Cormac McCarthy return to the Texas-Mexico border, the scene of his acclaimed Border Trilogy, in his fiery new book. We live in an era where drug dealers have replaced cattle rustlers and little towns are now open-fire zones. Llewellyn Moss one day discovers a pickup truck encircled by a bodyguard of dead men. Two million dollars in cash and a shipment of heroin are still in the rear. When Moss steals the money, he starts a domino effect of catastrophic brutality that neither the law, represented by the seasoned and disheartened Sheriff Bell nor Moss can stop. McCarthy concurrently strips down the American crime thriller and broadens its concerns to cover issues as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily present as this morning’s headlines as Moss seeks to elude his pursuers, including a mystery mastermind who tosses coins for human lives. A victory, No Country for Old Men.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
“The point is there ain’t no point.”
“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don’t deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
The third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy and Pulitzer Prize winner by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, is the biggest book ever written about the last resolute wilderness of America. It is a love tale, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier.
Visit the dusty, small Texas town of Lonesome Dove to encounter a memorable cast of heroes, outlaws, whores, ladies, and natives as well as settlers. A book that makes us laugh, cry, dream, and remember, Lonesome Dove is richly authentic, exquisitely written, and always dramatic.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”
“Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”
“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
“It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”
“It’s like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added”
The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), the classic novel of the Lost Generation, is one of Ernest Hemingway’s greatest works and a prime illustration of his restrained yet effective writing style. Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, two of Hemingway’s most iconic characters, are introduced in this work, which takes a moving glimpse at the disillusion and angst of the post-World War I age. The story follows the flashy Brett and the foolish Jake as they travel with a ragtag gang of foreigners from the raucous nightlife of 1920s Paris to the bloody bullrings of Spain. It is a time of moral decay, spiritual decay, unfulfilled love, and dissipating illusions. The Sun Also Rises, which was first published in 1926, contributed to Hemingway’s reputation as one of the best authors of the twentieth century.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
“Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
The epic history of the Great Depression won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired (and occasionally infuriated) millions of readers. The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is covered in Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, which was first published in 1939. The Joads, an Oklahoma farm family, are driven from their homestead and compelled to move west to the promised land of California. A story that is intimately human yet magnificent in scope and moral vision, elemental but blunt, tragic but ultimately uplifting in its human dignity, emerges from their struggles and recurrent collisions with the harsh reality of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots. The novel portrays the horrors of the Great Depression and inquires into the very nature of justice and equality in America. It is a depiction of the fight between the powerful and the downtrodden, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoic strength. Steinbeck’s enduring classic work is arguably the most American of all American Classics because it functions simultaneously as a naturalistic epic, captivity tale, read fiction, and transcendental gospel.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.”
“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
“And her joy was nearly like sorrow.”
“If you’re in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help–the only ones.”
“The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”
Slaughterhouse-Five, a famous American novel and one of the greatest antiwar works ever written, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time. Billy Pilgrim’s trip through time, which is centered on the horrific firebombing of Dresden, symbolizes the epic journey of our own fragmented lives as we look for meaning in the things we fear the most.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”
French novelist Albert Camus wrote a novella in 1942 titled The Stranger, which was also released in English as The Outsider. Although Camus expressly disliked the term “existentialism,” its theme and attitude are sometimes regarded as instances of his philosophy, absurdism combined with existentialism.
Camus investigated what he called “the nudeness of man confronted with the ludicrous” through the tale of a regular man who unknowingly becomes involved in a senseless killing on a beach in Algeria. Published for the first time in English in 1946; a new translation by Matthew Ward.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
In spite of being published 50 years ago, Catch-22 is still regarded as a classic of American literature and one of the funniest books of all time. In recent years, Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer have all included it on their lists of “great novels.”
This is the tale of the legendary, whiny bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is enraged because thousands of people he has never seen are trying to murder him. It takes place in Italy during World War II. However, his army, which continually raises the number of sorties the troops must fly to finish their duty, is his actual issue, not the adversary.
Yossarian will be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule if he makes any attempt to excuse himself from the dangerous missions he has been assigned. A man is considered insane if he continues to fly risky combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be relieved of duty, he is proven sane and is therefore ineligible to be relieved.
A new introduction by Christopher Buckley, several critical essays and reviews by authors including Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others, as well as unique documents and images from Joseph Heller’s personal archive are all included in this edition’s commemorative 50th anniversary. The ultimate edition of a piece of world literature is finally available.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
“[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”
“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”
To the Lighthouse, written by Virginia Woolf in 1927 and published more than a century after Pride and Prejudice, is a great book to read if you’re interested in reading other books that are similar to Pride and Prejudice and bear some similarities to that novel despite being published more than a century later.
The majority of the story takes place in the Ramsay family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where they spend a number of years, and is told in Virginia Woolf’s signature stream of consciousness style, which was prevalent in literature published during the 1920s.
It is not a plot-driven tale, as is common with Woolf’s writings and with many modernist books written at the time. However, it deals with comparable topics to Pride and Prejudice when it comes to the language on marriage, class, and society’s responsibilities.
East of Eden, which was dubbed “the first book” by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck in his journal, does certainly have mythic simplicity and primal intensity. This expansive and frequently cruel book is set in the fertile Salinas Valley of California and chronicles the connected fates of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose descendants helplessly recreate the fall of Adam and Eve and the toxic rivalry of Cain and Abel.
To cultivate and nurture his family on the new, lush land, Adam Trask migrated from the East to California. However, the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, drives his wife to the verge of insanity, leaving Adam to raise his boys by himself until they are men. The love of everyone surrounding one youngster helps him develop, whereas the other boy grows up alone and surrounded by enigmatic darkness.
East of Eden, first published in 1952, is Steinbeck’s most famous book. It explores his most persistent themes, including the enigma of identification, the inexplicability of passion, and the terrible effects of love’s absence. East of Eden, a literary classic from Steinbeck’s latter years, is both a family drama and a contemporary retelling of the Book of Genesis.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”