Akron Public Library

"With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation."-publisher's website.

Looking for adventure and a new life, Ishmael, the story's narrator, decides to find work on a whaling boat. On arriving at the Massachusetts harbour to begin his search, the only bed available is already half occupied by a "cannibal" named Queequeg. Although Queequeg has limited English, a friendship forms and the two men sign up for work together aboard the Pequod under the infamous Captain Ahab. Consumed by an insane rage, Captain Ahab has but...

Sixteen-year-old Lisa, smart, attractive, and outwardly successful, suffers from a nervous breakdown that only her closest friends seem to notice and care enough about to try to find a way to help her.

In the first of these two science fiction stories a scientist invents a machine that transports him into the future. In the second story a man watches his body slowly become invisible. The only one-volume edition of these classic works of science fiction.

Novelist Reta Winter's idyllic life is shattered when her eldest daughter abandons her life to sit on a gritty street corner with a sign reading "GOODNESS" around her neck, a situation that prompts Reta to uncover what drove her daughter to her new existence.

"Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is considered by many readers to be the Great American Novel. But most don't know that since its appearance in 1851, it has been revised in substantial ways that alter its original meaning. Melville's masterpiece is described as a "fluid text": it exists in multiple versions, each revealing shifting intentions. The new Longman Critical Edition offers unprecedented access to the revisions that Melville made, the further...

A rash of horrifying crimes rips through the city, throwing it into complete chaos and terrorizing everyone living there. Immediately it becomes clear that they are the work not of an amateur but of a calculating, efficient, and deadly mastermind. The city calls on Detective Michael Bennett, pulling him away from a seaside retreat with his ten adopted children, their beloved nanny, Mary Catherine, and his grandfather. Not only does it tear apart their...

1922 opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, due to a long-standing argument about farmland willed to Arlette by her father. In "Big Driver", mystery writer Tess has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences. Suffering from cancer, Dave Streeter...

This 1962 novel is set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, and depicts the chaos when McMurphy, a rebellious prison inmate who has faked insanity in order to finish his sentence in the hospital, incites the other patients to disobey the feared Nurse Ratched. An escalating series of incidents leads to a tragic conclusion.