Steps

Author	Charles R. Johnson
ISBN	0684855887

It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary...

Author	Patrick Hamilton
ISBN	1590172205

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter.

Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated...

Author	Elvia Wilk
ISBN	1593764057

In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants; and the weather is acting strange. In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move...

Author	Heinrich von Kleist
ISBN	0976140721

Based on historical events, this thrilling saga of violence and retribution bridges the gap between Medieval and modern literature, and speaks so profoundly to the contemporary spirit that it has been the basis of numerous plays, movies, and novels.

It has become, in fact, a classic tale:...

Author	Robert Stone
ISBN	0395860253

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America...

Author	Nelson Algren
ISBN	1583220089

Nelson Algren's devastating of that savage, subterranean world go gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerates remains unsurpassed as an authentic portrait of human depravity.

Only a master like Algren could create such a passionate and dramatic novel of so...

Author	William H. Gass
ISBN	0141180102

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of...

Author	William H. Gass
ISBN	0879233745

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their...

Author	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374525862

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter,...

Author	Harold Pinter
ISBN	0822201844

It’s funny, you know. As soon as a play is called something like The Caretaker you just know that the person who gets the job of caretaker, who is referred to throughout as the caretaker, won’t be able to take care of anyone, not even himself. You know that he will be the one who is taken care of and he will...