NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. “[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review
In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
An extraordinary collection of dynamic stories by an exciting new voice in American fiction, Gigantic features ten powerful stories of emotional stagnation and personal transformation, passion and violence, race and community, that are viscerally immediate in their impact and otherworldly in their scope. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a struggling mattress salesman witnesses a horrific car accident at his bus stop and embarks on a wild journey that will lead him to put his life in order, beginning with his troubled relationship with his disabled alcoholic father. In "Quality Fuel for Electric Living," a sanitation worker, recovering from a romantic breakup and a painful hangover, suddenly faces a life-threatening situation while collecting an unusual deer carcass. In "Thursday the Sixteenth," a club manager dating the ex-girlfriend of a reggae singer unwittingly becomes entangled in a chain of events that ends in a violent confrontation. At turns comic and heartbreaking, and at all times rich with language and meanings that operate simultaneously on a variety of levels, the stories of Gigantic mark the arrival of an exciting voice in American fiction. "Impressive ... Ten lean and energetic stories ... Grimly funny, bleakly fatalistic, and emotionally true all at once." -- Chris Lehman, The Washington Post "Beautiful ... Nesbitt is smart, dark, and funny, like a young Elmore Leonard with a drinking problem." -- Sam Sifton, The New York Times Book Review "Nesbitt takes risks. ... with imagery, details of his characters' dead-end lives and even with structure.... Wonderful ... A talent to watch." -- David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "Nesbitt sets out to blow his readers away with his debut collection.... He succeeds.... Funny, tense and horrifying." -- Carole Goldberg, The Hartford Courant
