This book tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, she is able to rise above hopelessness and create a quiet space for herself in the midst of her oppressive...

"A novel 'with a double plot interest. The heroine, Dorothea Brooke, longs to devote herself to some great cause and, for a time, expects to find it in her marriage to Rev. Mr. Casaubon, an aging scholar. Mr. Casaubon lives only eighteen months after their marriage, a sufficient period to disillusion her completely. He leaves her his estate, with the ill-intentioned proviso that she will forfeit if she marries his young cousin Will Ladislaw, whom...

Tells the story of an African village through the eyes of a spirit child.

Carson McCullers was all of twenty-three when she published her first novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her "the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced." "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" tells an unforgettable tale of moral isolation in a small southern mill town in the 1930s.

The story of three young Louisiana men from disparate backgrounds who find their destinies tragically intertwined.

A continuation of the family saga portrayed in the author's earlier novel Mortal friends. The Doyle brothers come of age in Boston during the 1960s, a time of political and social upheaval.

In San Francisco, a conventional woman who has always been fascinated by her hippie sister, retraces the sister's European trip which ended in her death. In the process of learning more about her, the idol loses some of the glitter.

"William Golding's unforgettable classic of boyhood adventure and the savagery of humanity comes to Penguin Classics in a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition with a new foreword by Lois Lowry As provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, Lord of the Flies continues to ignite passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary boys marooned on a coral island...

The lives of twelve-year-old Lou and her younger brother, Oz, change forever in 1940 when an accident involving their parents results in their being uprooted from their New York City home and moved to live with their great-grandmother in the mountains of Virginia.

Jewish-American author Philip Roth's 1969 comic novel about a successful New York lawyer named Alexander Portnoy who is plagued by guilt stemming from an obsession with sex and a domineering mother.