This extraordinary book is the result of Saul Bellow’s sojourn in Israel in 1975. A personal record of his stay—his experiences and impressions—as well as a meditation, it crackles with wit and controversy on America’s relationship with this embattled country.Using quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow captures the personal opinions, passions, and dreams of several Israelis, and he also adds to these his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. The varying viewpoint...

Here is Philip Roth’s masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fana...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers the astonishing story of the rise and fall of an American man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.I Married a Communist is the story of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt.In his ...

It is the dawn of the twenty-first century, and America is in trouble. Public schools breed apathy and ignorance, and politics has become the art of the quick fix. There is one woman, though, who has both the vision and the money to leverage change. Mariesa Gorley van Huyten, heiress to one of the great American fortunes, founds an educational subsidiary called Mentor Academies and begins to subcontract public school systems in order to raise a new, less cynical generation. But her clandes...

A midway murder sends a terrified eyewitness running for her life—from a cop, a con, and her own secrets—in this mystery by the author of the John J. Malone series.The best carnival barker in the business couldn’t have drawn a crowd like the one now gathered around the Ferris wheel on the pier. In one of the cabs, still rocking with the ocean breeze, is a dead man—a bloody knife protruding from his back. Why the notorious gambling boss Jerry McGurn was killed is no...

In the early years of the twenty-first century, humans have advanced step by slow step into space. Constantly monitoring the heavens, they have discovered that certain asteroids have changed their orbits—and are on a collision course with Earth. Urgent action is required, but politics and a worldwide financial crash are getting in the way. To save humanity from disaster, two of Earth's prominent families, a host of political movers and shakers, and dedicated pilots and space travelers of a...

We are living through a time of upheaval and social unrest, with increasing threats to global health, democratic institutions, and the world’s economies. But behind the alarming headlines is another issue that must be quickly addressed: the role of workers is being transformed—and often rendered obsolete—by automation and artificial intelligence.As Jamie Merisotis, the president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, argues in Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.At Lonoff’s, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff’s and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his a...

Winner of the first National Book Award in 1950, this modern classic takes us into the gritty underbelly of post–World War II America. It is the story of “Frankie Machine,” a veteran, drug addict, and card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run in Chicago’s near northwest side. Frankie has just returned from the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was exposed to all the pressures, anxieties, and temptations that had put him there in the first place.

Herzog is a man seeking balance, trying to regain a foothold on his life. Thrown out of his ex-wife’s house, Herzog retreats to his abandoned home in a remote village in the Berkshire Mountains. Amid the dust of the disused house, he begins scribbling letters to family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies, dead philosophers, ex-presidents—anyone with whom he feels compelled to set the record straight. The letters—which are never sent—are a means to cure himself of the psychic strain of th...

Two ambitious men. One historic mission.With a blinding flash in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1945, the world was changed forever. The bomb that ushered in the atomic age was the product of one of history’s most improbable partnerships. The General and the Genius reveals how two extraordinary men pulled off the greatest scientific feat of the twentieth century.Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who had made his name by building...

In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perver...