Literary Fiction Titles
Explore a curated list of top literary fiction titles, featuring acclaimed novels and timeless classics for discerning readers. Discover your next great read today.
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Frog in the Pot
by Richard Beckham II
If life is not a test, then what is it?That¿s what Alvin Taylor, a 27-year-old alcoholic janitor, tries to figure out over his winter vacation with help from a mocking, yet conscientious, ¿voice,¿ but after a belligerent night in Canada with his friend, Alvin decides to sober up and give back to society¿by becoming a crossing guard at an elementary school.¿Somewhere along the line, between the idealisms of youth and the realities of adulthood, we become pacified by our jobs; we tolerate how we hurt the world so that we can sustain our lives. At some point, blurred in the past, we traded the greater good for ourselves.¿¿"From Frog in the Pot""Frog in the Pot" is a meditation on loneliness, its desperation, loss, and rejection. The narrative is a mixture of introspection, opinion, and drunken nonsense; but there is a larger theme that underscores this prose, something reticent in those of us caught between generations, or a quarter-life crisis. This novel is an entertaining blend of cynicism, sarcasm, and desolation, though at its heart is a thread of hope.
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Black Spring
by Henry Miller
Ten autobiographical pieces that take Miller from his childhood in Brooklyn to literary life in Paris.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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The Tale of Mu
by Richard Charles Beckham, II
What if the Garden of Eden were on a sunken continent? What if our world was once sustained by human emotion, particularly the love of the first two human souls? This continent is Lemuria, Mu, and when its twin, Atlantis, a land of science and vaingloriousness, extends its arm into the spiritual and meek borders of its sister the world will forever change. A temperamental lieutenant of Atlantis and his underground revolutionaries, a young woman with the rare and ancient ability to manifest her emotions into crystals, a deaf recluse, and a mysterious city of legend where all human life began-this is the stage on which Mu, the Motherland, unfolds herself. Lieutenant Seth Vistin follows the orders of the Emperor of Atlantis and explores this neighboring land, its ways, and its people. While meditating, Aset produces a strange crystal and follows the instructions of a woman from a dream who says to join her. The deaf Thoth struggles to make a name for himself in the cavernous town of his birth, only to discover a lost and forgotten piece of sacred text. All the while, ever since Creation wrapped her warm arms over the world, the first two human souls seek out each other with the aid of two sprites that only live in scripture and lore. But these sprites must relentlessly search every soul, with hopes of finding the reborn First Two, reunite them and breathe harmony back into the world.
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The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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Tropic of Capricorn
by Henry Miller
A vicious social commentary of the times and culture of the 1920's New York City.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell
The adventures of a broke British writer as he works as a dishwasher in Paris and stays in homeless shelters in London.
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.
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The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson
The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
50th Anniversary Edition • With an introduction by Caity Weaver, acclaimed New York Times journalist This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Also a major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
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Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The story of an intelligent but zany dysfunctional family is set in a drug-and-alcohol addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy and follows such themes as heartbreak, philosophy, and advertising.
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Modern Classics Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of includes an introduction by Seamus Deane 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs' Joyce's final work, Finnegan's Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal - cultural, political and sexual - that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century. James Joyce (1882-1941), the eldest of ten children, was born in Dublin, but exiled himself to Paris at twenty as a rebellion against his upbringing. He only returned to Ireland briefly from the continent but Dublin was at heart of his greatest works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He lived in poverty until the last ten years of his life and was plagued by near blindness and the grief of his daughter's mental illness. If you enjoyed Finnegans Wake, you might like Virginia Woolf's The Waves, also available in Penguin Classics. 'An extraordinary performance, a transcription into a miniaturized form of the whole western literary tradition' Seamus Deane