"The Log of a Cowboy is an account of a five-month drive of 3,000 cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to Montana in 1882 along the Great Western Cattle Trail. Although the book is fiction, it is firmly based on Adams's own experiences on the trail, and it is considered by many to be the best account of cowboy life in literature. Adams was disgusted by the unrealistic cowboy fiction being published in his day; The Log of a Cowboy was his response."--Google...

In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect...

It was high hot noon on the Casket Ridge. Its very scant shade was restricted to a few dwarf Scotch firs, and was so perpendicularly cast that Leonidas Boone, seeking shelter from the heat, was obliged to draw himself up under one of them, as if it were an umbrella. Occasionally, with a boy's perversity, he permitted one bared foot to protrude beyond the sharply marked shadow until the burning sun forced him to draw it in again with a thrill of satisfaction....

A cynical view of the world armament industry in the period preceding and during the European War. The first volume in the author's series of Lanny Budd novels.

"Old Christmas" by Washington Irving is a delightful exploration of the traditional English Christmas, taking readers on a nostalgic journey to the heart of 19th-century holiday celebrations. Renowned for his ability to capture the essence of early American and English culture, Irving, in this charming series of essays and sketches, brings to life the rich, festive traditions of a bygone era. Set in the English countryside, "Old Christmas" is a vivid...

A historical adventure reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley romances, Cooper's novel centers on Harvey Birch, a common man wrongly suspected of being a spy for the British.

The most hilarious, charming, and entertaining of Mark Twain's later works, The Diaries of Adam and Eve collects in one volume "Extracts from Adam's Diary," first published in 1904, and "Eve's Diary," published in 1906 after Olivia Clemens's death. Ultimately an endearing love story, the diaries record the couple's initial ambivalence toward each other. While Adam observes that Eve "has such a rage for explaining," she muses, "He talks very little....

A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of capital punishment engraves the letter of the law into the body of the condemned. Such are the nightmare scenarios that emerge in the short stories of Franz Kafka, one of the twentieth century's most formative, mystifying literary figures. Though immediate in their impact, Kafka's stories invite endless angles...

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son is - at twenty-six - a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty - even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation...

Inspired by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived for several years on a Pacific island, the novel tells the story of Crusoe's survival after shipwreck on an island, interaction with the mainland's native inhabitants, and eventual rescue. Read variously as economic fable, religious allegory, or imperialist fantasy, Crusoe has never lost its appeal as one of the most compelling adventure stories of all time.