Dutiful Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a suitable match from a good family, when May's cousin, the beautiful and exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of perceived scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her worldliness, disregard for society's...

"Phileas Fogg has always been a quiet, orderly, and predictable English gentleman who reads the newspaper, visits the Reform Club, and dines at exactly the same time each day. But this routine is abandoned when he wagers his fortune in an outlandish bet that he can travel around the entire world in eighty days. Fogg sets off immediately to prove his point, accompanied by his new valet, Passepartout, whose job is turning out to be quite different from...

"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals...