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20th Century's Best Books

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20th Century's Best Books includes Peter Pan (2000), Silmarillion (1937), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Autobiography of Malcolm X (1992), cider house rules (1985).

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Peter Pan

by: Sidelines
release date: Jan 01, 2000
Peter Pan
Presents the storybook version of the Disney movie featuring an electronic keyboard which plays various sound effects.

Silmarillion

by: J.R.R. Tolkien
Silmarillion
The Silmarillion tells of the Elder Days, of the First Age of Tolkien's World, when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middle Earth, and the High Elves made war upon them for the recovery of the Silmarils, the jewels containing the pure light of Valinor.  It is to this ancient drama that the characters in The Lord of the Rings so often look back to.

Sit at the feet of the most beloved storyteller of the 20th century and hear how the world came to be.  The Silmarillion is told here in a brilliantly faceted audio production, with all the glory of the First Age itself.  Dazzlingly performed by Martin Shaw, it sparkles with the magic of the dawn of time--when Elves and Men roamed a world set spinning through space by the haunting music of supernatural choirs.  Slip through the shadows and you, too, may catch the whisper of harp-song on the winds of the high air above the mists of the world.

This exclusive audio boxed set of Tolkien's elegant masterpiece is one that will delight fans young and old.  It is an extraordinary keepsake to be treasured and listened to again and again.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by: Andy Hopkins
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. People live in half-deserted apartment buildings, and keep electric animals as pets because so many real animals have died. Most people emigrate to Mars - unless they have a job to do on Earth. Like Rick Deckard - android killer for the police and owner of an electric sheep. This week he has to find, identify, and kill six androids which have escaped from Mars. They're machines, but they look and sound and think like humans - clever, dangerous humans. They will be hard to kill. The film Blade Runner was based on this famous novel.

Autobiography of Malcolm X

by: Malcolm x
release date: Oct 01, 1992
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself "the angriest Black man in America" relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. An established classic of modern America, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" was hailed by the New York Times as "Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book." Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X's life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.

cider house rules

by: John Irving
cider house rules
"AN OLD-FASHIONED, BIG-HEARTED NOVEL . . . with its epic yearning caught in the 19th century, somewhere between Trollope and Twain . . . The rich detail makes for vintage Irving."
--The Boston Sunday Globe

"The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving's novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited. Victims of tragedy, violence, and injustice, their lives seem more interesting and full of thought-provoking dilemmas than the lives of many real people."
--The Houston Post

"John Irving's sixth and best novel . . . He is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving's own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Entertaining and affecting . . . John Irving is the most relentlessly inventive writer around. He proliferates colorful incidents and crotchets of character. . . . A truly astounding amount of artistry and ingenuity."
--The San Diego Union

Good Omens

by: Neil Gaiman
release date: Jan 01, 1990
Good Omens

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.

So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .

The manufacturer provides this product in random colors ( black and white). We are unable to provide the product in a color particular.Al confirm your purchase, you receive one of the colors shown on the image or title , depending on availability.Thank you so much for your understanding

Disgrace

by: J.M. Coetzee
release date: Jul 01, 2000
Disgrace
Book by Coetzee, J.M.

Neuromancer

by: William Gibson
release date: Jan 01, 1997
Neuromancer
A hard-boiled futuristic novel, NEUROMANCER uses as its stage the boundless range of modern cyberspace. The author's hero, Case, is a cyberspy, the best in the business. But he plays his games close to the edge and double-crosses the wrong people.

Banished from cyberspace and restricted to life in the physical world, Case hits the skids. But his luck turns when he gets another chance. To take it may cost him his life.

William Gibson is a guru of science fiction in the computer age, and NEUROMANCER is his "cyberpunk" masterpiece.

"Freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chilling." (The New York Times)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

by: Dr. Seuss
release date: Sep 25, 2007
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Inside this very special anniversary edition of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, you'll find the complete, original text and illustrations by Dr. Seuss, along with 32 fascinating pages of commentary, footnotes and archival images - written and compiled by renowned collector and Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen. In chatty, conversational style, Cohen reflects upon Dr. Seuss's changing view of Christmas over the years and traces the evolution of the Grinch, his dog Max, and the inhabitants of Who-ville. Also together for the first time are three rarely seen Seuss holiday offerings: "Perfect Present," a poem about the fluff-footed, frizzle-topped, three-fingered Zift and why it makes the ideal gift; "The Hoobub and the Grinch," a story about a con artist Grinch who sells pieces of green string; and the spiritually compelling painting and poem "A Prayer for a Child."

Screwtape Letters

by: C. S. Lewis
Screwtape Letters

A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below." At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C. S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the ­worldly-wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging and humorous account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written.

Mists of Avalon

by: Marion Zimmer Bradley
release date: May 01, 1995
Mists of Avalon
The legends of King Arthur come to life in the extraordinary stories of the women in his life--including his half-sister Morgaine, a high-priestess of the religion of the Mother Goddess, and his beautiful wife Gwynhefar, torn between her duty and her love for Lancelot. Book available.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by: Italo Calvino
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
paperback

Infinite Jest

by: David Foster Wallace
release date: Jan 01, 2006
Infinite Jest
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of Infinite Jest, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss ...'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight, and he has deep things to say about the hollowness of contemporary American pleasure ...sentences and whole pages are marvels of cosmic concentration ...Wallace is a superb comedian of culture' James Wood, Guardian

Possession

by: A. S. Byatt
release date: Jul 01, 1999
Possession
A special celebratory edition to mark the 21st birthday of Vintage books.

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."
        
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession--the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject--she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics--Roland Michell and Maud Bailey--as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.

The Thorn Birds

by: Colleen McCullough
release date: Jan 01, 2000
The Thorn Birds
[Audiobook CASSETTE Library Edition in vinyl case.]

[Read by Mary Woods]

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early 1900s when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to the vast Australian sheep station of Drogheda, and it ends more than half a century later with the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill.

Wonderful characters people this book: strong and gentle Paddy, hiding a private memory; dutiful Fiona, holding back love because it once betrayed her; violent, tormented Frank, and the other hardworking Cleary sons who give the boundless lands of Drogheda all their energy and devotion; as well as Meggie, Ralph, and Meggie's children. And there is the land itself: stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.

The Golden Compass

by: Philip Pullman
release date: Jan 01, 2007
The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman's best-selling, award-winning trilogy in one slipcase. The first book, NORTHERN LIGHTS, was filmed as THE GOLDEN COMPASS, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and filmed by New Line Cinema, creators of the LORD OF THE RINGS film trilogy. Sice the first volume was published in 1995, the trilogy has been acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, and has won the UK's top awards for children's literature. Today, the fabulous story of Lyra an her daemon is read and loved by adults and children alike. Thextraordinary story moves between parallel universes. Beginning in Oxford, it takes Lyra and her animal-daemon Pantalaimon on a dagerous rescue mission to the ice kingdoms of the far North, where she begins to learn about the mysterious particles they call Dut - a substance for which a terrible war between different worlds will be fought... "This trilogy is one of the great imaginativ works in the English language. And it contains one of the best villains in all literature." - Terry Jones Philip Pullman has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Children's Book of the Year - British Book Awards, the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Eleanor Farjeon Award and the Astrid Lindgren Award.
Other List with This Book:

Gravity's Rainbow

by: Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, "Gravity's Rainbow" is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's "Ulysses" was to the first.

Outlander

by: Diana Gabaldon
release date: Jan 01, 1998
Outlander
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A STARZ ORIGINAL SERIES
 
Unrivaled storytelling. Unforgettable characters. Rich historical detail. These are the hallmarks of Diana Gabaldon's work. Her New York Times bestselling Outlander novels have earned the praise of critics and captured the hearts of millions of fans. Here is the story that started it all, introducing two remarkable characters, Claire Beauchamp Randall and Jamie Fraser, in a spellbinding novel of passion and history that combines exhilarating adventure with a love story for the ages.
 
OUTLANDER
 
Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans in the year of Our Lord . . . 1743.
 
Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of a world that threatens her life, and may shatter her heart. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.
 
Praise for Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels
 
“Marvelous and fantastic adventures, romance, sex . . . perfect escape reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle, on Outlander
 
“History comes deliciously alive on the page.”—New York Daily News, on Outlander
 
“Gabaldon is a born storyteller. . . . The pages practically turn themselves.”—The Arizona Republic, on Dragonfly in Amber
 
“Triumphant . . . Her use of historical detail and a truly adult love story confirm Gabaldon as a superior writer.”—Publishers Weekly, on Voyager
 
“Unforgettable characters . . . richly embroidered with historical detail.”—The Cincinnati Post, on Drums of Autumn
 
“A grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].”—CNN, on The Fiery Cross
 
“The large scope of the novel allows Gabaldon to do what she does best, paint in exquisite detail the lives of her characters.”—Booklist, on A Breath of Snow and Ashes
 
“Features all the passion and swashbuckling that fans of this historical fantasy series have come to expect.”—People, on Written in My Own Heart's Blood


From the Hardcover edition.

Midnight's Children

by: Salman RUSHDIE
release date: Jan 01, 2009
Midnight's Children
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 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 of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other “midnight's children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight's Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.
Other List with This Book:

Breakfast of Champions

by: Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by: Murakami
release date: Sep 01, 2006
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru Okada is going through a difficult time. He is without a job, his cat has disappeared and his wife is behaving strangely. Into this unbalanced world come a variety of curious characters, a young girl sunbathing in a nearby garden, sisters who are very peculiar indeed, an old war veteran with a violent, disturbing story. Okada retreats to a deep well in a nearby house. And the story unfolds…

Alienist

by: Caleb Carr
release date: Jan 01, 1994
Alienist
In 1896 New York, psychologist--or in period terminology, an alienist--Laszlo Kreizler joins forces with journalist John Schuyler Moore to track a vicious serial killer. A first novel.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
release date: Jan 01, 1988
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength. 

First published in 1962, it is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, Ivan Denisovich is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man's will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

Dubliners

by: James Joyce
release date: Jan 01, 2009
Dubliners
Enduring Literature Illuminated by Practical Scholarship
Stories about the collective struggle of the Irish working class -- one of the world's most compelling portraits of urban life.
Each Enriched Classic Edition includes:
• A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
• A chronology of the author's life and work
• A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
• An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
• Detailed explanatory notes
• Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work
• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience
Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.
Series edited by Cynthia Brantley Johnson

Interpreter of Maladies

by: Jhumpa Lahiri
release date: Jan 01, 2006
Interpreter of Maladies
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of cultures and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth, while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.

The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

by: Bill Watterson
release date: Jan 01, 1995
The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
A special tenth anniversary edition of comic cartoons starring the Calvin and Hobbes pair. Calvin, cheeky, hyperactive and mischievous, and Hobbes, his cuddly toy tiger who, as far as Calvin is concerned is very much alive and kicking, are two of the most loveable and hilarious characters to grace the comic strip in years. Sit back and enjoy...

A Fine Balance

by: Rohinton Mistry
release date: Jan 01, 1995
A Fine Balance
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Stranger in a Strange Land

by: Robert A. Heinlein
release date: Nov 01, 2003
Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land is the epic saga of an earthling, Valentine Michael Smith, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with ''psi'' powers - telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, teleportation, pyrolysis, and the ability to take control of the minds of others - and complete innocence regarding the mores of man.

After his tutelage under a surrogate-father figure, Valentine begins his transformation into a kind of messiah. His exceptional abilities lead Valentine to become many things to many people: freak, scam artist, media commodity, searcher, free-love pioneer, neon evangelist, and martyr.

Heinlein won his second Hugo Award for this novel, sometimes called his ''divine comedy'' and often called his masterpiece. Stranger in a Strange Land caused controversy and uproar when it was first published. Still topical and challenging today it is in the great tradition of stories that endure through the power of the author's imagination that stretches from Gulliver's Travels to 1984.

This Blackstone audiobook is the ''as published'' version, read from an Ace paperback published in 1987. It is not the uncut, uncensored version that Heinlein originally wrote , but which wasn't published until 1991.

Tender Is the Night

by: F. Scott Fitzgerald
release date: Jan 01, 2010
Tender Is the Night
Om en læge, der svigter sine idealer og tilbringer sit liv i ørkesløs lediggang ved mondæne europæiske hoteller som sin rige kones mand

The World of Pooh

by: A. A. Milne
The World of Pooh
Lifelong devotees and new friends of the Bear of Very Little Brain will be glad to see all twenty of A. A. Milne's world-famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories brought together in one beautiful volume. Milne's prose and Ernest H. Shepard's drawings-including full-color art created especially for these editions-perfectly capture the feelings of childhood.
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