Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy.

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...

When I was twelve, I made a naïve, yet desperate pact with God to keep my ailing mother alive. It was the first time I'd ventured something so brazen--making a contract with the Almighty... So begins the story of Becky Owens, a talented and passionate young pianist on the verge of adolescence when she learns the devastating news of her mother's critical illness. As the daughter of a country preacher in Lancaster County, Becky knows well the significance...

Este delicioso y emotivo relato narra la histora del los March, una familia acostumbrada al trabajo y al sufrimiento. Aunque el padre esta lejos sirviendo en el ejercito durante la guerra civil norteamericana, las hermanas Meg, Jo, Amy y Beth, distintas entre si, peromuy unidas por sus lazos fraternales, mantienen su espiritu en alto gracias al carino de su madre. La novela narra los progresos que realizan las jovenes , sus complicaciones, sus enamoramientos,...

A collection of humorous and nostalgic Americana stories-the beloved, bestselling classics that inspired the movie A Christmas Story Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant-and utterly hilarious-works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of...

Young David is orphaned as a child, abandoned by a vicious stepfather and must learn to make a life for himself in Victorian England.

The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the...

"Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther." –Los Angeles Times Book Review In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled...

"This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.