The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

Three classic works—including the virtuosic Revolutionary Road, soon to be a major motion picture—that exemplify the remarkable gifts of this great American master. Richard Yates’s first novel, Revolutionary Road is the unforgettable portrait of a marriage built on dreams that tragically never come to fruition. In The Easter Parade, he tells the story of two sisters whose parents’ divorce overs...

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize—winning writer’s masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad...

A trilogy of brilliant novels—The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land—that charts the life and times of one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction. When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed—by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then f...

Raymond Chandler’s first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction. The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail a...

Once overshadowed by Sartre, Camus has proved the more durable novelist of the two. This collection of his work makes the reasons for his survival self-evident. In prose of bleak but piercing clarity, Camus cuts to the heart of each situation he describes. After The Outsider (also published in Everyman), The Plague is his most powerful novel, an account of heroic attempts to contain an epidemic in...

The brevity of Muriel Spark’s novels is equalled only by the brilliance. This collection of four stories, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrates her development over four decades. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, adapted as both play and film, explores the perils of hero-worship among girls and their teachers in the 1930s. Salvation is the theme of The Girls of Slender Means, which vividly evokes...

From Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz: the three magnificent novels—published in an omnibus edition for the first time—that form an ancient-Egyptian counterpart to his famous Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland’s majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu’...

Thirty years’ worth of Evelyn Waugh’s inimitable travel writings have been gathered together for the first time in one volume. Waugh’s accounts of his travels–spanning the years from 1929 to 1958–describe journeys through the West Indies, Mexico, South America, the Holy Land, and Africa. And just as his travels informed his fiction, his novelist’s sensibility is apparent in each of these pieces...

Here–for the first time in one volume–are two classic, brilliantly original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In both books Maxine Hong Kingston mines her family’s past and her culture’s stories, weaving myth and memory to fashion works of enormous revelatory power. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, i...

In books two and three of the Transylvanian Trilogy, the storm-clouds are gathering over Europe. War breaks out in the Balkans, but the politicians in Budapest are too busy scheming how best to spite the Habsburgs or pelting unpopular prime ministers with inkpots to pay much attention. The minorities question is still unresolved, the people are taking to the streets demanding the right to vote; in...