An enthralling novelette by Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers explores how a thirteen-year-old girl ceases to be a child and becomes a woman in Russia just before the Communist Revolution. The story examines...
At once a coming-of-age tale and a heart-rending love story, Wild Ginger explores the devastating experience of the Cultural Revolution, which defined Anchee Min"s youth. The beautiful, iron-willed Wild Ginger is only in elementary school when...
This facsimile of Melville's historical novel appears in a paperback classroom edition, with a commentary by Hennig Cohen. "Israel Potter" is the story of a neglected hero of the American...
Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect...
Early in "Proud Beggars," a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery's wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the...
A fully realized portrait of one woman’s life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author
An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary...
Fifty years after World War III, the residents of New Orleans struggle daily just to survive. Despite being surrounded by the waters of the Mississippi, latent radiation and pollution have made clean drinking water hard to come by. So Rue has...
First published nearly a quarter-century ago and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital—each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless...