Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the 20th century, this book remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...

"Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution...

"Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L.P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece - a richly layered,...

"When World War I broke out the author of ''Buddenbrooks'' was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...

"There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast...

"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland."--Publisher's description.

A classic California noir with a feminist twist, this prescient 1947 novel exposed misogyny in post-World War II American society, making it far ahead of its time.
Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele.  To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the...

"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....

This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. 
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water...