Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

Zenith, Ohio, a good-sized city, is the setting for Sinclair Lewis's parody of middle-class American life represented by average citizen George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real estate agent. He considers himself a regular fellow who is a Rotarian, an Elk, a Republican, and makes use of the current slogans, and parrots the editorials of the local newspaper. A day in Babbitt's life is a view of the most disturbing examples of American policies of this...

"The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues...

The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.
As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay — with officer Nestor Camacho on board — Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina...

Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the...

Delve into the whimsical world of "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a groundbreaking novel that revolutionized the literary landscape. Sterne's work, inspired by the likes of Cervantes and John Locke, challenges traditional narrative forms through its playful digressions, innovative typography, and satirical tone. The novel humorously narrates the life of Tristram Shandy, making it a pioneering precursor to stream of consciousness...

A utopian classic with a rich legacy–influencing authors from Huxley to Herbert and beyond–Erewhon satirizes Victorian society with biting insight still relevant today. When Higgs, a young traveler, stumbles upon the beautiful land of Erewhon, he soon discovers that its seemingly ideal culture is founded upon bizarre, unsettling beliefs. Crime is a sickness, while sickness is a crime; the greatest scholarly achievement is unreason, and all machines...

"[Zoe Heller] is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts, including a scathing, Waugh-like wit."—New York Times

Best-selling author Zoe Heller has followed up the critical and commercial success of What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal with another tour-de-force on the meaning of faith, belief, and trust: The Believers. Tragic and comic, witty and intense, The Believers is the story of

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"The Sound of Sirens" is a humorous tale told by the primary character Mike Chandler a recently retired business executive, who after a long stressful career found peace and solace playing on his computer and/or watching television. His wife Helen feels isolated in their large suburban home where her social life has all but disappeared as a result of their life long friends relocating to various retirement communities around the country. Mike is

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