"In the Deep South of the 1950s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. What happened to John Howard Griffin - from the outside and within himself - as he made his way through...

Because her mind-reading ability tends to spook people, most of Sookie's friends are of the not-exactly-human variety. And now that her brother is about to transform into a were-panther for the first time, the supernatural world is suddenly a family affair. When Sookie realizes a deadly sniper is gunning down the local changelings, her feelings turn to full-blown terror. She needs to stop the assassin before the next full moon--if he doesn't get to...

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl,...

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...

"Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King's Men is one of the most famous and widely read works in American fiction. Its original publication by Harcourt catapulted author Robert Penn Warren to fame and made the novel a bestseller for many seasons. Set in the 1930s, it traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie [Stark] Talos, a fictional Southern politician who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Talos begins his career...

Father Timothy Kavanagh is married to more than his lovable and eccentric Episcopal parishioners. He's also married to Cynthia, his vivacious and talented neighbor. Suddenly, the routine existence of a sixtysomething bachelor is out the window. How will they keep his sofa-sized dog at a safe distance from her arrogant, albeit famous, cat? Can he learn to love the old-Italian-villa look his wife is bent on giving the rectory? These concerns pale, however,...

After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. This lively and panoramic book, which was recently cited by David Denby in the New Yorker as being Sinclair's "most readable" novel, is now the...

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s...

Joe 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. Light in August is the story of Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.