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Banned Books Week: Banned and Challenged Classics
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Graphic Novels
FOR: Graphic novel reading older children, teens, and adults who have an appreciation for magical lands, brightly colored illustrations, and surprisingly scrappy young girls.
Animal farm
Action/Adventure, Literary Fiction, Politics
<:st> Orwell's classic political fable is often cited as simply a condemnation of Stalinism, which it certainly was, but its political relevance is both wider and more enduring, as novelist Ann Patchett notes in her introductory essay to this new edition. Among the lessons contained in its pages is the need of politicians for "The Enemy" (think Axis of Evil) and the dangers of individuality to oppressive political order. A previous edition ...
Lord of the flies : a novel
Thriller, Action/Adventure
The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.
Kenneth Grahame's complete & unabridged The wind in the willows
When shy Mole climbs out of his hole and into the fresh spring air, he meets Ratty. The two set off for a day on the river, and thus begins this classic tale of deep friendship and adventure.Even before the publication of the first edition in 1908, Kenneth Grahame's beloved characters appeared in gentle letters from the author to his young son. Those letters and the charming story itself inspired internationally acclaimed artist Michael Foreman t...
A separate peace : a novel
Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
John Knowles' beloved classic has been a bestseller for more than 30 years and is one of the most moving and accurate novels about the trials and confusions of adolescence ever written. Set at an elite boarding school for boys during World War II, A Separate Peace is the story of friendship and treachery, and how a tragic accident involving two young men forever tarnishes their innocence.
My Antonia
Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
My Antonia is a classic tale of pioneer life in the American Midwest. The novel details daily life in the newly settled plains of Nebraska through the eyes of Jim Burden, who recounts memories of a childhood shared with a girl named Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of a family who have emigrated from Bohemia. As adults, Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and productive farm...
The call of the wild ; and, White Fang
Action/Adventure
The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author's unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.
Their eyes were watching God
Literary Fiction, Multicultural Fiction
One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood thro...
Charlotte's web
Humor, Fantasy, Action/Adventure
Since its publication in 1952, Charlotte's Web has become one of America's best-loved children's books. For fifty years, this timeless story of the pig named Wilbur and the wise spider named Charlotte who saved him has continued to warm the hearts of readers everywhere. Now this classic, a 1953 Newbery Honor book, comes to life in a delightful unabridged recording, read lovingly by the author himself.
The grapes of wrath
Literary Fiction
First published in 1939, "The Grapes of Wrath" is a landmark of American literature. This Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm homestead by the "land companies" and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. A portrait of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, the novel captures the horrors of the Depression and probes ...
The awakening, and selected stories of Kate Chopin
Literary Fiction
Published in 1899, the short novel of feminist fiction is a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's discovery of the stifling bonds of her marriage and the strengh of her own sexuality.
Midnight's children : a novel
Multicultural Fiction, Literary Fiction
Winner of the Booker of Bookers Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those o...
Rabbit, run
Literary Fiction
For use in schools and libraries only. A frank treatment of a former high school athlete's failure to cope with the adult world. The first of four Updike novels featuring Rabbit Angstrom.
Main street
Literary Fiction
“This is America-a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.” So Sinclair Lewis-recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer-prefaces his novel Main Street. Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self-satisfied inhabitants of small-town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty.
The beautiful and damned
Literary Fiction
The Beautiful and Damnedis the story of Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria. Harvard-educated and an aspiring aesthete, Patch is waiting for his inheritance upon his grandfather's death. His reckless marriage to Gloria is fueled by alcohol and is destroyed by greed. The Patches race through a series of alcohol-induced fiascoes -- first in hilarity, and then in despair.The Beautiful and Damned,a devastating portrait of the nouveaux riches, New York...
The French lieutenant's woman.
Literary Fiction
As part of Back Bay's ongoing effort to make the works of John Fowles available in uniform trade paperback editions, two major works in the Fowles canon are reissued to coincide with the publication of Wormholes, the author's long-awaited new collection of essays and occasional writings. Perhaps the most beloved of Fowles's internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invent...
Atlas shrugged
Literary Fiction
For use in schools and libraries only. The decisions of a few industrial leaders shake the roots of capitalism and reawaken man's awareness of himself as a heroic being.
An American tragedy
Literary Fiction
Based on an actual criminal case, "An American Tragedy" was the inspiration for the award-winning film "A Place in the Sun". This book, the only paperback edition of Dreiser's masterpiece, features an Introduction by Richard Lingeman, one of the foremost experts on Theodore Dreiser.
Lord Jim
Literary Fiction
This immortal novel of the sea tells the story of a British sailor haunted by a single youthful act of cowardly betrayal. To the white men in Bombay, Calcutta, and Rangoon, Jim is a man of mystery. To the primitive natives deep in the Malayan jungle, he is a god gifted with supernatural powers. To the beautiful half-caste girl who flees to his hut for protection, he is a lord to be feared and loved. Lord Jim— Conrad' s classic portrait of a...
The naked and the dead
Literary Fiction
Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of...
Rebecca
Literary Fiction
With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten#8212a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched,...
Things fall apart
Multicultural Fiction, Literary Fiction
Achebe's first novel portrays the collision of African and European cultures in people's lives. Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought about by British colonial rule. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's downfall results from his own character as well as from external forces.
The wings of the dove
Literary Fiction
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James,The Wings of the Dove(1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short time to live and a passion for experiencing life to its fullest. To the creation of the other two...
Ethan Frome
Literary Fiction
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie?s vivacious cousin enters their household as a ?hired girl,? Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.In one of American fiction?s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their ...
Jazz
Literary Fiction
In the afterglow of a clean triumph--her widely celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller,Beloved--Toni Morrison moves to even higher ground. This, her eagerly awaited new novel,Jazz,is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style. It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating Ci...
Discours sur les "versets sataniques," ou, Lettre ouverte aux occidentaux et autres ennemis de l'Islam : essai
Literary Fiction, Science Fiction
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures fall to the sea, later washing up, alive, on a beach. It was an ambiguous miracle, for both seem to have acquired curious changes. Both have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil.
A clockwork orange
Literary Fiction
A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening f...
Ulysses
Literary Fiction
This revised volume follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.
Schindler's list
Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Reissued to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg's film of the same name from Universal Pictures, this Booker Prize-winning novel tells the true story of one remarkable man who outwitted the Nazis to save more Jews during WWII than any single person. "A masterful account of the growth of the human soul". --LA Times Book Review. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
The lord of the rings
Action/Adventure, Fantasy
Endorsed by BCL3, this is a reprinting of Tolkien's classic fantasy trilogy with 50 new paintings by Alan Lee commissioned for this celebration of the 100th anniversary of JRR's birth. An elegant package. Printed on acidic paper. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The chronicles of Narnia
Action/Adventure, Fantasy
Journeys to the end of the world, fantastic creatures, and epic battles between good and evil -- what more could any reader ask for in one book? The book that has it all is the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, written in 1949 by C. S. Lewis. But Lewis did not stop there. Six more books followed, and together they became known as The Chronicles of Narnia.For the past fifty years, The Chronicles of Narnia have transcended the fantasy genre to beco...
The world according to Garp
Literary Fiction
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes, even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with lunacy and sorrow, yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries&n...
Go tell it on the mountain
Literary Fiction
James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghett...
The old man and the sea
Action/Adventure, Literary Fiction
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transfo...
Winnie-the-Pooh
Rediscover the classic stories that made Pooh the world's favorite bear. A. A. Milne's first stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, the most famous bear in the world, were published eighty years ago. This beautiful anniversary edition of Winnie-the-Pooh celebrates the enduring popularity of Pooh and his Forest friends. Discover what happens when Pooh goes visiting and Piglet meets a Heffalump, not forgetting when Eeyore loses his tail and Pooh finds one!...
