**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes the first volume of an epic trilogy that takes us on a literary adventure through cycles of birth and death, passion and betrayal that will span a century in America.“Intimate.... Miraculous.... Staggering.... A masterpiece in the making.” —USA Today**1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Fr...

"Clear, vibrant" essays on reading and writing by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author: "A reader feels smarter just taking it in" ( The Boston Globe).From the author of A Dangerous Business, A Thousand Acres, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, this volume "gathers essays (and two stories) composed with wit, enthusiasm, expertise, and candor" ( Booklist).Long acclaimed as a...

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland a...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "powerful and poignant" twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear (The New York Times Book Review) that takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters.When the youngest daughter objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals—and a young boy—whose lives intersect in Paris in this "feel-good escape” (The New York Times).Paras, short for "Perestroika," is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon at dusk, she finds the door of her stall open and**—she's a curious filly—*...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of A Thousand Acres: An amazing “mash-up of a Western, a serial-killer mystery and a feminist-inflected tale of life in a bordello” (The Washington Post).In 1850s Gold Rush California two young prostitutes, best friends Eliza and Jean, attempt to find their way in a lawless town on the fringes of the Wild West—a bewitching combination of beauty and danger—as what will become the Civil Wa...

From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, a soaring, soulful novel about a folk musician who rises to fame across our changing times • “A robust, atmospheric coming-of-age story.” —PeopleBefore Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky—and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. ...

Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power and beauty of its creation.In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best young writers in America today transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison, twenty years old, was reunited with a parent whose abs...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • An “irresistible [and] beautifully braided tale” (The Wall Street Journal) that spans two years in the lives of thoroughbred breeders and trainers—and of the horses themselves—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Thousand Acres“[A] wise, spirited novel . . . Smiley plumbs the wondrously strange world of horse racing.”—People

A Pulitzer Prize winner makes her debut for young readers.Jane Smiley makes her debut for young readers in this stirring novel set on a California horse ranch in the 1960s. Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt has always been more at ease with horses than with people. Her father insists they call all the mares “Jewel” and all the geldings “George” and warns Abby not to get attached: the horses are there to be sold. But with all the stress at school (the Big Four have turned against ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980s: sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream.In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations with the expertise of a master carpenter.Forthright, likable Joe St...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and “one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love” (The New York Times)—comes a “masterly…compelling depiction of a singular woman,” (The New Yorker), from her childhood in post–Civil War Missouri to California in the throes of World War II.Here is the powerful, deeply affecting story of one Margaret Mayfield. When Margaret marr...