Akron Public Library

From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist...

Here is the story of an intransigent young architect, Howard Roark, of his violent battle against a mindless status quo, and of his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who worships him yet struggles to defeat him. In order to build his kind of buildings according to his own standards, Roark must fight against every variant of human corruption.

George Eliot takes the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire and out if it creates a portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people their labors and loves, their beliefs, their speech.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human...

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for...

The plot revolves around Lark Burrell, who grew up on a ranch in Idaho, her mother is a Nez Perce Indian. Lark loves wild horses. She is forced to leave there when her father dies and go live with the Wades, distant cousins. Her cousin Marigold is engaged to Stanley Weston, a college graduate like Marigold, but he soon discovers after returning home to run the ranch for his invalid father that he has more in common with Lark than he does with Marigold....

Martin Luna is in deep trouble. Just months ago, a horrible tragedy took his little brother, and now it threatens to take him too. On one side are his desperate mother, a friendly teacher at Bluford High School, and a pretty girl named Vicky. On the other are his old neighborhood and his hunger for revenge. Torn between the two, Martin stands at a crossroad, with his life hanging in the balance. Which way will he go?