Literary Fiction Sample
Explore a curated list of literary fiction sample books, featuring timeless classics and contemporary masterpieces. Discover profound narratives and rich storytelling for avid readers and book lovers.
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East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors, in a commemorative hardcover edition In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.
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This Other Eden
by Michael Hemmingson
Terrorism, crack cocaine and rape. Failure, miscarriages and suicide. Divorce, incest and misery. This Other Eden is Michael Hemmingson at his most brutal. A man wins the lottery and loses his family. A book agent must deal with a wild girl writer, a white trash genius and a limousine full of angry teenagers. His protagonists scratch at the bottom of society desperate to maintain delusions of adequacy. They fall into each other with hatred and bile; emerging with their own unique form of heroism. Provocative and intriguing, THIS OTHER EDEN by Michael Hemmingson is akin to reading a cross between someone's private journal and a True Crime magazine. Feeling titillated and naughty, as if reading a sibling's most private and dirty secrets, I found myself wholly unwilling to put this book down. It is glorious train wreck of loss, betrayal, and crime mixed with intimate thoughts and a poignant sense of loneliness. THIS OTHER EDEN is the kind of book that will make you forget your own life for a while but will also allow you to be grateful for it when you put the book down. Jennifer Brozek, Submissions Editor, Apex Book Company
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The Gravedigger's Daughter
by Joyce Carol Oates
Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.
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Little Bird of Heaven
by Joyce Carol Oates
In the tradition of the remarkably successful "New York Times" bestseller "The Gravedigger's Daughter," Oates is back with this dark, romantic, and captivating tale set in the Great Lakes regions of upstate New York.
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Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Selected Short Stories First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner’s ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt young Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his family legacy and that of the Old South. “Faulkner’s novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed,” noted Malcolm Cowley. “Absalom, Absalom! is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect.” This edition follows the text of Absalom, Absalom! as corrected in 1986 under the direction of Faulkner expert Noel Polk and features a new Foreword by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero’s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This Penguin Classics edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes. 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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Uncommon Arrangements
by Katie Roiphe
Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her. Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.
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1185 Park Avenue
by Anne Roiphe
From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture -- everything but happiness. While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society -- the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses -- lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family. Writing with a novelist's sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due.
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An Imperfect Lens
by Anne Roiphe
Twenty-seven-year-old Louis Thuillier, a protege of Louis Pasteur arrives in 1880s Alexandria, Egypt, as part of a French expedition searching for the source of the cholera epidemic raging through the city, and falls in love with Este Malina, the daughter of a respected Jewish doctor, but their growing love is threatened by the epidemic, intrigue, and political unrest. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
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Glory Goes and Gets Some
by Emily Carter
Follows Glory, an HIV-positive drug addict, who leaves the drugs and sex of the Lower East Side to find meaning to love and life in a Minnesota rehabilitation community.
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Decline and Fall
by Evelyn Waugh
Subtitled "A Novel of Many Manners, " Evelyn Waugh's notorious first novel lays waste the "heathen idol" of British sportsmanship, the cultured perfection of Oxford, and the inviolable honor codes of the English gentleman.
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The Sword of Honour Trilogy
by Evelyn Waugh
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often somber, the Sword of Honour trilogy is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh’s early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric.
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea-sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.
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A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
A satire of decadence among the English upper class depicts the breakup of a marriage among London's gentry, following the changing relationship between Tony Last, who is obsessed with his Victorian gothic country estate, and his wife, Lady Brenda, who, bored with her husband, embarks on an affair with an ambitious social climber.
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Merely Mary Ann
by Israel Zangwill
Lancelot stood at the hall door looking for a moment after his friend--the friend he had tried to cast out of his heart as a recreant. A rush of tender thoughts whelmed the musicians soul. Yes, life was sweet after all; he was a coward to lose heart so soon, and fame would yet be his.
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The Deptford Trilogy
by Robertson Davies
The complete volume of Robertson Davies's acclaimed trilogy, featuring Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Fifth Business Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. The Manticore Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels. Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic, THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where 'the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished'. World of Wonders This is the third novel in Davies's major work, The Deptford Trilogy. This novel tells the life story of the unfortunate boy introduced in The Fifth Business, who was spirited away from his Canadian home by one of the members of a traveling side show, the Wanless World of Wonders.
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The Cornish Trilogy
by Robertson Davies
Woven around the pursuits of the energetic spirits and erudite scholars of the University of St. John and the Holy Ghost, this dazzling trilogy of novels lures the reader into a world of mysticism, historical allusion, and gothic fantasy that could only be the invention of Canada's grand man of letters.
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The cunning man
by Robertson Davies
"A delight, a novel that travels 70 years of history on its own swift feet, a book of love and wisdom, loss and irony"--The Boston Sunday Globe When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high alter on Good Friday, Dr. Jonathan Hullah - whose holistic work has earned him the label "Cunning Man" (for the wizard of folk tradition) - wants to know why. The physician-cum-diagnostician's search for answers compels him to look back over his own long life. He conjures vivid memories of the dazzling, intellectual high jinks and compassionate philosophies of himself and his circle, including flamboyant, mystical curate Charlie Ireda≤ cynical, quixotic professor Brocky Gilmartin; outrageous banker Darcy Dwyer; and jocular, muscular artist Pansy Todhunter. In compelling and hilarious scenes from the divine comedy of life, The Cunning Man reveals profound truth about being human. The crowning achievement of "one of the most learned, amusing... accomplished novelists of our time and... of our century." - The New York Times Book Review
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Murther & Walking Spirits
by Robertson Davies
Anthony Burgess listed Davies' The Rebel Angels among the 99 best novels of our time and declared that Davies himself is "without doubt Nobel Prize material". In this unusual novel, Davies' protagonist is murdered in the first sentence of the book, but he lingers as a ghost to view the exploits of his ancestors, from the American Revolution to the present.
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The Lyre of Orpheus
by Robertson Davies
Davies triumphantly concludes the trilogy begun with The Rebel Angels. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the tutelage of Arthur Cornish, art expert, collector, connoisseur, and notable eccentric.
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The Buddha Speaks
by Anne Bancroft
Here is the core of the Buddha's teaching in his own words, as it was memorized word-for-word by his disciples and written down two hundred years after his death. These selections from the Buddhist scriptures deal with the search for truth, the way of contemplation, life and death, living in community, and many other topics, serving as an excellent introduction to the Buddha's teaching. Whether addressed to monks and nuns, householders, outcastes, or thieves, the Buddha's teachings are characterized by one main concern: conveying the reality of our bondage to suffering-- and the supremely good news that liberation is possible. It is a concern as relevant for people today as it was for the people of north India a millennium and a half ago. Putting down all barriers, let your mind be full of love. Let it pervade all the quarters of the world so that the whole wide world, above, below, and around, is pervaded with love. Let it be sublime and beyond measure so that it abounds everywhere. The way toward liberation is to train yourself to live in the present without waiting to become anything. Give up becoming this or that, live without cravings, and experience this present moment with full at-tention. Then you will neither cringe at death nor seek for repeated birth. Meditate on that which is beyond words and symbols. Forsake the demands of the self. By such forsaking, you will live serenely.
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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
by Breece D'J Pancake
Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.
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Short and Sweet
by Michael Hemmingson
Short and Sweet delivers, with lusty impact, the best of that nifty literary art form – the erotic novella. Longer than a short story and a tad slimmer than a novel, it's just the right size and shape for erotic adventures. From sexual exploration in college to what kinky cops really do in private with their handcuffs, this surprisingly smart, sexy anthology has something to offer every hungry mind.