Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase is one of the best-loved novels of our time. It has been translated into sixteen languages, made into a prize-winning motion picture, and staged as a play at high schools all over the United States; its very...
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive...
The Short-Timers is a 1979 semi-autobiographical novel by American U.S. Marine Corps veteran Gustav Hasford, about his experience in the Vietnam War. It was later adapted into the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket by Hasford, Michael Herr, and Stanley...
Ladders to Fire explores the erotic attachments of four young women. Nin described it as a “woman’s struggle to understand her own nature.” It began a five-volume “continuous novel,” Cities of the Interior, which includes Children of the...
Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus lived form 10 B.C. to 54 A.D. Despised as a weakling and considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the...
Meet Eleanor Oliphant. She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully time-tabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza,...
The Forsyte Saga is John Galsworthy's monumental chronicle of the lives of the moneyed Forsytes, a family whose values are constantly at war with its passions. The story of Soames Forsyte's marriage to the beautiful and rebellious Irene, and its...