Will.i.am.
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"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...
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Indian Summer is often considered William Dean Howells's best novel after The Rise of Silas Lapham. Mark Twain commended the novel by declaring to Howells, "You are really my only author," and Howells himself considered this tale about a middle-aged man's misdirected love for a widow's young ward as among his best character studies.
3) Stoner
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<p><b>Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.</b></p><p> </p><p>William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a...
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"In the 1930s, William Sloane wrote two brilliant novels that gave a whole new meaning to cosmic horror. In To Walk the Night, Bark X and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to the old alma mater to catch a football game and to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. In the midst of the game, a strange inimical presence seems to grip the entire stadium; after, the two young men discover the body of their professor, consumed...
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"First published in 1963, The Stone Face tells the tale of a young African-American man who takes refuge from American racism in France, only to find himself complicit in a racist order of another sort. Simeon Brown, a journalist who, as a teenager, lost an eye in a racist attack, lives in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension, and after a violent encounter with some white sailors on shore leave, he decides to pack up and leave for...
7) The hive
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"The translator Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, "ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed." However provocative and disturbing, they are also flat-out dazzling as writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as riotous, lodge like knives in the reader's mind. Cela called himself...
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Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky.
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to...
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to...
12) Augustus
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"In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus...
13) Omer Pasha Latas
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A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul. This previously untranslated historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Andrić tells the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas, a Serbian Christian who rose to a position of power in the Ottoman Empire. When Mihailo's chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia,...
14) Dirty snow
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Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere
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"From Nikolai Leskov's enormous and varied literary output over some forty years, we have selected six works which represent each period and the contrasting genres and subjects of his fiction. Two of these stories - 'The Unmercenary Engineers' and 'The Innocent Prudentius' - have never been translated into English before. Of the other four, 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' received a definitive, accurate translation by Robert Chandler some years ago, and...
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Stoner author John Williams's first novel is a searing look at a man's relationship with his absent father, and how early trauma manifests throughout one's life John Williams's first novel is a brooding psychological noir. Arthur Maxley is a young man at the end of his emotional rope. Having dropped out of college, he's holed up in a big-city hotel, living off an allowance from his family, feeling nothing but alone and doing nothing but drinking to...
17) The alteration
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"In Kingsley Amis's virtuoso foray into alternate history, it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart's second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless...
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The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter ... On the contrary ... There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse." Here one finds the best of the worst of the greatest English poets, with an index ("Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, page 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly. Annotation. Just in time for National...