Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco—among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder,...

Ben Richards has no job, no money, and a young daughter who urgently needs medical attention. Desperate, out of options, he signs up for The Running Man, ‘the biggest show in the country.’ It’s an ultraviolent competition where the stakes could not be higher. Ben must stay alive for thirty days while an elite strike force, trained to kill, hunts for him. If he can survive for a month, he wins a...

Travel to 1920s China, a time when the last emperor still ruled and the sweeping changes of the twentieth century were distant rumblings, with this timeless, evocative classic tale of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his family as they struggle to survive in the midst of vast political and social upheavals.

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in their wake, yet also promising emancipation to China's oppressed millions who are groping for a way to survive in...

Pearl divers discover giant salamanders on one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. It quickly becomes clear that the amphibians are capable of speaking various languages, reading, and reasoning. Soon, industrialists and magnates begin to use the trusting and hardworking creatures in construction projects throughout the world's oceans. The salamander population grows rapidly, and they form...

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. As a boy he meets a foreign commander who adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, they decide to go in search of the legendary priest-king Prester John...

Every newcomer has their own Moscow. For the heroine of this book, the city is exactly as she wanted to see it: noisy, chaotic, but surprisingly not malicious – thanks to the wonderful people who are ready to offer help precisely when it seemed there was no one to turn to.

The masterpiece of military prose, ‘Volokolamsk Highway,’ has been translated into ten languages. It vividly describes the terrible days of the defense of Moscow during the Great Patriotic War... Ernesto Che Guevara was captivated by the novel, and when asked which of the heroes of World War II he considered his idol, Fidel Castro answered without hesitation: ‘Baurzhan Momysh-uly – the hero of...

In this amazing philosophical book, which ridicules the modern insane world, the absurdity and cruelty of human actions, fantasy and reality, madness and logic, author and character, truth and falsehood, fact and fiction merge into one.

The Bridge on the Drina is a vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late 16th century to the beginning of World War I. As we seek to make sense of the current nightmare in this region, this remarkable, timely book serves as a reliable guide to its people and history.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is a 1980 collection of 131 short stories by Richard Brautigan, written while he was dividing his time between Japan and Montana. The book is structured as a train journey, with each chapter representing a ‘station’ that offers brief, often surreal, vignettes blending the cultures of Tokyo and Montana, showcasing Brautigan's signature mix of humor, melancholy, and...

Lotte in Weimar’ is an elegant and captivating novel by the great Thomas Mann, in which profound reflections on the artist, his often painful existence in the real world, and the true meaning of life are closely intertwined with an interesting and slightly ironic plot – a meeting in Weimar between the aging and celebrated Goethe and his former beloved... Did this meeting actually happen? And if...