Libra

Author

Thomas Pynchon

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd...

Author

John Updike

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught...

Author	Thomas Pynchon
ISBN	0143039946

Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:

Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle...

Author	Thomas Pynchon
ISBN	0312423209

The New York Times Best Book of the Year, 1997
Time Magazine Best Book of the Year 1997

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	0141180935

With these audacious and murderous witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries...

Author

James Ellroy

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C....

Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose...

Author	John Barth
ISBN	1903809509

Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business...

Author

William Gaddis

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine...

Author	Thomas Pynchon
ISBN	0099532514

Slow Learner is a compilation of early stories written between 1959 and 1964, before Pynchon achieved recognition as a prominent writer for his 1963 novel, V and containing a revelatory essay on his early influences and writing.
The collection consists of five short stories: 'The Small Rain',...

Author	Meyer Levin
ISBN	1941493025

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert,...