"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic...

First published in 1925, "In Our Time" is a collection of short stories and vignettes by Ernest Hemingway written at the beginning of his literary career. Hemingway began working on some of the stories and pieces of prose that would make up the collection in 1923 and continued working on and refining his stories for the next two years. Many of the stories center around Hemingway's well-known and semi-autobiographical character, Nick Adams. Several...

Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods and of their father.

Left with no family and no money, Lucy Snowe goes against her own timid nature and travels to the small city of Villette, France, where she becomes a school teacher in Madam Beck's school for girls.

"From one of Russia's most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother's ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina's autobiographical...

"An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough in an autobiographical novel that explores colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer. Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless...

The classic novel that epitomizes the "Beat Generation." Portrays a spontaneous and wandering way of life founded on jazz and drugs.

"'I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.' In a world created outside of time, Li and the son who died talk about their lives. Deeply intimate and moving, this story cycle of grief captures the love and humor in a relationship which goes on now in a mother's heart, between a mother and child, even as it captures the pain of Li's...

From a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks' narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of life as a young man born into the first days of the 20th century. Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, 'Caliban Shrieks' is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to...