Harper Lee and the One-Book Wonder Phenomenon

A haunting classic that chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under. This deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and makes us mourn Sylvia Plath’s tragic suicide at age thirty all the more.

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells the story of one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha with exquisite lyricism. Published in 1999, with an acclaimed film adaptation released in 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha remains Arthur Golden’s only novel.

“A collection of short fiction and personal essays, THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS reads like your early twenties in real time, touching on friendship, love, jealousy, self-discovery, family, and the one thing you’ll always love, no matter what: your first car.”

Read Julianna Haubner’s review here.

“Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
The turbulent and tempestuous love story of Cathy and Heathcliff spans two generations—from the time Heathcliff, a strange, coarse young boy, is brought to live on the Earnshaws’ windswept estate, through Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton and Heathcliff’s plans for revenge, to Cathy’s death years later and the eventual union of the surviving Earnshaw and Linton heirs. A masterpiece of imaginative fiction, Wuthering Heights (the author’s only novel) remains as poignant and compelling today as it was when first published in 1847.

A milestone in American literature, this novel has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. Ralph Ellison was awarded in 1969.

This novel is a deeply moving account of a horse’s experiences at the hands of many owners―some sensitive; others cruel. Scenes from the lives of both the landed gentry and the impoverished working class reveal as much about the social ills of the nineteenth century as they do about the treatment of animals. Composed during the last years of her life, Anna Sewell died just five months after its publication.

An American comic masterpiece, its hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is “a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (The Chicago Sun-Times). After struggling to find a publisher, Toole committed suicide in 1969. More than a decade later, his mother succeeded in having his manuscript published by the Louisiana State University Press, and he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.