Cynthia Rylant returns to her home state of West Virginia with this powerful and evocative collection of poems. In a heartbreaking narrative that flows like a novel, we follow Ludie from childhood to falling in love and getting married, through the birthof her own children, and on into old age. This is the story of one woman's experiences in a hard-scrabble coal-mining town, a story that brims with universal themes about life, love, and family-and...

A masterly work from a writer with “the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America” (National Review), A Garden of Earthly Delights is the opening stanza in what would become one of the most powerful and engrossing story arcs in literature.
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young...

Lizzie Greystock, a gold-digging pathological liar, marries Sir Florian Eustace. Just as planned, Sir Florian dies swiftly following the union, and Lizzie inherits the Eustace Diamonds. However, the priceless necklace is stolen, which is just half of the mystery in the classic nineteenth century tome.

Already a frequent contributor of well-crafted stories to The New Yorker when he turned to the larger canvas of the novel, John O'Hara wrote with unusual acuity about the power of status and class in American life. His reputation as a novelist rests largely on four extraordinary books published from 1934 to 1940. These early novels, like those of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dramatize the longings and dashed hopes of...