In 1964 Charles Portis left a promising career as a newspaper reporter in New York and London to return to his native Arkansas. There, working in relative obscurity, he would write the books that led critic Ron Rosenbaum to call him the “least-known great writer” in America. In five novels published over twenty-five years, Portis refined a signature deadpan style...

Throughout a celebrated career that spanned five decades and multiple genres, Ursula K. Le Guin was first and last a poet. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Le Guin’s work presents for the first time an authoritative gathering of her poetry—from the earliest collection, 1974’s Wild Angels, through her final publication, So Far So Good,...

Save $42 when you purchase all three volumes of the Bernard Malamud edition. One of America’s great mythmakers, a storyteller who ranks with Flannery O’Connor as an unfolder of the mysteries of human character, Bernard Malamud is a writer of profound sympathy, intensity, and emotional truth. This third and final volume of Library of America’s Malamud edition brings together three...

Save $75 when you purchase the five-volume set of John Updikes novels. Library of America caps its five-volume edition of John Updike’s novels with a trio of resonant late masterpieces. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, wrote of this culminating phase of the author’s career: “Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured.” In the...

Seventy-five years after its publication, Norman Mailer’s gripping, ambitious debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), remains one of the most powerful books about World War II and a towering contribution to the global literature of war. Drawing on Mailer’s experience as a soldier in the 1945 invasion of the Philippines, the novel’s depiction of the taking of the...

Including Animal Farm 'Orwell is the most influential political writer of the twentieth century' New York Review of Books Throughout his life George Orwell aimed, in his words, to make 'political writing into an art'. This collection brings together the best of his matchless political essays and journalism with his timeless satire on totalitarianism, Animal Farm. It includes articles on...

Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve-novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations. Volume 3 contains the seventh, eighth and ninth novel in the series: The Valley of Bones; The Soldier's Art; The...

Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In THE TOTAL LIBRARY, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume - all in superb new translations. More...

Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations. Volume 4 contains the last three novels in the sequence: Books do Furnish a Room; Temporary Kings; Hearing Secret...

Including Down and Out in Paris and London 'Orwell was the great moral force of his age' Spectator The powerful writings collected together in this volume chronicle George Orwell's first-hand experiences of life among the underclass of the 'two nations' of rich and poor. Down and Out in Paris and London is the young Orwell's memoir of his time as...

The most quoted writer in English literary history, Shakespeares work continues to grip audiences and delight readers. His plays fill our theatres and have inspired countless films, most recently the immensely popular Romeo & Juliet starring Leondardo Di Caprio and the Oscar winning film Shakespeare in Love. Bringing together 150 of the most famous extracts from his plays, sonnets and...

_________________________ The first three volumes of Anthony Powell's remarkable A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME sequence: A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING; A BUYER'S MARKET; THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD 'One of the greatest pleasures of my reading life. The cool elegance of the prose, the deliciously dry humour, the confident choreography of his characters make for an incomparable treat.' - Michael Palin...

This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant,...