Ocean State Libraries

"Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox biography. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as...

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is

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Every so often a character so captures the hearts and imaginations of readers that he seems to take on a life of his own long after the final page is turned. For such a character, one book is not enough?readers must know what happens next. Now Dean Koontz returns with the novel his fans have been demanding. With the emotional power and sheer storytelling artistry that are his trademarks, Koontz takes up once more the story of a unique young hero and...

"The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds...

The chronicle of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and young offers an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique.

Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American writer Jack London. The book follows the tradition of the Künstlerroman, a narrative that traces the life and development of an artist, to tell the story of a young man not unlike London himself. Part fiction, part autobiography, Martin Eden examines the consequences of dreams and achievements, successes and failures, for a young artist struggling with fame. The novel is heavily influenced by London's socialist...

After Napoleon's defeat, the French aristocracy tried to reassert its power in a government known as the Restoration. Venal and corrupt, the Restoration fell in 1830. Later that year, Stendhal published his scathing satire of Restoration society, The Red and the Black . Its title refers to the military and the clergy, the two career paths open to young men of intelligence and ambition but no social standing. Stendha's hero, Julien Sorel, is such a...

Assigned to locate land in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma that can be converted into pig farms for his employer, a young man meets the residents of Woolybucket and comes to respect their fierce desire to retain their land.

Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father-whom he'd been led to believe was dead-is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back...

"An extremely entertaining array of American life in a bygone era." — New Yorker

The last of Thornton Wilder's works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder's twin brother who died at birth. This edition features an updated afterword from Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating material about the novelist,

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