Celebrating America 250: The Great American Novel
In honor of America’s 250th, this list brings together novels that capture the sweep, struggle, humor, and heart of the American experience. From classic voices to contemporary storytellers, these books explore the people, places, and experiences of our country.
From the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is "poignant…powerful… Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory." (The New York Times Book Review)
Don't miss Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, available now!
Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America.
"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review
"A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told." —The Washington Post Book World
From the acclaimed author of the Earthseed series, two immortals chase each other across continents and centuries, binding their fates together and changing the destiny of the human race.
This deluxe edition includes:
- A new cover and package
- Premium French flaps and newly designed, full-color interior covers
- High-quality paper with elegant deckled-edges
Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one—until he meets Anyanwu.
Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu—until she meets Doro.
The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her; and from the villages of 17th-century Nigeria to 19th-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human.
A young New Yorker grieving his mother’s death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this “extraordinary” and beloved novel that “connects with the heart as well as the mind” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review), named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love — and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this “soaring masterpiece” examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author ofPachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn’t want to end.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
An immersive, engrossing novel … this is panorama told in brilliant detail.”—Colm Tóibín, bestselling author ofLong IslandandBrooklyn
Features:
- New hardcover jacket with special effects
- Four-color specially designed endpapers
- Specially designed foil stamped case
- Stenciled edges
- Ribbon bookmark
History is seldom kind. In Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed and magisterial novel, four generations of a poor, proud immigrant family fight to control their destinies while exiled from their homeland.
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant—and that her lover is married—she refuses to bend to his will. Instead she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home and reject her son’s powerful father sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of one of Japan’s finest universities to pachinko parlors and the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters—resilient, fierce women, devoted sisters, bright sons, fathers shaken by moral crises—survive and flourish against the indifferent arc of history.
Meet Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of Korean immigrants immersed in a glamorous Manhattan lifestyle she can’t afford. Casey is eager to make it on her own, away from the judgements of her parents’ tight-knit community, but she soon finds that her Princeton economics degree isn’t enough to rid her of ever-growing credit card debt and a toxic boyfriend. When a chance encounter with an old friend lands her a new opportunity, she’s determined to carve a space for herself in a glittering world of privilege, power, and wealth-but at what cost?
Set in a city where millionaires scramble for the free lunches the poor are too proud to accept, this sharp-eyed epic of love, greed, and ambition is a compelling portrait of intergenerational strife, immigrant struggle, and social and economic mobility. Addictively readable, Min Jin Lee’s bestselling debut Free Food for Millionaires exposes the intricate layers of a community clinging to its old ways in a city packed with haves and have-nots.
Includes a Reading Group Guide.
Marking the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, this deluxe edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 Great American Novel, is beautifully illustrated by award-winning artist Adam Simpson.
Widely considered to be the greatest American novel of all time, The Great Gatsby is the story of the wealthy, quixotic Jay Gatsby and his obsessive love for debutante Daisy Buchanan. It is also a cautionary tale of the American Dream in all its exuberance, decadence, hedonism, and passion.
First published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Great Gatsby sold modestly and received mixed reviews from literary critics of the time. Upon his death in 1940, Fitzgerald believed the book to be a failure, but a year later, as the U.S. was in the grips of the Second World War, an initiative known as Council on Books in Wartime was created to distribute paperbacks to soldiers abroad. The Great Gatsby became one of the most popular books provided to regiments, with more than 100,000 copies shipped to soldiers overseas. By 1960, the book was selling apace and being incorporated into classrooms across the nation. Today, it has sold over 25 million copies worldwide in 42 languages.
This exquisitely rendered edition of the original 1925 printing reintroduces readers to Fitzgerald’s iconic portrait of the Jazz Age, complete with specially commissioned illustrations by Adam Simpson that reflect the gilded splendor of the Roaring Twenties.
“To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one; this is the other.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
Set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renews the idea of what a novel can do.
“Uproarious … Infinite Jest shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer … who can seemingly do anything.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“The next step in fiction … Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty … Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.” —Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic
One of Time magazine’s “100 Best Novels” (1923—2005)
A powerful novel that’s “hilarious, heartbreaking, and ass-kicking” (Jamie Ford) about a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long‑missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and sets out to bring her home.
Winner of the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction · Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize · March Indie Next Pick · Belletrist, Phenomenal, Page & Pairing, and Readers Digest book club pick
The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman’s hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?
The years since Ruthy’s disappearance haven’t been easy on the Ramirez family. It’s 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.
After seeing maybe‑Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long‑lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future—with or without Ruthy in it.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle • USA Today • Today.com • Ms. Magazine • Good Housekeeping • Bustle • The Week • Goodreads • Bookriot • Pop Culturely • SheReads • Litreactor • Electric Lit • The Mary Sue • People Español • Zibby Mag • Debutiful • Her Campus
Best Books of March by Shondaland • Ms. Magazine • Popsugar • Bookriot • Debutiful • Powell’s Book Blog • TIME 100 must-read book of 2023 • Booklist Top 10 debut of 2023 • Library Journal Best Pop Fiction of 2023 • The Latinidad List Best Debut Novel of 2023 • Chicago Public Library Favorite Book of 2023 • Good Housekeeping Must-Read Book of 2023 • Today.com Standout Book of 2023
Includes a Reading Group Guide.
Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenance—a golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the trail are a perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, an oversized adventurer named Gutman, and Spade’s new client Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime.
This cat-and-mouse thriller has haunted readers for generations and inspired multiple adaptations including the iconic 1941 film of the same name starring Humphry Bogart and the 2024 AMC drama, Monsieur Spade, starring Clive Owen.
"In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke had both mastered the thriller and exceeded it." —Ann Patchett
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules—a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.
When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders—a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman—have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes—and save himself in the process—before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. From a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Bluebird, Bluebird is a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas.
"Heartbreakingly resonant" —USA Today
CELEBRATING 75 YEARS OF THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, 1951 – 2026
The “brilliant, funny, meaningful novel” (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature—and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days, grappling with feelings of loneliness, grief, and alienation. His search for something genuine in a world that feels insincere and superficial remains urgent and unmistakably modern.
In Holden’s comic, cutting, and painfully sincere voice, readers discover a comradeship and understanding as they recognize the ache of being lost, and the impulse toward rebellion that comes with the passage into adulthood. The Catcher in the Rye resonates deeply and personally for every new reader.
Passport to Your Summer Self
Travel the World—or Stay Local. The Right Book Takes You Everywhere.