Nothing Like the Sun: A Novel about William Shakespeare

Sophie's Choice

William Styron · 625 pages

The gripping, unforgettable story of Stingo, a 22-year-old writer; Sophie, a Polish-Catholic beauty who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; and Nathan, her mercurial lover. The three friends share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.

Orlando

Virginia Woolf · 194 pages

In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman three centuries later.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

William Shakespeare · 166 pages

"I feel that I have spent half my career with one or another Pelican Shakespeare in my back pocket. Convenience, however, is the least important aspect of the new Pelican Shakespeare series. Here is an elegant and clear text for either the study or the rehearsal room, notes where you need them and the distinguished scholarship of the general editors, Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller who underst

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

The Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen · 162 pages

Lucian Taylor is damned, either through contact with an erotically pagan faerie world or through something degenerate in his own nature. He thinks of the damning thing inside him as a faun. He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which become increasingly real. The portrait of a doomed artist:

Tamburlaine Must Die

Louise Welsh · 149 pages

London, 1593. A city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, strangers are unwelcome, suspicion is wholesale, severed heads grin from the spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe walks the city's mean streets with just three days to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer escaped from the pages of his most violent play. Tamburlaine Must Die is the searing adventure

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Jose Saramago · 384 pages

By Any Other Name

Jodi Picoult · 544 pages

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Shakespeare Undead

Lori Handeland · 291 pages

Will was not only one of the greatest writers in the English language, he was also a necromancer. In exchange for a front row seat to history, Will supplied zombie armies. Sure, he's sorry now. Hey, he's refused to raise a shuffling, shambling corpse for years. And the talent--which comes only to a necromancer who's become a vampire--is extremely rare. So why are there so many zombies strolling ar

Ruled Britannia

Harry Turtledove · 458 pages

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 321 pages

A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.

You Can't Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe · 638 pages

A twentieth-century classic, Thomas Wolfes magnificent novel is both the story of a young writer longing to make his mark upon the world and a sweeping portrait of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the years leading up to World War II. Upon the publication of You Cant Go Home Again in 1940, two years after Wolfes death,The New York Times Book Review declared that it “will stand

Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 403 pages

Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, th

A Country Road, A Tree

Jo Baker · 336 pages

"From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a stunning new novel that follows an unnamed writer--Samuel Beckett--whose life and extraordinary literary gift are permanently shaped in the forge of war. When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the maelstrom. With him we experience the hardships

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

The Master

Colm Toibin · 355 pages

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, wh

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · 228 pages

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompass

The Virgin in the Garden

A.S. Byatt · 428 pages

A new play, the highlight of a magnificent local festival celebrating the coronation of Elizabeth II, brings together the young playwright and a brilliant but eccentric family whose personal dramas soon eclipse the entire production.

Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env