The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

When Maud Martha Brown is seven years old, what she likes even better than "candy buttons, and books, ..and the west sky" are dandelions: "Yellow jewels for everyday studding the patched green dress of her back yard." Maud Martha's nine-year-old sister, Helen, is heart-catchingly beautiful; Maud Martha comforts herself with knowing that what is common - like the demurely pretty dandelion with "only ordinary allurements" - is also a flower. Through pithy and poetic chapter-moments - "spring landscape: detail," "death of grandmother," "first beau," "low yellow," "everybody will be surprised" - Maud Martha grows up, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter. Maud Martha, a gentle woman with "scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile..." who knows "while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat," is portrayed with exquisitely imaginative and tender detail by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

“The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times

“The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune

“A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy.

When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

Kindred is Hugo and Nebula Award winner Octavia E. Butler's 1979 masterpiece. An essential read which explores themes of racial and gender identity with insight and originality, for fans of the Hulu TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. 'A shattering work of art' Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

On her twenty-sixth birthday, Dana and her husband are moving into their apartment when she starts to feel dizzy. She falls to her knees, nauseous. Then the world falls away.

She finds herself at the edge of a green wood by a vast river. A child is screaming. Wading into the water, she pulls him to safety, only to find herself face to face with a very old looking rifle, in the hands of the boy's father. She's terrified. The next thing she knows she's back in her apartment, soaking wet. It's the most terrifying experience of her life ... until it happens again.

The longer Dana spends in nineteenth century Maryland - a very dangerous place for a black woman - the more aware she is that her life might be over before it's even begun.

This scathing “comedy of manners” set in the 1940s “steers us through the lives of women who come to New York . . . for love, money, opportunity, and a good time” (New York Times).
 
At the center of this 1942 novel are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler—who ensnares Ohioan Vicky Haven in her social and romantic manipulations.
 
Author Dawn Powell always denied Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce until years later when she discovered a memo she’d written to herself in 1939 that said, “Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?” Which prompted Powell to write in her diary, “Who can I believe? Me or myself?”
 
Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America’ s entry into World War II, A Time of Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends.

Clare and Irene were two childhood friends. They lost touch when Clare's father died and she moved in with two white aunts. By hiding that Clare was part-black, they allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white racist. Irene lives in Harlem, commits herself to racial uplift, and marries a black doctor. The novel centers on the meeting of the two childhood friends later in life, and the unfolding of events as each woman is fascinated and seduced by the other's daring lifestyle. The novel traces a tragic path as Irene becomes paranoid that her husband is having an affair with Clare (the reader is never told whether her fears are justified or not, and numerous cues point in both directions). Clare's race is revealed to her husband John Bellew. The novel ends with Clare's sudden death by "falling" out of a window.
The end of the novel is famous for its ambiguity, which leaves open the possibility that Irene has pushed Clare out the window, or the possibility that Clare has killed herself.
Many see this novel as an example of the plot of the tragic mulatto, a common figure in early African-American literature. Others suggest that the novel complicates that plot by introducing the dual figures of Irene and Clare, who in many ways mirror and complicate each other. The novel also suggests erotic undertones in the two women's relationship. Some read the novel as one of repression, while others argue that through its attention to the way passing unhinges ideas of race, class, and gender, the novel opens spaces for the creation of new, self-generated identities.
Recently, Passing has received renewed attention because of its close examination of racial and sexual ambiguities and liminal spaces. It has achieved canonical status in many American universities

The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece--one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era. "Nightwood," Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" ("TLS"). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna--a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction--there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person--a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, "Nightwood" still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.

A modern classic, "Housekeeping" is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.
In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

" Mountain ," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain , first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening.
Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school.
Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a “good” life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.

A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.

Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.

Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.
A disturbing, yet beautifully composed narrative told in three parts, The Vegetarian is an allegorical novel about modern day South Korea, but also a story of obsession, choice, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice--to both the individual and America at large--The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature. It remains as relevant today, widely read in classrooms and lecture halls across America, as it was when first published, 45 years ago.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

作为一部自传体小说，《青春》不同凡响，写法特别。它并非采用这类作品常见的第一人称途述，主人公也是一位名叫约翰的年轻人，但库切总是称之为“他”。库切写“他”十九岁到二十四岁几年间的生活经历，一个南非大学生跑到伦敦做了计算机初级程序员，朝九晚五的公司职员，饭碗不用担心，却还是郁闷。这个岁数的年轻人不是意气风发就是躁动不安，却玩不出轰轰烈烈的名堂，由于生性缺少热情，干不成大事也惹不出乱子。他也需要被爱抚的感觉，但性爱从来没有给他带来生命的光辉，只是在吞噬时间和精力……这种内敛的性格，这般平淡无奇的生存状态，还能做出什么样的文章呢？可是，库切就有这样的本事，一段春梦无痕的人生就让他写得楚楚动人。他把年轻时的自己作为他者来观照，再度审视青春的彷徨之途。

《名利场(上下)》作者主要塑造了19世纪初英国资本主义社会一个女冒险者的典型。这个人物并不邪恶，也不善良，但非常富有人情味，完全是时代的产物。小说中，作者频频与读者交流，叙述中夹杂着议论，时而冷嘲热讽，时而严肃说理，时而歪理歪推，喜剧效果强烈。读者在参与思索的过程中，不但能理解作者的用心，也颇受教益。《名利场(上下)》的故事以两条线索展开，从同一个起点出发，相互交织，最后到达同一个终点。其中一条线索讲述善良、笨拙、生活在富有家庭中的女子阿米莉亚·塞德利；另一条线索讲述的是一个机灵、自私、放荡不羁恢穷的孤女丽贝卡·夏普。两人于1813年乘坐同一辆马车离开平克顿女子学校。两人都在遭到家庭反对的情况下，于1815年结婚，分别嫁给即将参加滑铁卢战役的两名英国军官。新婚不久，那场具有历史意义的战役打响了。阿米莉亚的丈夫战死疆场；丽贝卡的丈夫战后生还。接下来的十年中，而贝卡生活一帆风顺，在社会的阶梯上不断攀升，直至有幸觐见国王，而阿米莉亚却因父亲破产承受着极大的不幸。到了1827年，命运发生了逆转，丽贝卡的生活落入毁灭的深渊，这其实是罪有应得；阿米莉亚却转而变得富裕幸福，可归因于善有善报。但是，作者以灵活的讽刺手法，使两位女主角最后的命运归于平衡，仿佛在一个大的轮回之后，回到故事开始时两人命运的起点。 故事中，滑铁卢战役是两人命运的重要分水岭。战役之前，故事的焦点是两位女主角的婚事。两人的婚事分别受到男方家庭的反对，也都因此得不到家庭的支持，两位丈夫的遗产继承权均被取消。滑铁卢战役之后，故事的焦点是两个女主角的贞节问题。两个三角关系分别展开。丽贝卡对丈夫不忠，与放荡好色的贵族富豪斯泰思侯爵勾搭；阿米莉亚对自己去世的丈夫信守贞节，拒绝与十几年如一日忠实爱慕她的多宾结婚。