National Book Award Fiction

In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...

Kate's desperate struggle to maintain her sanity forces her cousin Binx to relinquish his dreamworld

After Leander the ferryboat operator is harried by his wife and sister, he swims out to sea and does not return, and his sons go on to lead unhappy lives.

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...

Definitive edition containing 42 stories, 17 of which were written between 1932 and 1948.

Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."

Originally published in 1978, and now reissued in a Modern Library paperback classics edition, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP occupies a special place in American letters as a beloved modern classic. Author John Irving provides a new Introduction for this edition. As the Chicago SUN-TIMES said, "Like all extraordinary books, GARP defies synopsis".

In the jungles of Indochina, Private Cacciato decides to lay down his rifle and embark on a quixotic walk to Paris, leaving in his wake a trail of M & M candies and a platoon intent on bringing him back to the war--and to reality. "To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales." So wrote the New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, Going After...