Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy.

An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and personality.

The author, the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP, offers a fictionalized account of his life and looks at the consequences of denying one's heritage.

The character David Foster Wallace is introduced to the banal world of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and the host of strange people who work there, in a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author's death.

Between sports, school, and working for his father, eleven-year-old Amar'e's life is full and he is not yet ready to concentrate on basketball--but when a group of older boys start hogging the local basketball court he knows that he has to do something to help his friends.

A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road

“In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle
Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and...

Praised for simple use of language to convey complex emotions, In Our Time introduces readers to the young Nick Adams and to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose enlivened by an ear for the colloquial.

"Derek is sure this will be the best season yet! He has it all planned-his dad will have him start at shortstop, and the team will cruise to a championship. But sometimes life doesn't go according to plan."--Provided by publisher.

"An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough in an autobiographical novel that explores colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer. Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless...

"'I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.' In a world created outside of time, Li and the son who died talk about their lives. Deeply intimate and moving, this story cycle of grief captures the love and humor in a relationship which goes on now in a mother's heart, between a mother and child, even as it captures the pain of Li's...