Fiction

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1997 The American Dream is a theme so compelling it resonates throughout our culture. In Martin Dressler, Steven Millhauser creates a young man who, in dedicating his life to it, becomes a symbol of that dream. Powerful, lyrical, finely crafted, this best-selling book...

Pulitzer Prize Winner, Fiction 1996 Hailed as a major American novel, Independence Day is a relentlessly thoughtful, heart-wrenching, yet hilarious portrait of an ordinary American man. Wickedly realistic details and dialog entice you to see modern life filtered through the first-person...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, and "a rare creation, a lyric page-turner" (Chicago Tribune). At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman is wrenched violently out of his world...

This poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993....

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jane Smiley’s spellbinding novel also headed bestseller lists for many months. A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members. Three...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER This "powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. With an afterword by the author and a new introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. “A masterwork...

The well-to-do Carver family moves to Memphis from Nashville, where they become embroiled in a domestic dispute over the widower patriarch's decision to remarry....

Virginia Miner, a 50-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes....

Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this novel about a resilient and courageous woman has become a Broadway show and a cultural phenomenon....

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable...

The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, a convicted killer becomes the first prisoner to be executed in the United States. The Executioner's Song follows the true story of cold-blooded murderer Gary Gilmore, who, after being tried and convicted, insisted on being executed for his crimes. To do...

Here are twelve magnificent short stories from acclaimed author John Cheever, read by an incredible cast of celebrity narrators, as well as Cheever himself. As Cheever writes in his preface, "These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still...

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie....

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “remarkable” (Ken Burns), “utterly absorbing” (Forbes) Civil War classic that inspired the film Gettysburg “My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its...