Houghton: 1009 books

“Essential reading for any serious beginning writer . . . illuminating.” —San Francisco Chronicle Carson McCullers is renowned for her Southern Gothic fiction and for such modern classics as The Member of the Wedding. This collection includes an assortment of her earliest work, written...

“Uniquely qualified to explicate Tolkien’s worldview,” this journey into the roots of the Lord of the Rings is a classic in its own right (Salon.com). *From beloved epic fantasy classic to record-breaking cinematic success, J.R.R. Tolkien's story of four brave hobbits has enraptured the...

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format. CliffsNotes...

Join the journey through Middle-earth in the study guide of these two epic fantasies suggestive of life in medieval days, a classical battle between good and evil and the quest for a magical ring. This guide covers all four volumes of this unforgettable fantasy.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic. The author of Lolita and Pale Fire was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir...

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer a look into key elements and ideas within classic works of literature. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the familiar format. CliffsNotes on Fahrenheit 451 explores a twenty-fourth...

A “fascinatingly readable” novel that ponders “where the personal becomes the political or if it is possible to maintain a distinction at all” (Miami Herald). In his fifty-four years in the US Senate, Kim Malone made a difference. Emulating FDR, he advocated and agitated, fighting for...

National Book Award Finalist: The most widely read and enduring interpretation of this ancient Babylonian epic. One of the oldest and most universal stories known in literature, the epic of Gilgamesh presents the grand, timeless themes of love and death, loss and reparations, within the stirring...

Discover another side of the Nobel Prize–winning modernist poet: “The imaginative dimensions of this [book] are altogether extraordinary” (The Boston Globe).   Hidden away for decades, this newly discovered trove of previously unpublished early works includes drafts of T .S. Eliot’s poems...

The famed series of Trinity College and Johns Hopkins lectures in which the Nobel Prize winner explored history, poetry, and philosophy. While a student at Harvard in the early years of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot immersed himself in the verse of Dante, Donne, and the nineteenth-century...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “A romantic idyll played out in the rhythms and meanings of a vanished Navajo world.” —The Denver Post Laughing Boy is a model member of his tribe. Raised in old traditions, skilled in silver work, and known for his prowess in the wild horse races, he does...

Hypnotic short stories of life in the Southwest that “emanate suspense, inspiring page-turning tension” (The Washington Times).   A young woman is pushed, quite literally, to the edge on a desolate mountain pass. An orphaned brother and sister try to patch together an existence one stitch at...

A “wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality” from a Nobel Prize–winning author who pushes fiction to its very limits (The Boston Globe). As this novel by the author of Blindness and All the Names begins, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed history teacher....

An unassuming family struggles to keep up with the ruthless pace of progress in “a genuinely brilliant novel” from a Nobel Prize winner (Chicago Tribune). A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his...