Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.
A hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Now available in eBook for the first time, Richard Yates's groundbreaking collection of short fiction. First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true—and just beginning to ring a little hollow. In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, you'll discover some of the most influential and sharply observed short fiction of the 20th century, and find out why Richard Yates was a true American master.
With an introduction by Rachael KushnerIn the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, and their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand and an ill-fated romance. The Crossing is the story of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham who sets off on a perilous journey across the mountains of Mexico, accompanied only by a lone wolf. Eventually the two come together in Cities of the Plain, in a stunning tale of loyalty and love. A true classic of American literature, The Border Trilogy is Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier. Beautiful and brutal, filled equally with sorrow and humour, it is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life.
National Book Award Finalist A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.
Inspired by the rhythms of the Periodic Table, Primo Levi assesses his life in terms of the chemical elements he associates with his past. From his birth into an Italian Jewish family through his training as a chemist, to the pain and darkness of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Levi reflects on the difficult course of his life in this heartfelt and deeply moving book.
Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time.
The Everyman’s Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the world’s greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everyman’s Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors’ lives and works. This set includes one each of the following titles: The Aeneidby Virgil The Analectsby Confucius Animal Farmby George Orwell Anna Kareninaby Leo Tolstoy The Arabian Nightsby Husain Haddawy The Audubon Readerby John James Audubon Belovedby Toni Morrison The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Windowby Raymond Chandler Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfoldby Evelyn Waugh The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flowerby Penelope Fitzgerald The Border Trilogyby Cormac McCarthy Brideshead Revisitedby Evelyn Waugh The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevsky Canterbury Talesby Geoffrey Chaucer Carried Awayby Alice Munro The Castleby Franz Kafka Catch-22by Joseph Heller Collected Storiesby Raymond Chandler Collected Storiesby Roald Dahl Collected Storiesby Franz Kafka Collected Storiesby W. Somerset Maugham The Complete Henry Bechby John Updike The Complete Short Novelsby Anton Chekhov The Complete Short Storiesby Evelyn Waugh Crime and Punishmentby Fyodor Dostoevsky David Copperfieldby Charles Dickens Democracy in Americaby Alexis de Tocqueville The Divine Comedyby Dante Alighieri Doctor Zhivagoby Boris Pasternak Don Quixoteby Miguel de Cervantes Dublinersby James Joyce Essaysby George Orwell The Garden of the Finzi-Continisby Giorgio Bassani The General in His Labyrinthby Gabriel García Márquez Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens The Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad The Historiesby Herodotus A House for Mr. Biswasby V. S. Naipul The House of the Spiritsby Isabel Allende The Human Factorby Graham Greene The Iliadby Homer Jane Eyreby Charlotte Brontë Joseph and His Brothersby Thomas Mann The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playbackby Raymond Chandler Lolitaby Vladimir Nabokov Love in the Time of Choleraby Gabriel García Márquez Madame Bovaryby Gustave Flaubert The Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvestby Dashiell Hammett Meditationsby Marcus Aurelius Midnight’s Childrenby Salman Rushdie The Mill on the Flossby George Eliot Moby-Dickby Herman Melville Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamableby Samuel Beckett Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatmaby R. K. Narayan Mrs. Dallowayby Virginia Woolf My Ántoniaby Willa Cather The Name of the Roseby Umberto Eco Nineteen Eighty-Fourby George Orwell The Odysseyby Homer Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Springby Penelope Fitzgerald Oliver Twistby Charles Dickens One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichby Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel García Márquez Pale Fireby Vladimir Nabokov A Passage to Indiaby E. M. Forster The Periodic Tableby Primo Levi