Give Great Fiction this Birthday!
Find the perfect birthday gift with our curated list of great fiction books! Surprise your loved ones with captivating stories they'll cherish. Shop now!
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Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace
A collection of essays by the award-winning author of Infinite Jest shares whimsical and biting observations about such topics as the Bush-Kerry presidential race, the pain experienced by lobsters while they are being prepared for the feast, and Franz Kafka's questionable sense of humor. Reprint.
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Girl with Curious Hair
by David Foster Wallace
A collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace that explore the different ways people live their lives.
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The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
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Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
A Penguin Classic Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper. 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 Floating Opera and The End of the Road
by John Barth
From the author of National Book Award-nominated Lost in the Funhouse • John Barth's first two novels are both existential comedies featuring strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effects of an overactive intellect on the emotions. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times The relationship between these two darkly comic novels is evident not only in their ribald and philosophical subject matter but in their eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone. The protagonist of The Floating Opera is Todd Andrews, an orphaned war veteran who has been sleeping with his friend's wife. Todd awakens in the morning determined to commit suicide, having concluded that nothing in life has intrinsic value--but then spends the day methodically reasoning his way into disregarding that fact and remaining a part of the floating opera of life. In The End of the Road, a man named Jacob Horner finds himself literally paralyzed by an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. He begins an unconventional course of "mythotherapy" treatment at the Remobilization Farm, but his eccentric doctor's directives lead him into a tragic love triangle and from there to the nihilistic end of the road. Separately these two novels give two very different views of the universal human quest for meaning, and together they form the beginnings of an illustrious literary career.
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The Sot-weed Factor
by John Barth
A parody of life in colonial America relates the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke who became the poet laureate of Maryland.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
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Bradbury Stories
by Ray Bradbury
For more than sixty years, the imagination of Ray Bradbury has opened doors into remarkable places, ushering us across unexplored territories of the heart and mind while leading us inexorably toward a profound understanding of ourselves and the universe we inhabit. In this landmark volume, America's preeminent storyteller offers us one hundred treasures from a lifetime of words and ideas. The stories within these pages were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium. Here are representatives of the legendary author's finest works of short fiction, including many that have not been republished for decades, all forever fresh and vital, evocative and immensely entertaining.
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 ofrece la historia de un sombrio y horroroso futuro. Montag, el protagonista, pertenece a una extrana brigada de bomberos cuya mision, paradojicamente, no es la de sofocar incendios sino la de provocarlos, para quemar libros. Porque en el pais de Montag esta terminantemente prohibido leer.Porque leer obliga a pensar, y en el pais de Montag esta prohibido pensar. Porque leer impide ser ingenuamente feliz, y en el pais de Montag hay que ser feliz a la fuerza...