In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.

Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.

In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.

Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?", "Leaving the Yellow House", and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence". With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new listeners.

Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting - until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.

Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, A Single Man) turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.

One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Mr. Artur Sammler is, above all, a man who has lasted, from the civilized pleasures of English life in the 1920s and 30s through the war and death camps in Poland. Moving now through the chaotic and dangerous streets of New York's Upper West Side, Mr. Sammler is attentive to everything, and appalled by nothing. He brings the same dispassionate curiosity to the activities of a black pickpocket on an uptown bus, the details of his niece Angela's sex life, and his daughter's lunacy as he does to the extraordinary theories of one Dr. V. Govinda Lal on the use we are to make of the moon.

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.

Wealthy Maggie Verver has everything she could ever ask for - except a husband and a title. While in Italy, acquiring art for his museum back in the States, Maggie’s millionaire father, Adam, decides to remedy this and acquire a husband for Maggie. Enter Prince Amerigo, of a titled but now poor aristocratic Florentine family. Amerigo is the perfect candidate.

In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.

Hidden somewhere, in nearly every major city in the world, is an underground seduction lair. And in these lairs, men trade the most devastatingly effective techniques ever invented to charm women. This is not fiction. These men really exist. They live together in houses known as Projects. And Neil Strauss, the best-selling author, spent two years living among them, using the pseudonym Style to protect his real-life identity. The result is one of the most explosive and controversial books of the year.

Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.

In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.