consul's half-brother. As the trio enjoys a local Mexican festival, they discover the dead body of a peasant, thus beginning a series of events that will decide the Consul's fate. In the course of one day an entire life is chronicled.
12. The Way Of All Flesh
Samuel Butler
ISBN 0679417184
Reared on piety, repression and emotional blackmail, Ernest Pontifex follows the course prescribed for him towards Holy Orders. Yet rebellion at Cambridge, unwise theology, unwiser financial dealings, and finally prison free him from his parents' tyranny. Left with his health and career ruined, Ernest faces still more trials before fortune and his godfather rescue him from the brink.
13. 1984
ISBN 0899663680
Est. list price: $29.95
Published in 1949, Ninety Eighty-Four is Orwell's terrifying vision of a totalitarian future. Its hero, Winston Smith, is a worker at the Ministry of Truth, where he falsifies records for the party. Secretly subversive, he and his colleague Julia try to free themselves from political slavery but the price of freedom is betrayal.
14. I, Claudius
Robert Graves
ISBN 0848805119
Est. list price: $28.95
Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D.
15. To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
ISBN 0151907374
Est. list price: $18.00
A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family.
16. An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
ISBN 0899667090
Est. list price: $54.95
A story of a poor boy whose ambition for wealth and social prestige leads him to commit murder.
17. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
ISBN 0679424741
Est. list price: $17.95
A sensitive teenage girl discovers the meaning of loneliness.
18. Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN 0385312083
Est. list price: $22.95
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant during the Second World War, returns home only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present.
19. Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
ISBN 0679601392
Est. list price: $19.50
he nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of 'the Brotherhood', and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
20. Native Son
Richard Wright
ISBN 156849694X
Est. list price: $
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny--it was for murder and rape. Set in 1930s' Chicago, this powerful novel is as meaningful today as when it was written--both n its unsparing reflection of the poverty in the inner cities across the U.S. and in what it means to be black in America.
21. Henderson The Rain King
Saul Bellow
ISBN 0140189424
Est. list price: $13.95
Bellow's glorious, spirited story of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home of sorts in deepest Africa.
22. Appointment In Samarra
John O'Hara
ISBN 0679601104
Est. list price: $14.50
An excellent look at a Christmas weekend in the life of Julian English, a Cadillac dealer in a small town in Pennsylvania, and his wife Caroline. Many scenes, especially those that take place at the local country club, are expertly sketched and in Dr English, Julian's father, O'Hara creates a model of concise characterization.
23. U.S.A. (Trilogy)
John Dos Passos
ISBN 1883011140
Est. list price: $40.00
A novelistic view of America, from the robber barons to the labor radicals to the great American artists of the early twentieth century is captured by an author who lived through it in a trio of novels--The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money.
24. Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
ISBN 0679601465
Est. list price: $14.95
Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In 'Hands,' Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In 'Adventure,' lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.
25. A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
ISBN 0679405496
The book portrays the relationship between the British and the Indians in India and the tensions that arise when a visiting Englishwoman, Adela Quested, accuses a well-respected Indian man, Dr. Aziz, of attacking her during an outing.
26. The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
ISBN 0679600671
Like a dove, Milly Theale is victimized by ruthless predators: her guileless good will and ample fortune. When faced with a fatal illness, she hopes only for the joy of one experience of love; but the passionate lovers who befriend her betray her, leaving her to the talons of London society. Her last gesture will be either the ultimate deed of selflessness, or a final act of revenge.
27. The Ambassadors
ISBN 3895082309
Est. list price: $7.98
The Ambassadors, is the most exquisite refinement of his favorite theme: the collision of American innocence with European experience. This time, James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts.
28. Tender is the Night
ISBN 0684830507
A story of Americans on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability.
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
James T. Farrell
ISBN 0252062825
Studs Lonigan, the story of an Irish-American youth growing to adulthood in Chicago, is considered by many to be one of the finest American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, and its author was widely regarded as the voice of urban Irish America.
30. The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
ISBN 1582870314
Est. list price: $24.00
Somewhat forgotten as a classic, The Good Soldier has been called everything from the consummate novelist's novel to one of the greatest English works of the century. And although its narrative hook--the philandering of an otherwise noble man--no longer shocks, its unerring cadences and doleful inevitabilities proclaim an enduring appeal.
31. Animal Farm
ISBN
A political fable based on the events of Russia's Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals' intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.
32. The Golden Bowl
Wealthy American widower Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie live in Europe, where they collect art and relish each other's company. Through the efforts of the manipulative Fanny Assingham, Maggie becomes engaged to Amerigo, an Italian prince in reduced circumstances, but remains blind to his rekindled affair with her longtime friend Charlotte Stant. Maggie and Amerigo marry, and later, after Charlotte and Adam have also wed, both spouses learn of the ongoing affair, though neither seeks a confrontation. Not until Maggie buys the gilded crystal bowl of the title as a birthday present for Adam does truth crack the veneer of propriety.
33. Sister Carrie
ISBN 067960250X Est. list price: $19.50 Sister Carrie tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress, while George Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and suicide.
ISBN 067960250X
Sister Carrie tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress, while George Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and suicide.
34. A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
ISBN 0316926051
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver.
35. As I Lay Dying
ISBN 067973225X
As I Lay Dying is the harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.
36. All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
ISBN 0151047723
Est. list price: $19.00
All the King's Men is a classic novel about American politics. Set in the '30s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional character who resembles the real-life Huey Long of Louisiana.
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
ISBN 0899668534
In this Pulitzer Prize winner, a bridge collapses in eighteenth-century Peru; five die. Who were they? In the answer to that question lie numerous cosmic ironies, which are related in a melancholy narrative of great power, simplicity and beauty.
38. Howards End
ISBN 0375753761
Est. list price: $9.95
The narrative concerns the relationships that develop between the imaginative, life-loving Schlegel family--Margaret, Helen, and their brother Tibby--and the apparently cool, pragmatic Wilcoxes--Henry and Ruth and their children Charles, Paul, and Evie. Margaret finds a soul mate in Ruth, who before dying declares in a note that her family country house, Howards End, should go to Margaret. Her survivors choose to ignore her wishes, but after marrying Henry, Margaret ultimately does come to own the house. In a symbolic ending, Margaret brings Henry back to Howards End after several traumatic events have left him a broken man.
39. Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
ISBN 0679601546
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.
40. The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
ISBN 0884116549
Est. list price: $23.95
Set during World War II in a bleak area of West Africa, the novel concerns the moral dilemmas facing Scobie, an honorable and decent deputy commissioner of police who is torn between compassion for his wife Louise and love and pity for Helen, a young widow with whom he has an affair.
41. Lord of the Flies
William Golding
ISBN 0884116956
Est. list price: $20.95
William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, 'the boy with fair hair,' and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted./p>
42. Deliverance
James Dickey
ISBN 038531387X
Est. list price: $12.95
The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.
43. A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powel
ISBN 0375403183
Est. list price: $0.00
This series of novels by Anthony Powell, published from 1951 to 1975, traces events in the lives of a number of characters from Britain's upper classes and bohemia, following them from adolescence in the 1920s to senescence in the 1970s. The novels focus on social behavior; all characters are dealt with objectively, as they would wish to appear to outside observers. Personality and motivation are revealed through minute and subtle analysis of disconnected incidents.
44. Point Counter Point
ISBN 1564781313
When it was published in 1928, Point Counter Point no doubt shocked its readers with frank depictions of infidelity, sexuality, and the highbrow high jinks of Aldous Huxley's arty characters. What's truly remarkable, however, is how his novel continues to shock today. This is an intelligent novel about the intellectual world, and one that bears up gracefully under the test of time.
45. The Sun Also Rises
Set in the 1920s, the novel deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain. They are members of the cynical and disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation, many of whom suffer psychological and physical wounds as a result of the war. Two of the novel's main characters, Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, typify this generation. Lady Brett drifts through a series of affairs despite her love for Jake, who has been rendered impotent by a war wound. Friendship, stoicism, and natural grace under pressure are offered as the values that matter in an otherwise amoral and often senseless world.
46. The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
ISBN 0679417230
This absurdist story is noted for its adept characterizations, melodramatic irony, and psychological intrigue. Adolf Verloc is a languid eastern European secret agent posing as a London shop owner with anarchist leanings who is ordered to dynamite Greenwich Observatory. The plot fails when Verloc's mentally retarded brother-in-law is accidentally killed by the explosives. Verloc's wife Winnie murders Verloc in a fit of rage. She commits suicide after she is betrayed by Ossipon, one of her husband's anarchist associates.
47. Nostromo
ISBN 3829008872
Est. list price: $7.95
Conrad paints in shocking detail the insidious effects of greed and exploitation. When the silver mines of the South American republic of Costaguana are threatened by rebel forces, a brave captain, Nostromo, steps in and offers to bury the silver to ensure its safety. Conrad uses the violence of Latin American politics to focus his pessimistic vision on the tragic and brutal essence of human nature itself.
48. The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
ISBN 0679423052
Set in the rural midlands of England, this novel revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family. Beginning with the passionate marriage of Tom Brangwen and a Polish widow, it traces their tumultuous relationship, as well as the development of their daughter, Ursula, a spirited young woman who rejects the conventional expectations of society in search of self-fulfillment.
49. Women in Love
ISBN 0679409955
Women in Love examines the ill effects of industrialization on the human psyche, resolving that individual and collective rebirth is possible only through human intensity and passion. Women in Love contrasts the love affair of Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen with that of Gudrun, Ursula's artistic sister, and Gerald Crich, a domineering industrialist.
50. Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
ISBN 0802131786
Est. list price: $11.95
No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller.
51. The Naked and the Dead
ISBN 0805060170 Est. list price: $16.00 Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing. Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, it received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since enjoyed a long and well-deserved tenure in the American canon.
ISBN 0805060170
Est. list price: $16.00
Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing. Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, it received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since enjoyed a long and well-deserved tenure in the American canon.
52. Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
ISBN 0679756450
Est. list price: $13.00
Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience.
53. Pale Fire
ISBN 0679410775
Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
54. Light In August
ISBN 0679732268
oe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man.
55. On the Road
Jack Kerouac
ISBN 0670874787
Est. list price: $24.95
Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.
56. The Maltese Falcon
Dasheill Hammett
ISBN 0848824369
Est. list price: $18.95
Sam Spade, San Francisco detective, is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
57. Parade's End
ISBN 1857543424
Est. list price: $27.95
The complete Tietjens tetralogy, consisting of Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and Last Post. The misadventures of a public-school Candide during World War I expose the hypocrisy and corruption of military and civilian alike, and provide an elegy for a lost era.
58. The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
ISBN 1582019703
Est. list price: $98.00
Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when 'society' had rules as rigid as any in history.
59. Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
ISBN 0848809149
Max Beerbohm's sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas College, Oxford. A conjurer by profession, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is impervious to her considerable charms: a circumstance that proves fatal, as any number of love-smitten suitors are driven to suicide by the damsel's rejection. Laced with memorable one-liners ('Death cancels all engagements,' utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm's rococo imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to Forster, 'a beauty unattainable by serious literature.'
60. The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
ISBN 0394437039
Est. list price: $25.00
This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational.
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
ISBN 0679600507
Death Comes for the Archbishop traces the friendship and adventures of Bishop Jean Latour and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. Latour is patrician, intellectual, introverted; Vaillant, practical, outgoing, sanguine. Friends since their childhood in France, the clerics triumph over corrupt Spanish priests, natural adversity, and the indifference of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and build a cathedral in the wilderness.
62. From Here to Eternity
James Jones
ISBN 0385333641
This is a long, satisfying, commanding novel of the soldiers who were poised on the brink of real manhood when World War II flung them unceremoniously into that abyss. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt is the nonconformist hero who refuses to box at Schofield Barracks and is slowly destroyed by his own rebelliousness. Around him, others are fighting their own small battles--and losing. It's worth noting that Jones' 1951 audience was shocked by his frank language and the sexual preoccupations of his characters.
63. The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever
ISBN 0679738991
This novel takes place in a small Massachusetts fishing village and relates the breakdown of both the Wapshot family and the town. Told in a comic rather than a tragic vein, the novel uses experimental prose techniques to convey a nostalgic vision of a lost world.
64. The Catcher In the Rye
J. D. Salinger
ISBN 0316769533
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with 'cynical adolescent.' Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.
65. A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
ISBN 1568495110
Set in a dismal dystopia, it is the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior. The novel satirizes extreme political systems that are based on opposing models of the perfectibility or incorrigibility of humanity. Written in a futuristic slang vocabulary invented by Burgess, in part by adaptation of Russian words, it was his most original and best-known work.
66. Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
ISBN 0735101213
Est. list price: $39.95
Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom. This classic bildungsroman tells the story of Philip Carey, a sensitive boy born with a clubfoot who is orphaned and raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns for adventure, and at eighteen leaves home, eventually pursuing a career as an artist in Paris. When he returns to London to study medicine, he meets the androgynous but alluring Mildred and begins a doomed love affair that will change the course of his life.
67. Heart of Darkness
ISBN 3829030037
Compelling, exotic, suspenseful and far more than just an adventure story, this vivid picture of the moral deterioration and reversion to savagery resulting from prolonged isolation explores deep into the dark heart of its characters' souls.
68. Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
ISBN 0899664954
This classic by Sinclair Lewis shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire. Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early 20th Century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, and petty small-minded bigotry.
69. The House of Mirth
ISBN 0684842203
Est. list price: $27.00
The House of Mirth is the story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, touching upon the insidious effects of social convention and the sexual and financial aggression to which free spirited women were exposed.
70. The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
ISBN 0140153179
Est. list price: $51.80
This is a series of four novels by Lawrence Durrell. The lush and sensuous tetralogy, which consists of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), is set in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1940s. The first three volumes describe, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II; the fourth carries the story forward into the war years. The events of the narrative are mostly seen through the eyes of one L.G. Darley, who observes the interactions of his lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria.
71. A High Wind in Jamaica
Richard Hughes
ISBN 0884111288
The five Bas-Thornton children must leave their parents in Jamaica after a terrible hurricane blows down their family home. Accompanied by their Creole friends, the Fernandez children, they board a ship that is almost immediately set upon by pirates. The children take to corsair life coolly and matter-of-factly; just as coolly do they commit horrible deeds, and have horrible deeds visited upon them.
72. A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
ISBN 0679444580
This richly comic novel tells the moving story of a man without a single asset who enters a life devoid of opportunity, and whose tumble-down house becomes a potent symbol of the search for identity in a postcolonial world.
73. The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
ISBN 0899663028
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous 'home of the stars' but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their own desires--from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be star whom they all lust after.
74. A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
ISBN 0684837889
This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war
75. Scoop
ISBN 0316926108
Scoop is a comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s and the story of William Boot, a innocent hick from the country who writes careful essays about the habits of the badger. Through a series of accidents and mistaken identity, Boot is hired as a war correspondent for a Fleet Street newspaper. The uncomprehending Boot is sent to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover an expected revolution. Although he has no idea what he is doing and he can't understand the incomprehensible telegrams from his London editors, Boot eventually gets the big story.
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Murial Spark
ISBN 0060931736
A teacher at a girls' school in Edinburgh during the 1930s comes into conflict with school authorities because of her unorthodox teaching methods.
77. Finnegans Wake
ISBN 0140062866
Est. list price: $16.95
The book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod (near Dublin), his wife, and their three children. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. His strange polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words is intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures.
78. Kim
Rudyad Kipling
ISBN 1582870438
Kim tells the gripping story of an Irish orphan in India who goes from being the disciple of a gentle Tibetan lama into the shadowy world of British espionage. Kim and the lama meet their respective destinies in the mountains of India.
79. A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
ISBN 0848804910
A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Forster's skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of foreign cultures, as he portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy. One of Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.
80. Brideshead Revisited
ISBN 0316926345
Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. Taking place in the years after World War II, Brideshead Revisited shows us a part of upper-class English culture that has been disappearing steadily.
81. The Adventures of Augie March
ISBN 0140281606
Augie March, a young man growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, doesn't understand success on other people's terms. Fleeing to Mexico in search of something to fill his restless soul and soothe his hunger for adventure, Augie latches on to a wild succession of occupations until his journey brings him full circle.
82. Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner
ISBN 0679603387
Wheelchair-bound historian Lyman Ward decides to write about the frontier lives of his grandparents at a time when he has lost con-nection with his living family. Of his relationship with his son, he says, 'That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf.' It is an enterprise that will cast as much light on the lives of the members of succeeding generations as on the grandparents'.
83. A Bend in the River
V. V. Naipaul
ISBN 0679602674
Est. list price: $16.50
A Bend in the River is a profound and richly observed novel of the politics and society of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.
84. The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
ISBN 0140183000
Portia, an orphan, comes to live in London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. A child of sin raised in a series of shabby French hotels, Portia is possessed of a kind of terrible innocence. Unfortunately for her, she falls in with Anna's friend Eddie, who seems to be made entirely of bad motives
85. Lord Jim
ISBN 0679405445
An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero. A classic novel.
86. Ragtime
E. L. Doctorow
ISBN 0679602976
An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.
87. The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett
ISBN 1853262722
Est. list price: $3.95
First published in 1908, The Old Wives' Tale affirms the integrity of ordinary lives as it tells the story of the Baines sisters--shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia--over the course of nearly half a century. Bennett traces the sisters' lives from childhood in their father's drapery shop in provincial Bursley, England, during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women. The setting moves from the Five Towns of Staffordshire to exotic and cosmopolitan Paris, while the action moves from the subdued domestic routine of the Baines household to the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
88. The Call of the Wild
Jack London
ISBN 067170494X
Est. list price: $4.50
In this quintessential adventure story, Jack London takes readers on an arduous journey through the forbidding Alaskan landscape during the gold rush of the 1890s. Buck, a rangy mixed breed used to a comfortable, sun-filled life as a family dog, is stolen by a greedy opportunist and sold to dog traffickers. In no time, Buck finds himself on a team of sled dogs run ragged in the harsh winter of the Klondike.
89. Loving/Living/Party Going
Henry Green
ISBN 0140186913
An omnibus of three novels. Loving brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War II. Living those of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. Party Going presents a party of wealthy travelers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below. Each novel amply illustrates why Green was one of the most admired writers of his time.
90. Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
ISBN 0140283390
Est. list price: $15.95
Two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet.
91. Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell
ISBN 0899663044
Est. list price: $35.95
It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence and destructive sexuality. Its tragic ending is almost foreordained by the characters' inability to change their lives. Caldwell's skillful use of dialect and his plain style made the book one of the best examples of literary naturalism in contemporary American fiction.
92. Ironweed
William Kennedy
ISBN 0140070206
The Pulitzer Prize-winner about Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, a man trying to make peace with the ghosts of his past and present.
93. The Magus
John Fowles
ISBN 0679602836
Young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching position on a Greek island where his friendship with the owner of the islands most magnificent estate leads him into a nightmare. As reality and fantasy are deliberately confused by staged deaths, erotic encounters, and terrifying violence, Urfe becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his life.
94. Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
ISBN 1568497296
The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield. Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know of Antoinette's existence.
95. Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
ISBN 0140014454
In her novel Murdoch examines the nature of reality through the thoughts and relationships of the novel's main character, Jake Donaghue. A recurring theme in the novel is the idea of reflection, in both senses of the word: Jake is continually thinking about ideas, and he is also forever trying to see himself as he really is. Many of the instances of reflection in the novel occur near rivers or are connected in some way to currents. As we shall see, Iris Murdoch uses reflections in Under the Net to represent the mirror opposites of reality and appearance.
96. Sophie's Choice
William Styron
ISBN 0679640290
Est. list price: $19.95
This complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.
97. The Sheltering Sky
Payl Bowles
ISBN 0880015829
The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II examines the way Americans apprehend an alien culture and the way their incomprehension destroys them.
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain
ISBN 0679723250
Est. list price: $9.00
A young vagrant and the sexy, bored wife of a restaurant owner plan to murder her husband, with unexpected results.
99. The Ginger Man
J. P. Donleavy
ISBN 0871131994
Presents the author's rags-to-riches story of his quest to create and publish his twentieth-century classic, The Ginger Man.
100. The Magnificent Amdersons
Booth Tarkington
ISBN 0253358752
The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.
