First published in 1929, Passing is a remarkable exploration of the shifting racial and sexual boundaries in America. Larsen, a premier writer of the Harlem Renaissance, captures the rewards and dangers faced by two negro women who pass for white in a deeply segregated world.

Notes from the Underground is Fyodor Dostoevsky's ninth novel, and considered to be one of the first examples of the existential novel. In this radically inventive work, an alienated former minor administrator in nineteenth-century Russia has broken away from society and withdrawn into an underground identity. With its piercing insight into political, social, and moral issues, this classic is one of the most provocative work of literature ever written. In...

First published in 1925, "Manhattan Transfer" by American author John Dos Passos is an engrossing portrayal of urban life in New York City from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age. Critically acclaimed and widely considered to be his most important work, Dos Passos tells the story of the city as it grows and changes through the perspectives of many of its inhabitants. The city itself is a central character of the novel. It is exciting and glamorous, but...

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

Essence® bestselling author Kiki Swinson keeps it coming with a gritty drama about one cunning sistah playing a very dangerous game with the law. Playing dirty is a skill that Yoshi Lomax has perfected. By bribing cops and officials, sleeping with her boss, and convincing her friend in the DEA to make evidence disappear, Yoshi has become a top criminal defense attorney. And she has the multimillion-dollar Miami pad and Aston Martin to prove it....

Gabriella Guerrero has been independent ever since she was a little kid doing her best to care for her drug-addicted single mom. Her world changes when her mother dies, and her aunt takes her in. She has to learn everything all over again, especially how to trust her Aunt Isabel. She has to learn how to live with her aunt and her three cousins in the little house in East Los Angeles. They don't have much except for each other. Gabi does more than...

A poet and novelist whose work has been variously compared to Rimbaud, Charles Bukowski and Irvine Welsh, Serhiy Zhadan's first novel Depeche Mode depicts Ukrainian youth during the turbulent 1990s. Described by the author as "a book about real male comradeship," the novel follows the unemployed narrator and his friends, Jewish anti-Semite Dogg Pavlov and Vasia the Communist, on their adventures around Kharkiv and beyond. Against a background of...

Midst of My Confusion tells the story of a violent, defiant, and survivalist Chicano whose reality in the barrio is intensely brutal. The main character is Joaquin, a young vato who has lived his entire life in the barrio of his small town. But the peace of a small town is short-lived. Fights occuring everywhere, so Joaquin and friends he's grown up with all bond together for protection, a gang. His destiny changes during a business trip to Mexico...

In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers - from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave...