With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

Explores the explosive tensions of the South in the mid-1950s through the prism of a young girl's friendship with her black maid and the currents of violence, infidelity, and corruption that run beneath the polite surface of her family's life.

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior...

Set in contemporary small town America, this is the story of Verbena Martin Eckert McHale ("Bena," for short), an indomitable woman who is damned-but not doomed-by the bad behavior and bad luck of her two husbands. When Bena's first husband, Bobby Eckert, dies in a car wreck, she's left with their five children, a little mortgaged house, a little bit of insurance, and a big empty place in her heart. Not to mention that the hole Bobby left is jagged...

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, "Scout", returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming becomes bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.

"Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons is the story of one man's remarkable life, spanning a century of relentless change. At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of the Cherokee Nation, the uncharted white space on the map. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear,...

Raney and Charles were drawn together by their mutual love for bluegrass music. Though their love is strong, their cultural differences sometimes seem monumental.

When Jack Reacher suddenly decides to ask a Greyhound bus driver to let him off near the town of Margrave, Georgia, he thinks it's because his brother once mentioned that the famed blues guitarist Blind Blake died there. But it doesn't take long for the footloose ex-military policeman to discover that there are plenty of strange--and very dangerous--things going on behind Margrave's manicured lawns and clean streets that demand his attention.

The extraordinary lives, passions, and careers of four great military leaders--Stonewall Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Chamberlain, and Robert E. Lee--come to a climax as Union and Confederate forces clash on the battlefields of the Civil War. A worthy companion to The Killer Angels . . . Shaara brilliantly charts the war, the exploits of the combatants and their motivations. He also concisely shows how the early parts of the campaign unfolded....

"The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons. Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through...