Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive comedy of blending, identity, and politics.

Stranger in a Strange Land is the epic saga of an earthling, Valentine Michael Smith, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with “psi” powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, teleportation, pyrolysis, and the ability to take control of the minds of others—and complete innocence regarding the mores of man. After his tutelage under a surrogate father figure, Valentine begins his transformation into a kind of messiah.

In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.

This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.

Colonial politics in Kyauktada, India, in the 1920s, come to a head when the European Club, previously for whites only, is ordered to elect one token native member. The deeply racist members do their best to manipulate the situation, resulting in the loss not only of reputations but of lives. Amid this cynical setting, timber merchant James Flory, a Brit with a genuine appreciation for the native people and culture, stands as a bridge between the warring factions. But he has trouble acting on his feelings, and the significance of his vote, both social and political, weighs on him.

With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit, and sometimes rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic The Grapes of Wrath remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of Tom Joad and his family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires, and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision.

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

Like the tentacles of an octopus, the railroad in California reached out across the state, grasping everything of value in the state. Based on the bloody Mussel Slough Tragedy - a conflict between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad - The Octopus is a stunning novel chronicling the twilight of the frontier West. A depiction of the tensions between the railroad, the ranchers, and the ranchers’ League. The book emphasizes the control of “forces” - such as the power of railroad monopolies - over individuals.

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine.

In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. The events and people who crowd this audiobook guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America....

Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.

Haunted by the horrors of World War I, Dr. James Delaney's personal life is a nightmare. But everything changes when he returns home one day to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep.

London, 1936: At twenty-one, Kate Grifferty is a press photographer in a Fleet Street agency, an unusual job for a young woman. But Kate is both talented and daring, recklessly going wherever the story might be—including, one October day, to an anti-fascism protest in East London. There, she meets David Rabatkin, a brilliant Jewish medical student. While his idealistic brother is eager to go to Spain and join the fight for the Republic, David knows where his path lies: at home, fulfilling the expectations of his profession and his family.

The future looks bright for John and Ruby. John's business is growing, and they're talking about starting a family. But when Ruby receives a life-changing diagnosis, and insurance won't cover the treatment, John steals a customer's identity and files a false claim. The plan works perfectly - until the customer in question contacts John with a startling proposition. If John and Ruby play a little game he's devised, he won't report their fraud. The rules are simple: commit real crimes.

Laurence Sterne's beloved comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is the "biography" of Tristram Shandy - a wonderfully humorous and eccentric narrator who guides the listener from his conception to his birth and on to his life as an adult. The twists and turns of Tristram's life expose him to such memorable characters as Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr. Slop, and the Widow Wadman - whose own stories enrich the central narrative of Tristram's life.

Perhaps Frank and April Wheeler married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to unravel. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication of this runaway best seller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass' publishers all over the world, offer a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources. The result is a translation that is faithful to Grass' style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After 50 years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance.

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading, he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.

Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the best 100 English-language novels by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song "Day of the Locusts" in homage, and Matt Groening's Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes-actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles.

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. Classics of modern fiction, these novellas capture 1931 Berlin—charming, grotesque, and dangerous, as Hitler was ascending to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters, in particular the nightclub performer Sally Bowles, whose misadventures were popularized on stage and screen in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

The fictionalized account of Louisiana's colorful and notorious governor, Huey Pierce Long, All the King's Men follows the startling rise and fall of Willie Stark, a country lawyer in the Deep South of the 1930s. Beset by political enemies, Stark seeks aid from his right-hand man Jack Burden, who will bear witness to the cataclysmic unfolding of this very American tragedy.

The Fountainhead studies the conflict between artistic genius and social convention, a theme Ayn Rand later developed into the idealistic philosophy knows as Objectivism. Rand's hero is Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect who won't compromise his integrity, especially in the unconventional buildings he designs.

Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.

By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.