The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...

"Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It s a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers....

"It's been a minute-or five years-since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they've reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old...

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments,...

"The Confessions of Nat Turner reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, William Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations-and hopes-which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who had held his people in bondage."--provided by publisher

"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...

An early morning adventure out stealing horses leads to the tragic death of one boy and a resulting lifetime of guilt and isolation for his friend, in this moving tale about the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life that are gone forever.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard, a serial adulterer with a crumbling fifth marriage and a waning career, seizes the chance to solve all his problems when he blames the accidental death of a rival scientist on his wife's lover, and steals the man's valuable research.

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.