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An intriguing patchwork of poignant episodes, Atwood's latest set of stories (after The Tent) chronicles 60 years of a Canadian family, from postwar Toronto to a farm in the present. The opening piece of this novel-in-stories is set in the present and introduces Tig and Nell, married, elderly and facing an uncertain future in a world that has become foreign and hostile. From there, the book casts back to an 11-year-old Nell excitedly knitting garments...

This is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel by an authentic man of genius, Thomas Wolfe - about the struggles and triumphs of an aspiring writer named George Webber in the glittering world of New York, about one young man's discovery of life and the world. It follows Webber from humble Southern beginnings to his arrival in The Big City to write. Then he meets Esther Jack, and things go as differently - but wonderfully so - as they possibly could....

Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his ever-changing states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience. Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's best-known works, following a visit to northern California and...

"Many girls in elementary and middle school fall in love with the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. What they don't always realize is that Wilder's books are autobiographical. This narrative biography describes more of the details of the young Laura's real life as a young pioneer homesteading with her family on many adventurous journeys. This biography, complete with charming illustrations, points out the differences between the fictional...

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 emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The...

A reminiscence of a Christmas shared by a seven-year-old boy and a sixtyish childlike woman, with enormous love and friendship between them.

A young man searches for meaning, creates art, and grapples with fame in this semiautobiographical Beat Generation classic by the author of On the Road.
This urgently paced yet deeply introspective novel closely tracks Jack Kerouac’s own life. Jack Duluoz journeys from the Cascade Mountains to San Francisco, Mexico City, New York, and Tangier. While working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades, Duluoz contemplates...

When Clay Spencer fails to arrive home at the expected hour on Christmas Eve of 1933, his family grows concerned. While his seven brothers and sisters and his mother keep vigil the older son, Clay-boy, goes in search of his father. But on his journey through the snowbound Virginia hills, the boy experiences a series of hazardous, touching and hilarious adventures.His life is endangered by an enraged deer, the family's honor is threatened by a well-meaning...

Written in 1929 by a dedicated social activist, it chronicles a woman's escape from grinding rural poverty into a predominantly male world of politics and revolution. "My aim in life was to study, not to follow a man around," asserts Marie Rogers, who struggles to establish her identity as an individual and as "a daughter of the earth," in restless pursuit of equality and justice. Marie's hardscrabble childhood and her involvement with freedom fighters...

"Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is a sequence of incantations, a series of battles. Each of the three journeys sees Shaw walk alone into a Dartmoor forest and wait. What arrive are stories - fragments of myth that he has carried within...