"First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes into the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters, Knut Hamsun embarked on 'an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.' Like the works of Dostoyevsky, Hunger marks an extraordinary break with Western literary and...

A collection of short fiction presents ten stories that capture important moments in the course of a life and in the lives intertwined with it, in a volume that ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s.

"Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life: first on the famous “Death...

Relationships within the Pontifex family reflect the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Victorian England. A semi-autobiographical novel written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. It represents a relaxation from the religious outlook from a Calvinistic approach, which is presented as harsh. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published it was accepted as part of the general reaction...

"Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther." –Los Angeles Times Book Review

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood

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First published in two volumes in French in 1920 and 1921, "The Guermantes Way", is the third book in the "In Search of Lost Time" series by French author Marcel Proust. The series centers around the narrator's memories of his childhood through adulthood in late nineteenth and early twentieth century upper class French society. The seven volumes of the series explore the themes of time, memory, sexuality, and death, and are widely regarded as one...

I am Silver, and there is no other pirate like me on these waters. This being the last testament of the infamous pirate Long John Silver, you would do well not to trust a word in its pages. Held captive aboard his own ship, the Linda Maria, he is to be taken to England, where he will hang at the king's pleasure. But he has another plan: to tell a tale of treason, murder, a lost treasure that would rival King George's own riches, and what really happened...

A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.

From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society.
Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals....

"A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother's death from Alzheimer's, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She...