This volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected works brings together for the first time her five remarkable standalone novels. Not part of her Hainish universe or other series, these books illuminate in unexpected ways Le Guin’s central concerns with power and gender, human freedom and creative possibility. In the Locus Award–winning The...

Over a five-year period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regular readers of The New Yorker were treated to humorist S. J. Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series, witty and withering reviews of the pulp fiction and silent films that had enthralled the comic genius in his youth. Among the once-innocent-now-guilty pleasures featured were George Barr McCutcheon’s 1901 historical fantasy novel...

S. J. Perelman’s incomparable gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense never shone brighter than in this classic collection, now restored to print in a deluxe paperback edition. Here are such beloved gems as “Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet,” a rollicking parody of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, about seven proletariat gnomes toiling away in Santa’s North Pole...

After contracting tuberculosis while interning at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Alabama native Walker Percy abandoned the medical profession to become—in words he would use to describe doctor-turned-writer Anton Chekhov—“the pathologist of the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, published in 1961 on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, won the National Book Award and...

Boats against the current, we are borne back ceaselessly to The Great Gatsby. Its unforgettable characters—the conflicted narrator Nick Carraway, the golden girl Daisy Buchanan, and the mysterious Jay Gatsby—its indelible symbols and soaring prose, and its large themes of money, class, and American optimism have an enduring fascination and make The Great Gatsby a frequent candidate for “the Great...

An incandescent stylist who emerged from the experimental ferment of science fiction’s New Wave and against the backdrop of the women’s liberation and LGBTQ+ rights movements, Joanna Russ upended every genre she worked in. The essential novels and stories gathered in this Library of America edition reveal not only a beguiling, darkly comic writer of speculative fiction, but, in the...

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Her haunting and powerful plays, filled with unexpected juxtapositions and startling transfigurations, dramatize interior realities “in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,”...

Save $25 when you purchase both Crime Novels of the 1960s volumes in a boxed set. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction through formal experimentation and the exploration of audacious new subjects and themes. This is the second of two volumes gathering the best of their work,...

Set in Boston, New York, and Virginia, The Prodigal Women tells the intertwined stories of three young women who come of age in the Roaring Twenties, not flappers and golden girls but flesh-and-blood female protagonists looking wearily—and warily—at the paths open to women in a rapidly changing world. Leda March, “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire,” is the daughter...

Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade: Fredric Brown’s The Murderers (1961), a...

Save $25 when you purchase both Crime Novels of the 1960s volumes in a boxed set. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction through formal experimentation and the exploration of audacious new subjects and themes. This is the first of two volumes gathering the best of their work,...

Part religious observance and part commercial extravaganza, a gift basket of cultural customs from many nations, Christmas grew into its modern form in America, and over the last 150 years the most magical time of the year has proven to be glad tidings for American writers. Library of America and acclaimed author Connie Willis invite you to unwrap this diverse...

Library of America collected fifteen of John Updike’s finest novels in a five-volume set: Novels 19591965 The Poorhouse Fair | Rabbit, Run | The Centaur | Of the Farm Novels 19681975 Couples | Rabbit Redux | A Month of Sundays Novels 19781984 The Coup | Rabbit Is Rich | The Witches of Eastwick Novels 19861990 Roger’s Version | Rabbit at...

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,...