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 *The Morning Watch* (1951) is a compressed, intensely lyrical novella about Richard, a twelve-year-old boy at a Southern Episcopal boarding school, who keeps vigil in the chapel during the hours before Easter morning. Through the child's fluctuating consciousness—part prayer, part fantasy, part moral self-interrogation—Agee examines sexuality, guilt, religious aspiration, and the painful emergence of adult awareness. Its richly tactile prose, shifting rhythms, and close psycho...

James Agee's A Death in the Family is a profoundly intimate, formally daring novel about the sudden death of Jay Follet and its consequences for his wife, Mary, their children, and the wider community of 1915 Knoxville, Tennessee. Drawing closely on Agee's own childhood experience, the narrative moves between domestic realism, lyrical interior monologue, shifting points of view, and vividly observed regional detail. Its sustained attention to grief—refracted through religious doubt, childh...

James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), created with photographer Walker Evans, is a landmark of American documentary literature. Commissioned originally by Fortune, it examines the lives of three Alabama sharecropping families during the Great Depression, combining ethnographic observation, political critique, meditative autobiography, and experimental prose. Evans's austere photographs and Agee's intensely lyrical, self-questioning narrative resist sentimental representations o...

“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...

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...

"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...

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 ...

The "dazzling, exhilarating" (San Francisco Chronicle) debut novel from the bestselling author of Infinite Jest, available for the first time as an audiobook.At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switch...

From one of our most heralded writers--Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood"--her first novel in more than a decade: the life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert.Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landsca...

**From the author of bestselling Invisible Man—the classic novel of African-American experience—this long-awaited second novel tells an evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. Brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master."Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, a...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California.“Utterly absorbing.”—Celeste Ng • “A marvel of a first novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.”—Entertainment WeeklyNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR •