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 The
Call of the Wild (Scribner Classics) by Jack London, Wendell Minor (Illustrator)
In this quintessential adventure story, Jack London takes
readers on an arduous journey through the forbidding Alaskan landscape
during the gold rush of the 1890s. Buck, a rangy mixed breed used to a
comfortable, sun-filled life as a family dog, is stolen by a greedy opportunist
and sold to dog traffickers. In no time, Buck finds himself on a team
of sled dogs run ragged in the harsh winter of the Klondike. In a climate
where every day is a savage struggle for survival. This edition is beautifully
illustrated and has a library binding that will last.
Maltese
Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn
private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grifter named
Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful
and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These
are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's coolly glittering gem of detective
fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.
The
Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Richard Winston (Translator), Clara
Winston (Translator)
Setting his story in the distant, post-Holocaust future,
Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals occupying themselves with
an elaborate game that employs all the cultural and scientific knowledge
of the ages. The most imaginative and prophetic of Hesse's works.
 The
Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
Somewhere under the Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander
has just made a fateful decision: the Red October is heading west. The
Americans want her. The Russians want her back. And the most incredible
chase in history is on.... The Hunt for Red October is the runaway bestseller
that launched Tom Clancy's phenomenal career. A military thriller so accurate
and convincing that the author was rumored to have been debriefed by the
White House. Its theme: the greatest espionage coup in history. Its story:
the chase for a runaway top secret Russian missile sub.
 The
Magic Mountain : A Novel by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods (Translator), Zauberberg
(Translator)
A vast intellectual drama of the forces that play upon
modern man, The Magic Mountain is set in a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps--a
community organized with exclusive reference to ill health, and reflects
the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe. A young marine engineer
rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story
about how a human's environment affects self identity.
 Ball
Four: The Final Pitch by Jim Bouton
As a player, former hurler Jim Bouton did nothing half-way;
he threw so hard he'd lose his cap on almost every pitch. In the early
'70s, he tossed off one of the funniest, most revealing, insider's takes
on baseball life in Ball Four, his diary of the season he tried to pitch
his way back from oblivion on the strength of a knuckler. The real curve,
though, is Bouton's honesty. He carves humans out of heroes, and shines
a light into the game's corners. A quarter century later, Bouton's unique
baseball voice can still bring the heat. This new edition of this sports
classic contains an added chapter , which "is extra special. It is...
the most moving, the most significant part of the book".
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 A
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world
has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world
breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But
those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very
gentle and the very brave impartially." The greatest American novel to
emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms cemented Ernest Hemingway's
reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.
 The
Dubliners (Modern Library) by James Joyce
James Joyce's second book, his first book of prose, is
a collection of fifteen short stories published in 1914. Joyce deals with
eposodes of childhood, adolescence, family and public life recreating
the atmosphere of Dublin early in the century. "His stories are like
a string of pearls bound into a book".
 Owls
Do Cry by Janet Frame
Janet Frame's first novel, Owls Do Cry draws on many
details of her own life. Her childhood was shadowed by poverty, sickness,
and accidental death, and shaped by the power of the spoken and written
word. At twenty-one, she was institutionalized in a mental hospital and
later saved from a threatened lobotomy only by her achievement as a writer.
Owls Do Cry explores the life of the Withers family in a New Zealand town
"halfway between the South Pole and the equator." Poverty and a reputation
for strangeness exclude the Withers from the hollow conventions and artifacts
of suburban life. They do not possess revolving clotheslines, walkie talkie
dolls or uncomfortable chairs, yet the children's lives are rich in "wonder
currency:" rhymes and rituals, play and dreams. Twenty years later, this
currency is subsumed for each of them into vivid, haunted inner lives.
(From 500
Great Books by Women; review by Prudence Hockley )
 Their
Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Edwidge Danticat
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s,
Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United
States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce
rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she
consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography,
countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s,
Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel.
She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave. Of
Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known
and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of
Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston
sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along
with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life.
Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about
black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing
criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact
of black-white relations either.
Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
Library binding for years of enjoyment!
 Lady
Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish (Designer), Mark
Schorer (Designer)
Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928
Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly
explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between
a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who
works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're
used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent
that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence
was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the
world of its characters.
 Gone
With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
A Pulitzer Prize-winning classic recounts one of the
most popular American love stories, during which a spoiled young Southern
belle vows to rebuild her family plantation home after the Civil War and
is swept off her feet by a man who infuriates her.
 The
Shining by Stephen King
The author, Stephen King , August 4, 1997: "I hope
you all liked the book, Constant Readers, and, as many of you possibly
suspect from my multitude of comments over the years about THE SHINING
(book and movie), the novel remains one of my personal favorites."
 Hondo
by Louis L'Amour
Two men. One woman. A land that demanded courage--or
death... He was a man etched by the desert's howling winds, a big, broad-shouldered
man who knew the ways of the Apache and ways of staying alive. She was
a woman raising a young son on her own on a remote Arizona ranch. And
between Hondo Lane and Angie Lowe was the warrior Vittoro, whose people
were preparing to rise against the white men. Now the pioneer woman, the
gunman, and the Apache warrior are caught in a drama of love, war, and
honor.
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2003
Pulitzer Prize Winners
