"Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Àntonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebreska-Lincoln. She lived and worked...

"Legend has it something happened in Chaneysville . . . John Washington is coming home to Chaneysville. Old Jack Crawley, his father's closest friend and John's guardian, is dying, and the young man will care for him in his final days. For the brilliant and embittered black historian, it is a return that will plunge him deep into the past, into the dark secrets of this town and the buried evil of his heritage. Investigating the death of his father,...

"One terrible act plunges the world into an instant nuclear crisis, and with the American president accused of incompetence, Jack Ryan calls on FBI head Dan Murray to help him avert disaster."--

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time.

"It would be impossible to overstate John Steinbeck's enduring influence on American letters. Profuse with a richness of language, sly humor, and empathy for even his most flawed characters, Steinbeck's books are still widely read and deeply relevant today. "The Portable Steinbeck" is a grand sampling of his most important and popular works. Here are the complete novels "Of Mice and Men" and "The Red Pony," together with self-contained excerpts from...

"This summer Art Bechstein graduates from college and finds himself poised on the brink of freedom and limitless possibilities." --

"Willa Cather's novel of one man's life as he encounters the harsh landscape of the New Mexico desert and the people who inhabit it, with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine." --

"Ex-basketball player Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live."

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, 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.