Part autobiography, part self-help book, part celebrity profile, part meditation on success and emotional health, Walter Anderson's Courage is a Three Letter Word has been an inspiration to countless people since it was first published in 1986. It begins with a famous interview question directed to John Ehrlichman, a former Nixon aide and disgraced player in the Watergate scandal. With uncommon but characteristic candor, Anderson asks Ehrlichman why he hasn't killed himself. Ehrlichman takes a d... more info>>

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways," experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores... more info>>

"All the reality of a vividly realized nightmare," The Times of London wrote of John Wyndham's terrifying post-apocalyptic thriller Day of the Triffids, published in 1951. The novel is often labeled science fiction, but it might best be described as a completely unnerving fantasy, even at the distance of half a century- for nothing dates this story of a world rendered helpless by a frightening, unearthly phenomenon. Triffids are odd but interesting plants that seem to appear in everyone's garden... more info>>

In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Thomas Cahill takes up his most daring and provocative subject yet: Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Western civilization. Introducing us first to "the people Jesus knew," Thomas Cahill describes the oppressive Roman political presence, the pervasive Greek cultural influence, and especially the widely varied social and religious context of the Judaism in which Jesus moved and flourished. We see Jesus as a real person, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, bu... more info>>

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and th... more info>>

The setting of Family Matters is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren--Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent--occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has "rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman's] shrunken life," b... more info>>

Under the roiling seas of Venus, under the deadly atmosphere are the Keeps, fully enclosed cities, and within them live the descendants of those survivors who used atomic energy to propel the spaceships which first took them to Venus. In the massive superstructures that were built under the Venusian seas a complex feudal society devoted to decadence has evolved. Presiding over that society are the Immortals--genetic throwbacks to the mutant atomic survivors--who control the culture. This is a st... more info>>

For almost 50 years, fans of crime fiction have followed the boys of the 87th Precinct, a fictional urban police department precinct created by the novelist Evan Hunter, writing under the pseudonym Ed McBain. Since the first of almost 50 87th Precinct novels appeared in 1956, a rolling cast of characters in the same setting has grappled with every imaginable kind of crime. Fuzz was published in 1968, when respect for the police was, historically, at a low ebb, and the title comes from the insult... more info>>

Fred Fitch is pure of heart and substance but utterly credulous; if there is a scam operating anywhere--his rooming house where the General needs a loan to print his revelation of the secret history of the government, the street where those Little Sisters of the Poor raising funds for the homeless or anywhere in between--Fred finds it or it finds Fred to the same uncertain end. Fred even has his own contact, Reilly, on the Bunco Squad at Headquarters who adds weekly to the enormous file. But Fre... more info>>

The tormented and exhausted man at the center of W.R. Burnett's High Sierra is a notorious criminal whom the newspapers call "Mad Dog" Roy Earle. Earle is every bit the criminal the newspapers depict, but he is a complicated soul who is the tragic hero of the novel--a horribly flawed man, a violent criminal who still retains a bit of a conscience but never gets a decent break. As in most of Burnett's novels, High Sierra ostensibly describes a carefully plotted crime that is undermined by human n... more info>>

Historical accounts of tragedies such as the Holocaust often allow readers and students a certain detachment in the formidable but impersonal catalogue of numbers, events, policies and processes. Gerald Green's novel Holocaust, which is based on his teleplay for the 1978 NBC miniseries, seeks to put faces on the tragedy by telling the story of the experience of two German families whose lives intersect at certain points. The Dorfs are "good" Germans, loyal to the new Nazi regime, and their son E... more info>>

Few detective novels can make as strong a claim to social and political relevance as John Ball's 1965 mystery, In the Heat of the Night. Its protagonist, a black police officer from Pasadena California named Virgil Tibbs, passes through a southern town at an inauspicious moment. An orchestra conductor has been gruesomely murdered, and the police, without much in the way of evidence or possible motives for the crime, arrest Tibbs. When the police discover that he is not the killer, but in fact a ... more info>>

W.R. Burnett knew, first-hand, of the world he describes in his terse, vivid 1929 novel with a brutally ironic title--Little Caesar. Burnett worked as reporter in Chicago in the 1920s, and he observed the nobodies willing to cheat and kill their way to being somebodies. The novel's hero, Cesare Bandello, known as Rico, is a "gutter Macbeth," a bad guy who claws his way up through the Chicago gang, circa 1928. Though the very idea of Rico is inseparable from Edward G. Robinson's star-making perfo... more info>>

It is the year 1999 and the world has become grimly, terribly overpopulated. This is the premise of Harry Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! and fans of his more comic work may be surprised at this bleak, foreboding novel. But Harrison's purpose in writing this book was serious and his concerns were real. Although his fears thankfully did not become a reality for the inhabitants of New York and the rest of the United States, the novel remains a gripping, thought-provoking work about pri... more info>>

From Robert Silverberg's contemporary afterword: "What I wanted to do in short was to produce a masterpiece. I don't mean that word 'masterpiece' in the pretentious sense, not a sublime work of genius but merely the piece of work which a craftsman presents by way of proving that the apprenticeship is over. That required an elaborate plot. My earliest books suffered from an inability to tie up loose ends...so I studied my elders, I analyzed the means by which the science fiction writers I admired... more info>>

In some ways, it was unfortunate for author James Leo Herlihy that his novel Midnight Cowboy was adapted into the landmark film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Although the film, which won several Oscars including Best Picture, certainly brought the rising author a new level of regard and notice, its almost legendary status in the history of American filmmaking has somewhat overshadowed its literary progenitor. This is especially unfortunate since Herlihy's work is consi... more info>>

Missing is a true story. In retelling it, writer Thomas Hauser did not need to novelize it. Using the facts alone, the book unfolds with the breathtaking suspense and intrigue of a fully imagined political thriller. Missing explores the fate of a young American journalist named Charles Horman who, living in Chile in 1973 just before the overthrow of the country's Marxist president Salvatore Allende, discovered evidence of the United States' involvement in an impending right-wing coup to overthro... more info>>

A landmark work of world literature, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is an account of one day in the life of an upper class British woman, her husband, and her circle of friends. Woolf's narration of Clarissa Dalloway's day begins with her protagonist's preparations for a party she is holding at her house that evening, and it ends as the party gets underway. In between, Clarissa is visited by an old friend, Peter Walsh, and her mind is returned to a time thirty years earlier when she considered m... more info>>

After the Blow-Up, the children of a small group of the survivors were born with the capacity for telepathy--to perceive and share the thoughts of others. This minority, once the children became able to communicate their ability, became a feared and quarantined group; "ordinary" humans felt that their privacy had been taken from them and that the mutants, the "Baldies" (so called because of their most distinguishing visible characteristic) by knowing their most secrets could destroy them. Most o... more info>>

When famed gangster kingpin Johnny Rossi comes to New York to testify against his crime syndicate associates, it falls to Lieutenant Clancy to keep the government's star witness safe. Why Rossi has come to New York from California, and what is so crucial about his testimony are questions District Attorney Chalmers seems content to keep outside the Lieutenant's purview. However, when guarding Rossi turns out to be a more difficult and perplexing task than Clancy had anticipated, he begins to unco... more info>>

At the great atomic plant in Kimberly, a congressional committee makes a surprise inspection raising the level of the men's tension even higher than it has been. By midday there have already been minor accidents but in the giant nuclear converters which are at the heart of the project work goes on at desperate speed. Until converter Number four fails disastrously. Jorgenson, the supervisor of the technical team and his crew had been running through a new and unstable isotope when the walls of t... more info>>

In New York, a psychopathic killer will strike on October 15, as he always does--the anniversary of his mother's death, when he will kidnap, rape and murder an innocent young girl by slashing her jugular vein. William P. McGivern's Night of the Juggler tells the tense story of the serial killer as he prepares to kill again and the New York cops who are trying to find him before he strikes. A task force has been formed in the NYPD to find the killer known as the Juggler. Detective Vincent "Gypsy"... more info>>

The situation is a nightmare waiting to happen--a racist ex-con gets drawn into the planning of a heist by a crooked ex-cop, and they are forced to include a young black man who is in debt to a mobster. What can go wrong does go wrong in Odds Against Tomorrow, a bleak, mesmerizing thriller by William P. McGivern, published in 1957 and reminiscent of the novels of W.R. Burnett. An ex-con named Earl Slater and a disgraced former cop named Dave Burke agree to work together to rob a small bank in a ... more info>>

One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as 'a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.' It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave" essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."

A novel that is as witty and playful as it is probing and profound, Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the fantastic story of a person who lives through five centuries, first as a man and then as a woman. The novel opens with Orlando living as a young man in Elizabethan England. A favorite of the queen, Orlando is given a vast estate by the aging monarch and instructed to never to grow old. He doesn't, and Woolf's novel follows him through the centuries, across the globe, through all sorts of love affa... more info>>