Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with the formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’ he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog...

‘Fight Club’ is Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel. Everyone remembers the film directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, right? It's based on this book. It's a challenging novel, a novel created in defiance of everything and everyone, describing a generation of embittered people who have lost their sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, who they are themselves and who surrounds...

In the novel ‘The Surgeon,’ the story of the brilliant plastic surgeon Arkady Khripunov is intertwined with the story of the life of Hassan ibn Sabbah – the prophet and founder of the Nizari Ismaili state of the 11th century, the master of the impregnable Alamut fortress. Khripunov changes human bodies, and therefore destinies. Granting people new faces, he sees before him simply material –...

First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever experienced. The writer’s account of an assignment he...

On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Brett's affair with...

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

Follow Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, as he navigates the brutality of war and the fragile tenderness of love with Catherine Barkley. Hemingway’s signature realism and spare, haunting language make this both a tragic romance and a profound meditation on courage, fate, and the human condition.

In the 1950s, Hemingway and his wife return to Spain, where Hemingway had visited before as a war correspondent to cover the Spanish Civil War, in order to see friends and follow bullfighting events. Hemingway’s time in Spain is most often remembered as his experiences with bullfighting, his passion often conveyed through his writing. He and his wife follow summer-long series events and witness...

For Whom the Bell Tolls tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades, is attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of a guerilla leader’s last stand, Hemingway creates a work at once rare and...

A volunteer in the American army during World War II, who was captured by the Germans and witnessed the near-total destruction of Dresden, Vonnegut transferred this experience to the pages of his most famous novel – ‘Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade,’ in which the boundaries between present and past, peace and war, reality and fantasy, madness and sanity are blurred.