From Dorothy L. Sayers, "one of the greatest mystery story writers of the [twentieth] century" (Los Angeles Times), the first mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.
A corpse has been found in the bath of an architect's flat, wearing nothing but a pair... More details on Whose Body?
‘I’m afraid it’s an awkward place to turn in,’ said Lord Peter, answering the thought rather than the words. His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as whi...
A desperate young man plans the perfect crime - the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law - if it will ultim... More details on Crime and Punishment
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the stairs. His closet of a room was under the roof of a high, five-floor house and was more like a cupboard than a place in which to live. The land...
Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden. Then he met a seventeen-year old gir... More details on Fahrenheit 451
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood ...
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.
Now a Hulu limited series starring Christopher Abbott, George Clooney, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie.
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a co... More details on Catch-22
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could trea...
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential... More details on Infinite Jest
3 E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid's curve, with the tennis courts and pavilions at the center and t...
The sweeping love story of two people who defy the conventions of their age to follow the dictates of their hearts. Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna Karenina is swept off her feet by the dashing Count Vronsky. When the truth about their passionat... More details on Anna Karenina
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living ...
Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all... More details on Dracula
Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of...
A young governess is employed to look after two orphaned children in a grand country house. Isolated and inexperienced, she is at first charmed by her young charges but gradually she suspects that they may not be as innocent as they seem. And do the ... More details on The Turn of the Screw
My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back...
"A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction-it is an amazingly brave piece of work . . . so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will co... More details on A Prayer for Owen Meany
I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because ...
The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother's unsettling quest to understand her teenage son's deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them rem... More details on We Need to Talk About Kevin
I’m unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we’ve been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a ...