A poignant and evocative novel of self-discovery that follows a young man in America and abroad, on a journey into adulthood during the turbulent 1960s It is 1964, and Peter Levi, a young student and bird watcher, has come to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Shy and innocent at nineteen years old, he arrives fresh from an extended Maine holiday with his vivacious mother, and is determined to live a life free of unwanted complications and unnecessary...

Vows of celibacy are tested in a Vermont parish with the arrival of a beautiful woman from Montreal to care for ailing Father George Lecoeur. Not just the priest's celibacy either--on the premises is Frank Bennett, a young man about to enter a seminary.

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century, All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.

Heartbroken in his university town, Mark tries to focus his

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The new novel from the award-winning author of The End of Vandalism is a wry and sophisticated heist drama. Set in the rugged region of the Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area is the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble. When he falls in love, with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player...

The Arrow of Gold is Joseph Conrad's most romantic novel, literally a cloak-and-dagger tale set in the French port of Marseilles and the adjacent "sea of classic adventures." The principal characters are Monsieur George, a young sailor ready for love and adventure, and Doña Rita, a young woman of extraordinary wealth and beauty haunted by a mysterious threat. Supporters of a gallant but hopeless cause draw M. George into their dangerous gunrunning...

"Ben Shippers doesn't have much use for school, friends, or any members of his family except his smartass sister, but he has a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfill next to his house. After a botched attempt to destroy Trash Mountain with a homemade firebomb, Ben begins a years-long infiltration that finds him dropping out of school to work alongside homeless trash-pickers, and then, finally, interning at the...

Rum, a sailing ship, and a dare… …What could go wrong? Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is one of the first adventure stories set in and around the Antarctic, which at the time was a place of mystery and the unknown. Pym takes us on an adventure across the seas to uncharted southern lands that are fraught with danger. With shipwrecks, murder, mutiny, and, yes, cannibalism, this tale has it...

"It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged seventeen, has been sent down--'rusticated'--from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a dilapidated old mansion on the southern English coast inhabited by his newly impoverished mother and his sister, Effie. Soon, graphic and threatening letters begin to circulate among his neighbors, and Richard finds himself the leading...

Lincoln Smith, a young Texan living at the beginning of the twentieth century, thinks of himself as the last true cowboy. He longs for the days of the Old West, when men like his father, a famous Texas Ranger, lived by a chivalric code. But he finds himself hopelessly out of time and place in the fast-changing U.S. of the new century. When he gets his heart broken by a modern maiden who doesn't appreciate his anachronistic tendencies, he does what...

A novel by the author of 1984 about a man determined to reject middle-class values who finds living in noble poverty more difficult than expected. Gordon Comstock despises the materialism and shallowness of middle-class life-the worship of money, the striving for dull, stuffy respectability. To live up to his ideals, he quits his lucrative position as an advertising copywriter and devotes himself to poetry and other high-minded pursuits. But low-paid...