Fiction I love to Read Over & Over & Over
Dive into a curated list of unforgettable fiction loved enough to reread again and again. From John Irving's sweeping epics like *The World According to Garp* and Steinbeck's classic *East of Eden*, to the raw power of Jim Thompson's crime noir and the timeless depth of *Les Misérables*, discover the books that stand the test of time. Explore this hand-picked collection of must-read novels for every devoted book lover.
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The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim. This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress... “A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times
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Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill. Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.
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The Hotel New Hampshire
by John Irving
"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels." So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany. "Like Garp, [THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE] is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice." --Time "Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world....You must read this book." --Los Angeles Times "Spellbinding...Intensely human...A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity." --Cosmopolitan
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Until I Find You
by John Irving
Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.” Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force. A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
"I’m an outsider to the end of my days!" Jude Fawley’s hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking "New Woman." Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, caused a public furor when it was first published, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships. This edition uses the unbowdlerized text of the first volume edition of 1895, and also includes a list for further reading, appendices and a glossary. In his introduction, Dennis Taylor examines biblical allusions and the critique of religion in Jude the Obscure, and its critical reception that led Hardy to abandon novel writing. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."
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Animal Farm
by George Orwell
75th Anniversary Edition—Includes a New Introduction by Téa Obreht George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire on a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.
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The Great Gatsby
by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Tells the tragic love story of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin. • The definitive corrected text, including Faulkner's Appendix One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury
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Light in August
by William Faulkner
From the Nobel Prize winner—one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a novel set in the American South during Prohibition about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality. Light in August features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry. “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner
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Eudora Welty: Complete Novels (LOA #101)
by Eudora Welty
Complete Novels, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battle, The Optimist's Daughter.
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Adam Resurrected
by Yoram Kaniuk
A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. "A tour de force."--"Commentary."
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The Lover
by Abraham B. Yehoshua
A dreamlike story of a husbands obsessive search for his wifes lover amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War.--publisher.
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Five Seasons
by Abraham B. Yehoshua
With the death of his invalid wife, Molkho leaves his home for a freedom measured by the seasons.
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The Continuing Silence of a Poet
by Abraham B. Yehoshua
This collection of ten short stories represents almost 30 years of the author's career, including some of his most popular works. The title story is about an ageing poet who cannot write as the times demand, but his mentally handicapped son can.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review
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Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books). “A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty … His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.” —The Washington Post Book World A remarkable collection that includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life.” —The Washington Post Book World
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Classic Crews
by Harry Crews
Includes two of Crews' full-length novels, The Gypsy's Curse and Car, his autobiography, and three of his essays.
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Celebration
by Harry Crews
Crews brings to life a world of has-beens, ruined men, forgotten wives--and the ebullient woman who is out to save them all--in this darkly hilarious novel centered in a gruesome Florida retirement community with peculiar residents. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Strega
by Andrew Vachss
Andrew Vachss's implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph—and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean whose currents are flesh and money, the anguish of children and the pleasure of twisted adults. It is a place that Burke can visit only at the risk of his sanity and his life. But between the power of Strega and his own sense of justice, there is no turning back. In Strega one of our most acclaimed crime writers gives us a thriller that might have been imagined by Dante. For this is a tour of hell with no stops left out, conducted by a novelist who writes with the authority of the damned.
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Everybody Pays
by Andrew Vachss
From neo-noir master Vachss comes a second collection of stories following the success of "Born Bad"--street-grit prose that has earned him comparisons to Chandler, Cain and Hammett.
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Born Bad
by Andrew Vachss
From a writer whose novels have been acclaimed for their unflinching exploration of evil comes a brilliant collection of short stories—some never before published—that distill dread back down to its essence—and inject it straight into the reader's back brain. Andrew Vachss might have scissored his characters from today's headlines: a stalker prowling around an anonymous high-rise; a serial killer whose transgressions reflect a childhood of hideous abuse; an inner-city gunman who is willing to take out a blockful of victims in order to win a moment of acceptance. Tautly written and endowed with murderous ironic spin, Born Bad plunges us into the hell that lies just outside our bedroom windows.
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Safe House
by Andrew Vachss
In Burke, Vachss gave readers of crime fiction a hero they could believe in, an avenger whose sense of justice was forged behind bars and tempered on New York's meanest streets. In this blistering new thriller, Burke is drawn into his ugliest case yet, one that involves an underground network of abused women and the sleekly ingenious stalkers who've marked them as their personal victims. Burke's client is Crystal Beth, a beautiful outlaw with a tattoo on her face and a mission burned into her heart. She is trying to shield one of her charges from a vengeful ex with fetishes for Nazism and torture. But the stalker has a protector, someone so informed, so ruthless, and so connected that he need only make a few phone calls to shut down Crystal Beth's operation for good—and Burke along with it. Sinuous in its complexities, brutal in its momentum, Safe House is Burke at the edge of his nerve and cunning. And it's Vachss at the peak of his form.
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The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson
In a small town in Texas there is a sheriff's deputy named Lou Ford, a man so dull that he lives in cliches, so good-natured that he doesn't even lay a finger on the drunks who come into his custody. But then, that would be too easy, for Lou's sickness requires other victims. . . . A nightmarish book of psychopathic evil.
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Pop. 1280
by Jim Thompson
Sheriff Nick Corey of Potts County, is a simple man, but when he is pushed to far he becomes a killer or makes other people do his killings.
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A Hell of a Woman
by Jim Thompson
Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute--and about the money the old lady has stashed away--Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.
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The Grifters
by Jim Thompson
Roy DIllon seems too handsome and well-mannered to be a professional con man. Lilly Dillon looks too young--and loves Roy a little too intensely--to be taken for his mother. Moira Langtry is getting too old to keep on living off the kindness of male strangers. And Carol Roberg seems too innocent to be acquainted with suffering.
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After Dark, My Sweet
by Jim Thompson
William Collins is very handsome, very polite, and very friendly. He is also dangerous when aroused. Now Collins, a one-time boxer with a lethal "accident" in his past, has broken out of his fourth mental institution and met up with an affable con man and a highly arousing woman, whose plans for him include kidnapping, murder, and much, much worse.
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East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
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Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. "A thriller, a gripping tale . . . that you will not set down until it is finished. Steinbeck has touched the quick." —The New York Times
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Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
The special centennial edition of this classic novel offers readers a fresh look at this controversial tale. Reissue.
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Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Selected Stories
by Stephen Crane
A collection of short stories includes the tale of the short and brutal life of a hopeful young woman who, ignored and abused by her family, trusts a hustler who promises to protect her, but only hastens her downfall