James Agee's 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' is a compelling exploration of the lives of impoverished sharecroppers in the rural American South during the Great Depression. Blending the rigorous, factual reportage of a documentary with the evocative prose of a novel, Agee's work defies traditional genre classifications. Strikingly candid, the narrative delves into the everyday experiences and intimate realities of three tenant farming families, presenting an unflinching portrait of human di...

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to b...

James Agee's 'A Death in the Family' is a poignant exploration of grief, family, and memory set against the backdrop of 1915 Knoxville, Tennessee. With a narrative that seamlessly weaves Christian mythos and Southern Gothic realism, Agee illuminates the haunting impacts of sudden loss when a father perishes in a car accident. The novel's lyrical prose captures the fragmented consciousness of a family grappling with the vacuum left by a beloved member. Intricate details of daily life and vi...

James Agee's 'The Morning Watch' is an evocative exploration of innocence, faith, and introspection, crafted with lyrical prose and profound sensitivity. The Morning Watch explores the thoughts and feelings of 12-year-old Richard, a student at an unnamed Episcopal boarding school (based on Agee's schooling at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Sewanee, Tennessee), over the course of a few hours in the early morning of Good Friday in 1923. Set within the cloistered confines of a boarding school...

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.”James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee.There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Th...

"Agee's prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary." — Booklist (starred review)For the first time in book form—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning authorForeword by Jonathan Lethem, author Motherless BrooklynIn 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fort...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality” (The New York Times)In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collabor...

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a ...

A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form“Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem’s stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay.” —Chicago TribuneThis dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collect...

In this prize-winning portrait of a time and place—Montana in the 1930s—that at once inspires and fulfills a longing for an explicable past, Ivan Doig has created one of the most captivating families in American fiction, the McCaskills.The witty and haunting narration, a masterpiece of vernacular in the tradition of Twain, follows the events of the Two Medicine country's summer: the tide of sheep moving into the high country, the capering Fourth of July rodeo and community dance, a...

A love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat.In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not jus...

A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. And when the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, ...