As a crime writer, my stories have always weighed on the psychological workings and inner lives of the characters who inhabit my novels. Their motivations and desires are what drive the narrative, and a good crime story conveys the conflicts and moral dilemmas that stem from their thoughts and actions. Writing has always been a channel to convey my own views on the human condition, and giving my characters a three-dimensional inner life offers the reader a compelling work of fiction that reflects the real world.
It’s probably Raymond Chandler’s best novel. The story has all the elements Chandler is best known for biting humor, colorful characters that include gangsters and lawmen with violent streaks and hair-trigger temperaments, a keen insight into the sordid lives of society’s rich and powerful, and a private detective with a taste for alcohol and the soul of an avenging angel.
Phillip Marlowe is one of literature’s most famous private detectives, and probably cinema’s best portrayal of a jaded P.I. working the beat in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Chandler’s creation portrays a flawed and borderline alcoholic who handles cases with the insight of a social scientist and the wit of a streetwise hood. The novel is a page-turner not only for the action and suspense, but for the humor and sarcasm Chandler dispenses with each new scene he introduces.
The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the forthcoming film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson
Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.
This nineteenth-century novel paved the way for the modern crime novel. While the plot revolves around a murder, the book also explores the psychological workings of a loner who’s a frustrated and opinionated young man with a Napoleon-like complex, and is undone by a clever police detective. The narrative can be overwritten at times and a slog to read through, but the story remains compelling and insightful after all these years.
Hailed by Washington Post Book World as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth.
With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel.
When Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Most people are more familiar with the film and less so with the novel. Though Stanley Kubrick’s version offered a vivid and electrifying experience while creating some controversy at the time, the novel goes deeper into the workings of the violent mind. Burgess’ style is a treat to read, and the slang and pseudo-language his characters contrive are fun to explore, and plays a larger part in the novel. His characters come off the page as more three-dimensional than in the film, as well.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
The story of an unusual boy who stops growing for fear of becoming an adult in Nazi Germany. The novel was made into a much-heralded film, too, though the book explores the zeitgeist to greater effect. Gunter Grass is a master of irony and wit, and his boy creation becomes the story’s conscience as Germany descends into a moral hell. Ironically, Gunter Grass was outed later in his life as a former S.S. recruit.
WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures is post-war Germany.
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
I’m Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missing…
This was Vonnegut’s best novel, in my opinion. Based on his actual experiences as an American POW in Germany during W.W. II., he chronicled the firebombing of Dresden with a backstory mirroring his own experience. Funny and poignant in the face of horror and destruction, Vonnegut turns his book into a sinful pleasure to read.
A special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time), featuring a new introduction by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had…
Private Detective Robert Klayman is hard at work on a twenty-year-old cold case. He’s holed up in Spring Dunes, a chic desert town a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, where the jet set and casino moguls hobnob and meth labs proliferate. Sinister parties have taken an interest in the case, including a drug-dealing casino owner who deposits his victims in acid vats. Klayman’s attempt to bring closure for his client soon has him confronting the ghosts of his own past.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
