John Williams

"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...

"William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is...

Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists
With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines
Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing...

"The history of a generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a Bohemian utopia on the windblown shores of Cape Cod"--

Arthur Maxley is a young man at the end of his emotional rope. Having dropped out of college, he's holed up in a big-city hotel, living off an allowance from his family, feeling nothing but alone and doing nothing but drinking to forget it. What's brought him to this point? Something is troubling him, something is haunting him, something he cannot bring himself either to face or to turn away from. And now his father has come to town, a hail-fellow-well-met...

"Not just English poetry but poetry in English as we know it today was largely invented in England between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1630. For many years much of the poetry from the era was seen as half-baked, undeveloped, little more than a run-up to Shakespeare. From the point of view of the twentieth century and today, however, it seems a time of extraordinary poetic ferment and experimentation. Never since have the possibilities...

Eighteen years ago the town accused Dolores Claiborne of murdering her husband in cold blood. Now a woman lies dead and a witness finds Dolores standing over the body. Her daughter is the only one who can save her life and the only thing that stands between guilt and innocence is the evil secret that made the daughter run away ten years ago.

"Nearly two decades after the rise of the Empire, young farmer Luke Skywalker meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, who has lived for years in seclusion on the desert planet of Tatooine. Obi-Wan begins Luke's Jedi training, telling him of the Rebels' battle against the Empire and the power known as the Force. Soon Luke, Obi-Wan, and a charismatic mercenary named Han Solo and his Wookiee sidekick Chewbacca, join forces to rescue Princess Leia from the Empire's massive...

Based on the true story of Ron Kovic, a young man who volunteered for the Vietnam War, was wounded, and returned paralyzed from the mid-chest down. He later became a new voice for those disenchanted with the war.