The Greatest Books Written by American Authors
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1 . The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar...
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2 . Moby Dick by Herman Melville
First published in 1851, Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white wh...
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3 . The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1945 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking wo...
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4 . The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl...
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5 . Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1943 onwards, is frequently cite...
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6 . The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their fa...
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7 . The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
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8 . Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during,...
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9 . Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marx...
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10 . To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses is...
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11 . Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, about whom Morrison...
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12 . The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The novel explores the lives and values of the so-called "Lost Generation," chronicling the experiences of Jake Barnes and several acquaintances on their pilgrimage to Pamplona for the annual San F...
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13 . Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Roc...
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14 . The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordea...
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15 . For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a communist guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is ...
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16 . The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The story centres on Isabel Archer, an attractive American whom circumstances have brought to Europe. Isabel refuses the offer of marriage to an English peer and to a bulldog-like New Englander, to...
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17 . As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The book is told in stream of consciousness writing style by 15 different narrators in 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family's quest—noble or selfish—to honor he...
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18 . The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position ...
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19 . Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind is set in Jonesboro and Atlanta, Georgia during the American Civil War and Reconstruction and follows the life of Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of an Irish immigrant plantation o...
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20 . The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery...
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21 . The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence centers on an upperclass couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assump...
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22 . On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the post...
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23 . The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
“For many successive generations now, ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ and ‘Four Quartets’ have continued to excited readers and to inspire young poets. Teenagers still disc...
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24 . A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I.
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25 . The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbors she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl, is the product ...
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26 . Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
An anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim.
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27 . Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
The novel tells the story of a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praisin...
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28 . Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted ...
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29 . Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby...
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30 . Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Am...
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31 . The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor by Flannery O'Connor
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do n...
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32 . Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Rabbit, Run depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life.
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33 . A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Perc...
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34 . Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that ha...
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35 . All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men portrays the dramatic political ascent and governorship of Willie Stark, a driven, cynical populist in the American South during the 1930s.
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36 . Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. This collection, The Short Stories, originally published in 1938, is definitiv...
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37 . The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939) is a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe. The work has been adapted twice into film, once in 1946 and a...
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38 . My Antonia by Willa Cather
In Willa Cather's own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was "the best thing I've ever done." An enduring paperback bestseller on Houghton Mifflin's literary list, this hauntingly elo...
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39 . Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It was McCarthy's fifth book, and was published by Random House. The narrative foll...
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40 . The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid...
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41 . The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous...
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42 . Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The story is that of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be Fitzgerald's first novel in nine years, and ...
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43 . A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy’s mo...
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44 . One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Narrated by the gigantic but docile half-Indian "Chief" Bromden, who has pretended to be a deaf-mute for several years, the story focuses on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, a ...
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45 . Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike. It is the third novel of the four-part series which begins with Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and concludes with Rabbit At Rest. There is also a relat...
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46 . The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a best-selling novel written by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised...
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47 . The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Moviegoer tells the story of Binx Bolling, a young stockbroker in post-war New Orleans. The decline of Southern traditions, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korea...
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48 . A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended ...
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49 . The Ambassadors by Henry James
This dark comedy, one of the masterpieces of James' final period, follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son. Streth...
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50 . Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California. Based on Steinbeck's own experiences a...
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51 . Rabbit Redux by John Updike
Rabbit Redux finds the former high-school basketball star, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, working a dead-end job and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, ...
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52 . Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a...
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53 . The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever is a 1978 short story collection by American author John Cheever. It contains some of his most famous stories, including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "Th...
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54 . Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit
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55 . Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos
With 1919, the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his "vigorous and sweeping panorama of twentieth-century America" (Forum), lauded on publication of the first volume no...
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56 . The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
With his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising THE 42nd PARALLEL, 1919, and THE BIG MONEY, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultiva...
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57 . The Big Money by John Dos Passos
THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that...
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58 . The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
From the esteemed author of The Age of Innocence--a black comedy about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others. Lily Bart's quest to find a husband who...
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59 . The World According to Garp by John Irving
The story deals with the life of T. S. Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband. She encounters a dying ball turret gunner known only as Technica...
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60 . The Stand by Stephen King
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic horror/fantasy novel by American author Stephen King. It re-works the scenario in his earlier short story, Night Surf. The novel was originally published in 1978 and...
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61 . Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his l...
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62 . American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper...
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63 . Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand's epochal novel, first published in 1957, has been a bestseller for more than four decades as well as an intellectual landmark. It is the story of a man who said that he would stop the mot...
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64 . Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
This is the epic saga of an earthling, Valentine Michael Smith, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with "psi" powers--telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and the ability to take...
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65 . Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behavi...
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66 . Dune by Frank Herbert
Dune is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert, published in 1965. It won the Hugo Award in 1966, and also the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel. Dune was also the first bestselling h...
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67 . The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blast...
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68 . The Long Goodbye: A Novel by Raymond Chandler
Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he's divorced and re-married and who ends ...
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69 . An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Clyde Griffiths is a young man with ambitions. He's in love with a rich girl, but it's a poor girl he has gotten pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at his uncle's factory. One day he takes...
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70 . The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of the title characters, a C...
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71 . Light in August by William Faulkner
Lght in August is an exploration of racial conflict in the society of the Southern United States.
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72 . The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to ...
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73 . Herzog by Saul Bellow
Herzog is a novel set in 1964, in the United States, and is about the midlife crisis of a Jewish man named Moses E. Herzog. He is just emerging from his second divorce, this one particularly acrimo...
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74 . The Poems of Robert Frost by Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic de...
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75 . Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
It follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African-American male living in Michigan, from birth to adulthood. The main theme in the novel is Milkman's quest for identity as a black man in ...
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76 . Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Of course it's vulgar. How could it not be? The sustained cry of a ferociously perplexed, ferociously lucid New York City Jew—you expected maybe Jane Austen? Roth's barbaric yawp of a book was a li...
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77 . Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertake...
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78 . Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides (later called "Cal"), an in...
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79 . Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
"DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period," "Teddy," and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" are among the nine works in a collection of Salinger's perceptive and realistic short stories
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80 . Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Tragic story of wasted lives, set against a bleak New England background. A poverty-stricken New England farmer, his ailing wife and a youthful housekeeper are drawn relentlessly into a deep-rooted...
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81 . The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The story centers on Quoyle, a newspaper worker from upstate New York whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after the suicide of his parents, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Pe...
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82 . Henderson The Rain King by Saul Bellow
Bellow's glorious, spirited story of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home of sorts in deepest Africa.
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83 . The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of...
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84 . The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Written in Charlotte, North Carolina in a house on East Blvd, it is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the U.S. state of Georgia.
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85 . White Noise by Don DeLillo
Set at a bucolic midwestern college known only as The-College-on-the-Hill, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitle...
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86 . The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead's protagonist, Howard Roark, is an individualistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision. The book follows hi...
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87 . The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a novel by Saul Bellow. It centers on the eponymous character who grows up during the Great Depression. This picaresque novel is an example of bildungsroman,...
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88 . The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, ...
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89 . The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The Killer Angels (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the Am...
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90 . The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane. It is considered one of the most influential works in American literature. The novel, a depiction on the cruelty of t...
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91 . The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver is a bestselling novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from Georgia to the fictional village of Kilanga in the Belgian Cong...
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92 . Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in Oct...
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93 . Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson and published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel is the fictional auto...
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94 . Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
In this classic satire of small-town America, beautiful young Carol Kennicott comes to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with dreams of transforming the provincial old town into a place of beauty and cult...
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95 . The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan, in which the author presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social u...
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96 . Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Saul Bellow, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year. The novel, which Bell...
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97 . The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Secret History, the first novel by Mississippi-born writer Donna Tartt, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. A 75,000 print order was made for the first edition (as opposed to the usual 10...
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98 . The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. It was his first novel and second book. Set in antebellum Virginia, it examines issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by free...
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99 . All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by U.S. author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention...
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100 . Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Call It Sleep is the story of an Austrian-Jewish immigrant family in New York in the early part of the twentieth century. Six-year-old David Schearl has a close and loving relationship with his mot...
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101 . Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The novel examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community. It also, more...
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102 . Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs himself stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie Willia...
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103 . Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Set in France (primarily Paris) during the 1930s, it is the tale of Miller's life as a struggling writer. Combining fiction and autobiography, some chapters follow a strict narrative and refer to M...
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104 . Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America. The novel touches on the topics of tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child a...
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105 . A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy novel by Madeleine L'Engle, first published in 1962. The book won a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for t...
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106 . Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Bernard Sendak (born June 10, 1928) is an American writer and illustrator of children's literature. He is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963.
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107 . Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared. Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby...
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108 . The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. Thanks in part to the 1939 MGM movie, it is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been wid...
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109 . Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
This is the definitive edition of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognised as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, loved by readers and poets alike. This ...
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110 . Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothi...
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111 . The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
In a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmith introduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young America...
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112 . The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club (1989) is a best-selling novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on the game and four Chinese American immigrant families who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the C...
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113 . The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Godfather is a crime novel written by American author Mario Puzo, originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. It details the story of a fictitious Sicilian Mafia family based in New Yo...
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114 . Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Foundation is the first book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (later expanded into The Foundation Series). Foundation is a collection of five short stories, which were first published together ...
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115 . A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Benni...
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116 . Wings of the Dove by Henry James
One of the masterpieces of James' final period, this novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of the...
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117 . Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Bastard Out of Carolina was the first novel published by author Dorothy Allison. The book, which is semi-autobiographical in nature, is set in Allison's hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Narr...
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118 . Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's...
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119 . Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the northern Puget Sound region of the state of Washington coast in 1954, the plot revolves around a murder case in which Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese Americ...
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120 . Neuromancer by William Gibson
The novel tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to work on the ultimate hack. Gibson explores artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, ...
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121 . Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.
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122 . Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in 1984. Each chapter is narrated by a different character. These narratives are very conversational, as if the narrators were telling a st...
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123 . The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The story is set in the British province of New York during the French and Indian War, and concerns—in part—a Huron massacre (with passive French acquiescence) of between 500 to 1,500 Anglo-America...
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124 . Poems of W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden[1] (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[2] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[3][4] born in England, later an American citizen, a...
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125 . Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Ragtime is a 1975 novel by E. L. Doctorow. This work of historical fiction is mostly set in New York City from about 1900 until the United States entry into World War I in 1917. A unique adaptation...
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126 . Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African America...
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127 . Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction — evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet mo...
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128 . Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick first published in 1968. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter of androids, while the secondary plot ...
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129 . Sophie's Choice by William Styron
It concerns a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camp...
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130 . The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, depicting the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of i...
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131 . The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
The Custom of the Country is a 1913 novel by Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to ascend in New York City society.
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132 . The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a notable writer of the late 20th century and a contributor to the revitalization ...
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133 . Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle explores issues of science, technology, and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way. After turning down his original thesis, the University of Chicago, ...
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134 . The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she ...
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135 . The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Illustrated in black-and-white. We're celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary (1996) of this modern kids' classic with a special hardcover edition! This ingenious fantasy centeres around Milo, a b...
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136 . The Naked Dead by Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead is a 1948 novel by Norman Mailer. It was based on his experiences and exaggerations of that experience with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign (1944–4...
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137 . Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical fiction novel by Charles Frazier. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks...
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138 . A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
The collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive "The Misfit...
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139 . Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra is a play cycle written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on 26 October 1931 where it ran for 150 performances befo...
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140 . Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is a widely-acclaimed graphic novel by Chris Ware, published in 2000. The story was previously serialized in the pages of Ware's comic book Acme Novelty L...
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141 . In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emot...
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142 . Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse....
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143 . The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farc...
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144 . The Awakening by Kate Chopin
First published in 1899, this novel shocked readers with its open sensuality and uninhibited treatment of marital infidelity. Poignant and lyrical, it tells the story of a New Orleans wife who atte...
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145 . The Shining by Stephen King
The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. The title was inspired by the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on…". It was King's third...
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146 . The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Human Stain is set in 1990s America, the time of the culture wars, political correctness and the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The story is told by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who lives ...
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147 . Underworld by Don DeLillo
Underworld is a postmodern novel written in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, is one of his better-known novels, and was a best-seller.
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148 . American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the y...
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149 . The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
It is the fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirt...
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150 . The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Giver is a 1993 soft science fiction novel by Lois Lowry. It is set in a future society which is at first presented as a utopian society and gradually appears more and more dystopian; therefore...
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151 . Jazz by Toni Morrison
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At...
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152 . Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith tells the story of bright and scientifically-minded Martin Arrowsmith as he makes his way from a small town in the Midwest to the upper echelons of the scientific community. (He is born ...
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153 . The Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the fictional town of Midland City, it is the story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old ...
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154 . Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
When Babbitt was first published in 1922, fans gleefully hailed its scathing portrait of a crass, materialistic nation; critics denounced it as an unfair skewering of the American businessman. Spar...
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155 . Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Who are you? What have we done to each other? These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The pol...
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156 . The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collectio...
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157 . The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The shortest of Pynchon's novels and often considered his most accessible, the book is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution compa...
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158 . Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey, a sister and brother both in their 20s, are the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings. The action of both parts takes place o...
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159 . The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal,...
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160 . Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what...
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161 . Home by Marilynne Robinson
Home is a novel written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Marilynne Robinson. Published in 2008, it is Robinson's third novel, preceded by Housekeeping in 1980 and Gilead in 2004.
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162 . The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner is a novel by the author Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, it is Hosseini's first novel, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007.
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164 . The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one grisly solution — a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. ...
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165 . The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, si...
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166 . A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
The kingdom of the royal Stark family faces its ultimate challenge in the onset of a generation-long winter, the poisonous plots of the rival Lannisters, the emergence of the Neverborn demons, and ...
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167 . A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Larry Cook is an aging farmer who decides to incorporate his farm, handing complete and joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. When the youngest daughter objects, she is...
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168 . Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaki...
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169 . The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 movie of ...
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170 . Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel by Ben Fountain
A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed ...
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171 . The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner
This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds readers of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets....
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172 . Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.
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173 . Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending strug...
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175 . The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw, originally published in 1898, is a gothic ghost story novella written by Henry James. Due to its ambiguous content, it became a favourite text of academics who subscribe t...
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176 . A Separate Peace by John Knowles
It would be inconceivable for an American author to write a coming-of-age novel in a comedic vein without reckoning with J.D. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye; and it would be equally impossible to ...
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177 . Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
Andersonville is a novel by MacKinlay Kantor concerning the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville prison, during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The novel was originally published in ...
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178 . Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, bla...
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179 . A Death in the Family by James Agee
A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955. It was edited ...
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180 . The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a...
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181 . The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The novel is set in the 1680s and 90s in London and on the eastern shore of the colony of Maryland. It tells the story of an English poet named Ebenezer Cooke who is given the title "Poet Laureate ...
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182 . V by Thomas Pynchon
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohem...
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183 . The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a si...
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184 . Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Isherwood's classic story of Berlin in the 1930s - and the inspiration for Cabaret - now in a stand-alone edition. First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and scree...
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185 . The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKe...
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186 . The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
The Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren that recounts the life of "Frankie Machine", a card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run not far from the tenement in which he lives. Ma...
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187 . Them by Joyce Carol Oates
Them explores the complex struggles of American life through three down-on-their-luck characters—Loretta, Maureen and Jules—who are attempting to reach normality and the American dream through marr...
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188 . Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Janey Smith keeps a journal of her dreams and experiences as she is rejected by her father, kidnapped by thieves, and sold into prostitution
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189 . Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove, written by Larry McMurtry, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel and the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series. The story focuses on the relationship of several retire...
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190 . Cathedral by Raymond Carver
Cathedral is a collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver published in 1984.
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192 . If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by William Faulkner
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by Faulkner, and now published in the authoritative Library of America text—William Faulkner interweaves two narrati...
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193 . The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The story loosely follows the life of Wyatt Gwyon, a Calvinist minister's son from rural New England. He initially plans to follow his father into the ministry, but he leaves and travels to Europe ...
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194 . Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover
A groundbreaking collection of short fictions including “The Babysitter,” one of the most anthologized stories of all time. Coover’s stories are told well and told in many different styles.
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195 . Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Didion's mordant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts. She's a descendant of the old California, the great- great-granddaughter of pioneers. But she was also schoole...
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197 . Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of...
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198 . Sanctuary by William Faulkner
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story...
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199 . Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Long Day's Journey into Night is a drama in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1941–42 but only published in 1956. The play is widely considered to be his masterwork. O'Neil...
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200 . The Golden Bowl by Henry James
Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the "major phase" of James' career. The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelation...
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201 . Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film starring Elijah Wood in 2005.
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202 . Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could...
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203 . Hawaii by James Albert Michener
The epic saga of the fiftieth state traces its fascinating history from the fiery volcanoes that formed the islands to the strength and character of the original Polynesians to the early nineteenth...
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204 . The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and c...
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205 . A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Originally published in 1968, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea marks the first of the six now beloved Earthsea titles. Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the...
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206 . Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
Tales of the South Pacific is a Pulitzer Prize winning collection of sequentially related short stories about World War II, written by James A. Michener in 1946. The stories were based on observati...
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207 . Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro Protagonist—yeah, that's his name—is a freelance hacker and unemployed pizza deliveryman lost in a post-lapsarian, hyper-capitalist future America in which the central government has withered ...
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208 . The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is American author Thornton Wilder's second novel, first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse...
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209 . The Flamethrowers: A Novel by Rachel Kushner
Arriving in New York to pursue a creative career in the raucous 1970s art scene, Reno joins a group of dreamers and raconteurs before falling in love with the estranged son of an Italian motorcycle...
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210 . Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Ruth narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's hometown...
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211 . Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Bel Canto is a 2001 novel by American author Ann Patchett, published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award fo...
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212 . Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies is a 2000 collection of nine short stories by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. It was also...
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213 . Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
For almost four decades Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that e...
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216 . Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of susp...
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217 . Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler set in Baltimore, Maryland. It is Anne Tyler's ninth novel. In 1983 it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,[1] the National Book Aw...
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218 . Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934, is the first novel by John O'Hara. It concerns the self-destruction of Julian English, once a member of the social elite of Gibbsville (O'Hara's fictional...
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219 . Salvage the Bones: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard dri...
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220 . The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
A prophet has is about to board a ship home after 12 years in exile, when he is stopped by a group of people. His teachings to them, discussing love, marriage, crime, freedom and law among many oth...
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221 . The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The story centers on Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner. The journey, initially an attempt by ...
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222 . East of Eden by John Steinbeck
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it ...
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223 . The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
The stirring saga of a man’s journey to free his sister—and himself—from a tragic family history Tom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin...
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224 . Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the small town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, E. Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a wi...
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225 . JR by William Gaddis
A great masterpiece by William Gaddis, with a new introduction by Rick Moody. Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the Ameri...
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226 . The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
A writer comes one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, where she follows the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal towns. Here, lives are molded by the long Maine winters, rock...
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227 . The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
The Accidental Tourist is a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, the plot rev...
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228 . The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III returns home to the desert only to find his beloved canyons and rivers now threatened by industrial development. Joining forces with Bronx exile and fe...
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229 . Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ chronicles the journey of Judah Ben-Hur and the life of Jesus, from Ben-Hur's quest for vengeance against the Romans and his search for his imprisoned family to the bi...
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230 . Deliverance by James Dickey
Narrated in the first person by one of the main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry, the novel begins with four middle-aged men in a large Georgia city planning a weekend canoe trip down the ficti...
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231 . Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Ar...
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232 . Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis
Presents a collection of short fiction, including "What you Learn about the Baby" in which a mother describes how an infant disrupts her life and "Jane and Cane" details an elderly woman's search f...
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233 . The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
The Wapshot Chronicle is a 1957 novel by John Cheever about an eccentric family who live in a Massachusetts fishing village. The book won the National Book Award in 1958, and was later followed by ...
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234 . Another Country by James Baldwin
Another Country is a 1962 novel by James Baldwin. The novel tells of the bohemian lifestyle of musicians, writers and other artists living in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. It portrayed many ...
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235 . The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds...
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236 . The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Al...
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237 . Time and Again by Jack Finney
When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his twentieth-century existence and st...
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238 . I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
The three laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except where s...
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239 . What Is the What by Dave Eggers
What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s tr...
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240 . The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindb...
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241 . Sula by Toni Morrison
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet ...
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242 . Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the S...
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243 . The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Winter is an Earth-like planet with two major differences: conditions are semi arctic even at the warmest time of the year, and the inhabitants are all of the same sex. Tucked away in a remote corn...
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244 . The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.
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245 . My Name Is Aram by William Saroyan
"Marvelously captivating." — The New York Times. First published in 1940, Saroyan's international bestseller recounts the exploits of an Armenian clan in northern California at the turn of the 20th...
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246 . Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is a 1970 book by Judy Blume, typically categorized as a young adult novel, about a preteen girl in sixth grade who grew up with no religion. Margaret's mother...
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247 . The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
In a classic work of alternate history, the United States is divided up and ruled by the Axis powers after the defeat of the Allies during World War II. Reissue. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best N...
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248 . The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
The novel and trilogy traces the growth of the United States through the declining fortunes of three generations of the aristocratic Amberson family in a fictional Midwestern town, between the end ...
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249 . Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
A little bunny bids goodnight to all the objects in his room before falling asleep.
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250 . The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
The Transit of Venus tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women — seduction a...
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251 . Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell
'Studs Lonigan, ' the story of an Irish-American youth growing to adulthood in Chicago, is considered by many to be one of the finest American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, a...
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252 . The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels such as THE GREAT GATSBY, but during his all-too-brief literary life, he sold some 160 short stories to popular magazines. Here, noted scholar and b...
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253 . Billy Budd by Herman Melville
Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, first published posthumously in London in 1924. Melville began writing the work in November 1888, but left it unfinished at his d...
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254 . A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's A Lost Lady was first published in 1923. It tells the story of Marian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester who live in the Western town of Sweet Water, along the Trans...
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255 . Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting ra...
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256 . Mao II by Don DeLillo
A reclusive novelist named Bill Gray toils endlessly on a novel he can't finish. After publishing two celebrated novels he is stuck perpetually editing and rewriting his much anticipated new work, ...
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257 . The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Fortress of Solitude is a 2003 semi-autobiographical novel by Jonathan Lethem set in Brooklyn and spanning the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It follows two teenage friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude...
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258 . A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms h...
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259 . The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
The Clan of the Cave Bear is a historical fiction novel by Jean M. Auel about prehistoric times set somewhat before the extinction of the Neanderthal race after 600,000 years as a species, and at l...
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260 . Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
"Wittgenstein's Mistress" is a novel unlike anything David Markson -- or anyone else -- has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced -- and, astonishingly, will ultimately c...
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261 . The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
The Fixer is a 1966 novel by Bernard Malamud inspired by the true story of Menahem Mendel Beilis, an unjustly imprisoned Jew in Tsarist Russia. The notorious "Beilis trial" of 1913 caused an intern...
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262 . Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The story is narrated by The Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction. Hammett based the story on his own experiences in Butte, Montana as a Pinkerton agent.The Continental Op is c...
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263 . Pastoralia by George Saunders
If Americans in the future were to try to send us a message about where our culture is heading, they might simply point to the fiction of George Saunders. Living in a world that's both indelibly or...
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264 . Junky by William S. Burroughs
Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and pe...
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265 . Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Stories filled with wonder and the haunting beauty of his culture have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the father of Chicano literature in English, and his tales fairly shimmer with the lyric richness of...
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266 . Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Child hero Ender Wiggin must fight a desperate battle against a deadly alien race if mankind is to survive.
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268 . Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
American writer Gertrude Stein was definitely decades ahead of her time. Injecting experimental and avant-garde elements into her work, she described her method as "literary cubism" -- an understan...
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269 . A Fable by William Faulkner
A Fable is a novel written in 1954 by the American author William Faulkner, which won him both the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award in 1955. Despite these recognitions, however, the novel...
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270 . The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is the sixth novel by American author Colson Whitehead. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeaster...
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271 . Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
The story of one African-American family fighting to stay together and strong in the face of brutal racist attacks, illness, poverty, and betrayal in the Deep South of the 1930s.
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272 . The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of Americans." Library Journal
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273 . LaBrava by Elmore Leonard
LaBrava, the 1983 novel by author Elmore Leonard, follows the story of Joe LaBrava, former Secret Service agent. This novel won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel.
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274 . Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
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275 . The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond h...
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276 . In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
n Watermelon Sugar is a novel written by Richard Brautigan and published in 1968. It is a tale of a commune organized around a central gathering house which is named "iDEATH". In this environment, ...
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277 . Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady by Anita Loos
The incomparable adventures of Lorelei Lee, a little girl from Little Rock who takes the world by storm. Anita Loos first published the diaries of the ultimate gold-digging blonde in the flapper da...
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278 . The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Centuries ago, the moon Anarres was settled by utopian anarchists who left the Earthlike planet Urras in search of a better world, a new beginning. Now a brilliant physicist, Shevek, determines to ...
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279 . The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the ...
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280 . The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The timeless story of backwoods Florida and the tender relationship of a young boy and his tame fawn continues to delight and enthrall readers.
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281 . The Crucible by Arthur Miller
A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community "I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in hum...
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282 . Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag
The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America.
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283 . Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
The classic Zane Grey that established the modern western tradition.
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284 . Mating by Norman Rush
Mating is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative of an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Ne...
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285 . Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-Told Tales is a short story collection in two volumes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first was published in the spring of 1837, and the second in 1842.[1] The stories had all been previously pub...
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286 . Independence Day by Richard Ford
Independence Day follows Frank Bascombe, a New Jersey real estate agent, through the titular holiday weekend as he visits his ex-wife, his troubled son, his current lover, the renters of one of his...
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287 . The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel, but did most of the work when she was 16 and a jun...
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288 . The Poems of Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman (/ˈwɪtmən/; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, in...
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289 . The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective fiction novel written by American author Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris's Louv...
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290 . The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
In Marion Zimmer Bradley's masterpiece, we see the tumult and adventures of Camelot's court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king's rise and schemed for his fall. From their childhoo...
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291 . Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us al...
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292 . Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another... In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husba...
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293 . Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Mumbo Jumbo is a 1972 novel by African-American author Ishmael Reed. Set in 1920s New York City, the novel takes its plot from the struggles of "The Wallflower Order," an international conspiracy d...
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294 . Collected Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the di...
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295 . Mortals by Norman Rush
It is at once a political adventure, a social comedy, and a passionate triangle. It is set in the 1990s in Botswana—the African country Rush has indelibly made his own fictional territory. Mortals ...
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297 . The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical...
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298 . Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Unburdened by the material necessities of the more fortunate, the denizens of Cannery Row discover rewards unknown in more traditional society. Henry the painter sorts through junk lots for pieces ...
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299 . Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is the title of the first book published by the American novelist Philip Roth, a collection of six stories. In addition to its title novella, set in New Jersey, Goodbye,...
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300 . A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In." It i...
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301 . The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mis...
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302 . Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979.
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303 . Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish
Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant who works at a Chinese restaurant in Queens in search of a better life in the 'Land of the Brave'. Brad Skinner has recently arrived in New York following a tour in ...
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304 . The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
A Great Writer's Sweeping Story of Men and Women Struggling to Reclaim Their Lives in The Aftermath of World Conflict. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia an...
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305 . Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen, and her mother's belief in her, lead to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's momen...
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306 . The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939 by William Carlos Williams
Gathers, chronologically, all the major poems of Williams' career.
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307 . Stories of Washington Irving by Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Va...
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308 . Daisy Miller by Henry James
Daisy Miller is a novella by Henry James that first appeared in Cornhill Magazine in June–July 1878, and in book form the following year. It portrays the courtship of the beautiful American girl Da...
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309 . Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Fran...
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310 . The Hamlet by William Faulkner
The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its...
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311 . Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
Mickey Sabbath is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the (pro...
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313 . Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power broker...
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314 . Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.
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315 . Unless by Carol Shields
Unless, first published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins in 2002, is the final novel by Canadian writer Carol Shields. Semi-autobiographical, it was the capstone to Shields's writing ...
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316 . American Tabloid by James Ellroy
American Tabloid is a 1995 novel by James Ellroy. The novel chronicles three rogue American law enforcement officers from November 22, 1958 through November 22, 1963. Each becomes involved in a web...
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317 . Lad: a Dog by Albert Payson Terhune
Lad: A Dog is a 1919 American novel written by Albert Payson Terhune and published by E. P. Dutton. Composed of twelve short stories first published in magazines, the novel is based on the life of ...
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318 . Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout
Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, an armchair detective created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detectiv...
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319 . Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. With a surgeon’s skill, Connell cuts away th...
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320 . We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Merricat Blackwood lives on the family estate with her sister Constance and her uncle Julian. Not long ago there were seven Blackwoods � until a fatal dose of arsenic found its way into the sugar b...
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321 . Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
As this complete collection of her short stories demonstrates, Dorothy Parker's talents extended far beyond brash one-liners and clever rhymes. Her stories not only bring to life the urban milieu t...
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322 . Mr Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Evan S. Connell's Mr Bridge is a moving and darkly funny portrayal of a man who is outwardly successful but internally stunted by existential doubts, repressed sexual yearnings and deep-seated prej...
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323 . The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition of S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
Here William Goldman’s beloved story of Buttercup, Westley, and their fellow adventurers finally receives a beautiful illustrated treatment. A tale of true love and high adventure, pirates, princes...
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324 . Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler
A complete collection of short fiction by the creator of Philip Marlowe includes stories such as "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," "The Pencil," and "English Summer."
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325 . Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction. An eleven-year-old heroine tells her unforgett...
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326 . Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a 2017 novel by Jesmyn Ward. It is about a family's dynamics in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was ...
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327 . War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk
These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The multimillion-copy...
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328 . The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
The Violent Bear It Away is a novel published in 1960 by American author Flannery O'Connor. It is the second and final novel that she published. The first chapter of the novel was published as the ...
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329 . Centennial by James A. Michener
Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the West is an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story...
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330 . Cigarettes by Harry Mathews
Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it...
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331 . The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
The Enormous Room (The Green-Eyed Stores) is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I. Cummings served as...
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332 . Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery by Richard Brautigan
Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery is a novel by Richard Brautigan written in 1975. The story takes place in San Francisco, California in the early 1970s. The title character is ...
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333 . Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of w...
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334 . Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is the fourth novel by American writer John Barth. It is metafictional comic novel in which the universe is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of both ...
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335 . What Maisie Knew by Henry James
What Maisie Knew is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Chap-Book and (revised and abridged) in the New Review in 1897 and then as a book later that year. It tells the story ...
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336 . Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
Dangling Man is a 1944 novel by Saul Bellow. It is his first published work.
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337 . Contact by Carl Sagan
Contact is a 1985 science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ran...
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338 . The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The History of Love: A Novel is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Sar...
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339 . The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Magician of Lublin (Yiddish: Der kuntsnmakher fun Lublin) is a novel by Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though originally written in Yiddish, it was first published in English: in 1960 i...
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340 . Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
Disillusioned and loveless, a chain-smoking art history professor, who spends her spare time singing in nightclubs and tending to her young daughter, finds herself pursued by an erratic, would-be l...
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341 . Cost by Roxana Robinson
When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, ...
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342 . Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Get Shorty is a 1990 novel by American novelist Elmore Leonard. In 1995, the novel was adapted into a film of the same title, and in 2017 it was adapted into a television series of the same title.
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343 . The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow
The Book of Daniel (1971) is a semi-historical novel by E. L. Doctorow, loosely based on the lives, trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Doctorow tells the story of Paul and Rochelle ...
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344 . A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
A Gate at the Stairs is a novel by American fiction writer Lorrie Moore. It was published by Random House in 2009. The novel won Amazon.com's "best of the month" designation and was a finalist for ...
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345 . Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender a...
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346 . The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
The 13 Clocks is a fantasy tale written by James Thurber and illustrator Marc Simont in 1950, while he was completing one of his other novels. It is written in a unique cadenced style, in which a m...
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347 . The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
The Green Hat perfectly reflects the atmosphere of the 1920s—the post-war fashion for verbal smartness, youthful cynicism, and the spirit of rebellion of the "bright young things" of Mayfair. Iris ...
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349 . Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Quicksand is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. This is her first novel and the first draft was completed in a short period of time. The novel was out of print from t...
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350 . Like Life by Lorrie Moore
In Like Life’s eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore’s characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how t...
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351 . Stone Junction: An Alchemical Pot-Boiler by Jim Dodge
Daniel Pearse's journey from childhood to adulthood amid magic, mayhem and mysticism all guided by a mysterious organization named AMO, the Alliance of Alchemists Magicians and Outlaws. A series of...
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352 . I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson
Originally published in 1929, I Thought of Daisy is the first of three novels by Edmund Wilson. Written while he was still balancing his ambitions as a novelist against a successful career in liter...
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353 . The House on the Borderland by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his expe...
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354 . Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Two Englishmen meeting on a train to Berlin in 1930 kick off one of Isherwood’s most enduring novels On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistib...
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355 . American Rust by Philipp Meyer
American Rust is American writer Philipp Meyer's debut novel, published in 2009. Set in the 2000s, American Rust takes place in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which is...
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356 . They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a novel written by Horace McCoy and first published in 1935. The story mainly concerns a dance marathon during the Great Depression. It was adapted into Sydney Po...
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357 . Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby
Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by American writer Hubert Selby Jr., that concerns four New Yorkers whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions.
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358 . Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of short stories written by Flannery O'Connor during the final decade of her life. The collection's eponymous story derives its name from the wor...
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359 . The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in the December 1933 issue of Redbook. It appeared in book form the following month. Hammett never wrote a sequel...
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360 . Democracy by Joan Didion
Democracy -- Joan Didion's fourth novel -- was published in 1984. Set in Hawaii and Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War, the book tells the story of Inez Victor, wife of U.S. Senator and o...
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361 . Passing by Nella Larsen
Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhoo...
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362 . Asphodel by Hilda Doolittle
Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe, begins to test for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities
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363 . The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Virgin Suicides is the 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The fictional story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five sisters...
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364 . What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
What I Loved is a novel written by American writer Siri Hustvedt first published in 2003 by Hodder and Stoughton in London. It is written from the point of view of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian l...
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365 . The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about ...
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366 . Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Against the Day is a 2006 historical novel by Thomas Pynchon. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a...
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367 . Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg
Cutter and Bone is a 1976 thriller novel by Newton Thornburg about a Vietnam veteran, Alexander Cutter, who tries to convince his friend, Richard Bone, that Bone witnessed a murder. It was adapted ...
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368 . Moon Palace by Paul Auster
Moon Palace is a novel written by Paul Auster that was first published in 1989. The novel is set in Manhattan and the U.S. Midwest, and centers on the life of the narrator Marco Stanley Fogg and t...
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369 . At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on ...
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370 . Nemesis by Philip Roth
Set in a Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak, Nemesis is a wrenching examination of the forces of circumstance on our lives. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year...
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371 . The Professor's House by Willa Cather
The Professor's House is a novel by American novelist Willa Cather. Published in 1925, the novel was written over the course of several years. Cather first wrote the centerpiece, “Tom Outland's Sto...
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372 . The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot is a 2011 novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The novel grew out of a manuscript begun by Eugenides after the publication of his novel Middlesex and portions are loosely b...
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373 . Holder of the World: A Novel by Bharati Mukherjee
“An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past ...
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374 . The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle
Howard Halliday, editor-in-chief of the Midnight Examiner, a tabloid, finds himself caught up in an unexpected adventure involving the Mafia and a voodoo sorceress
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375 . The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle
The Fan Man is a cult comic novel published in 1974 by the American writer William Kotzwinkle. It is told in stream-of-consciousness style by the narrator, Horse Badorties (the titular "fan man"), ...
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376 . Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
Possessing the Secret of Joy is a 1992 novel by Alice Walker.
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377 . Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
Delta of Venus is a book of fifteen short stories by Anaïs Nin published posthumously in 1977—though largely written in the 1940s as erotica for a private collector.In 1994 a film inspired by the b...
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378 . The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine before being included in the collection Tale...
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379 . Blind Man with a Pistol by Chester Himes
Blind Man With a Pistol is a 1969 fiction novel by Chester Himes. It is the 8th book in the Harlem Cycle series.
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380 . Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon
Nowhere Man is a novel by Aleksandar Hemon, published in 2002 and named after the Beatles song "Nowhere Man". The novel (subtitled The Pronek Fantasies) centers around the character of Jozef Pronek...
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381 . Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured in the development of second-wave feminism. The novel is written ...
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382 . The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
This novel portrays the difficulties encountered by traditionalist Jews coming to terms with the social changes that rocked Poland in the late 19th century. The central figure of the novel is Calma...
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383 . The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
The End of the Story is an energetic, candid, and funny novel about an enduring obsession and a woman's attempt to control it by the telling of the story of it. With ruthless honesty, artful analys...
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384 . The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
The Black Dahlia (1987) is a crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because...
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385 . A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
A Boy’s Own Story is a 1982 semi-autobiographical novel by Edmund White.
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386 . Typical: Stories by Padgett Powell
Twenty-three surreal fictions—stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues—from one of the most heralded writers of the American South There are many things that repulse “Dr. Ordinary.” ...
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387 . The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme
The Dead Father is a post-modernist novel by author Donald Barthelme published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book relates the journey of a vaguely defined entity that symbolizes fatherh...
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388 . The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The Cider House Rules (1985) is a novel by American writer John Irving, a Bildungsroman, which was later adapted into a film (1999) and a stage play by Peter Parnell. The story, set in the pre– an...
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389 . The Floating Opera by John Barth
The Floating Opera is a novel by American writer John Barth, first published in 1956 and significantly revised in 1967. Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a fir...
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390 . The Graduate by Charles Webb
The Graduate is a 1963 novella by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. It tells the story of Benjamin Braddock, who, while pondering his future after his gradu...
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391 . The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt
Set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a swiftly gentrifying Manhattan, The Lost Language of Cranes tells the story of twenty-five-year-old Philip Benjamin, who realizes he must come out to his p...
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392 . Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was written and published with a collection of his...
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393 . Family Life by Akhil Sharma
Finally joining their father in America, Ajay and Birju enjoy their new, extraordinary life until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother incapacitated and the other practically orphaned in this stran...
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394 . What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is n...
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396 . Honored Guest by Joy Williams
With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways–comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client's...
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397 . Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
An engaging and funny second collection by an original voice.
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398 . The Intuitionist: A Novel by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. This marvellously inventive, genre-bending, noir-inflected novel, set ...
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399 . House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
House Made of Dawn is a novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for F...
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400 . Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders's first full-length novel and was the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller for the week o...
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401 . The Alienist by Caleb Carr
The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kre...
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402 . Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Rubyfruit Jungle is the first milestone novel in the extraordinary career of one of this country's most distinctive writers. Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungl...
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403 . Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Tree of Smoke is about a man named Skip Sands who joins the CIA in 1965, and begins working in Vietnam during the American involvement there. The time frame of the novel is from 1963 to 1970, with ...
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404 . The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter
The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great ...
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405 . The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J....
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406 . White Fang by Jack London
Retells the adventures in the northern wilderness of a dog who is part wolf and how he comes to make his peace with man.
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407 . The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist and writer Colson Whitehead.
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408 . The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel is a collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1958. It won the 1959 National Book Award for fiction. The stories included are The First Sev...
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409 . The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being brutally raped and murdered, watches from heaven as her family and friends go on with their live...
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410 . Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
Europe Central takes place in central Europe in the 20th century, examines a vast array of characters, ranging from generals to martyrs, officers to poets, traitors to artists and musicians. It dea...
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411 . The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian is a 2011 science fiction novel written by Andy Weir. It was his debut novel under his own name. It was originally self-published in 2011; Crown Publishing purchased the rights and re-r...
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412 . Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park is a 1990 science fiction novel written by Michael Crichton, divided into seven sections (iterations). A cautionary tale about genetic engineering, it presents the collapse of an amus...
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413 . The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. A USA Today arti...
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414 . The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
It tells the story of Anthony Patch (a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune), the relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism. The novel provide...
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415 . Carrie by Stephen King
Carrie is an epistolary horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was his first published novel, released on April 5, 1974, with an approximate first print-run of 30,000 copies. Set primaril...
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416 . Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the ever...
