"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligence greater than man's; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Then, late one night, in the middle...

"A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived....

A young woman returns to California for her sister’s wedding in this “brilliantly told” classic that stands alongside The Catcher in the Rye and The Member of the Wedding (New York Times).
 
“I stayed up all night reading . . . I can only . . . be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.” —Carson McCuller

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate...

"From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fenlands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, actitivies he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self...

"On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What...

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey,...

Winner of the National Book Critics Award for Fiction

This “classic of historical fiction” takes readers to 18th-century Ireland when French troops supported Irish rebels in their struggle for independence from Britain (The Times, London).
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They...

The classic children's story, written by Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini) in 1883. It tells the story of Pinocchio, a puppet come to life, whose various adventures serve to teach him right from wrong.

Heartwarming and profound, this account of one writer’s relationship with his beloved German Shepherd is “one of the bonafide dog-lit classics” (New Yorker)
The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middle age, he came into possession of a German Shepherd. To his surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the “ideal friend”...