This enormously eccentric book takes listeners on a crazy journey with renowned gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. The Curse of Lono is to Hawaii what Fear and Loathing was to Las Vegas: the crazy tales of a journalist's "coverage" of a news event that ends up being a wild ride to the dark side of Americana. Originally published in 1983, The Curse of Lono features all of the zany, hallucinogenic wordplay for which Hunter S.Thompson became known and loved.

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free”.

In The Road, Jack London embraces the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism through his autobiographical account of his time riding the rails of Canada and the United States. The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and Sea Wolf, relays the time leading up to turning point in his life - a perfunctory trial and a 30-day imprisonment in the Erie County Penitentiary for the crime of vagrancy - an experience so degrading that he turned to a career in writing.

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion".

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the best-selling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.

There is now no doubt that not only is Waiting for Godot the outstanding play of the 20th century, but it is also Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. Yet it is both a popular text to be studied at school and an enigma. The scene is a country road. There is a solitary tree. It is evening. Two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, exchange words. Pull off boots. Munch a root vegetable. Two other curious characters enter. And a boy. Time passes. It is all strange yet familiar.

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original, and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes "The Minority Report," "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," "Paycheck," "Second Variety," and "The Eyes Have It."

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads, the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her.

Here is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists - Hunter S.Thompson. In letters to a who's who of luminaries, from Norman Mailer toCharles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez - not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors - Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through hisown razor-sharp perspective.

First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

In The Road, Jack London embraces the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism through his autobiographical account of his time riding the rails of Canada and the United States. The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and Sea Wolf, relays the time leading up to turning point in his life - a perfunctory trial and a 30-day imprisonment in the Erie County Penitentiary for the crime of vagrancy - an experience so degrading that he turned to a career in writing.

The Mansion tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin, Flem. "For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man," noted Ralph Ellison. "Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." This volume includes a new introduction to the trilogy by acclaimed novelist George Garrett, author of Death of the Fox and The Succession.

1916: Norma Wallace, age 15, arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape-recorded her memories. With those tapes and original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles Norma's rise and fall with the social history of New Orleans.

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.

The story of Flem Snopes' ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, this is the second volume of Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South.

Juan Cabrillo's first adventure with the Oregon - a state-of-the-art spy ship disguised as a nondescript lumber hauler - takes him and his crew into dangerous waters as they try to put Tibet back in the hands of the Dalai Lama by striking a deal with the Russians and the Chinese.

Hollywood. Saturday night. A broken taillight leads to a routine traffic stop. It shouldn’t have changed the lives of the four men involved, but it did. The Onion Field is the frighteningly true story of a fatal collision of destinies that would lead two young cops and two young robbers to a deserted field on the outskirts of Los Angeles, towards a bizarre execution and its terrible aftermath.

Meet the Pratt clan. Driven men. Determined women. Through six turbulent generations, they would pursue a lost Paul Revere treasure. And turn a family secret into an obsession that could destroy them. Here is the novel that launched William Martin’s astonishing literary career and became an instant bestseller. From the grit and romance of old Boston to exclusive - and dangerous - Back Bay today, this sweeping saga paints an unforgettable portrait of a powerful dynasty beset by the forces of history...and a heritage of greed, lust, murder and betrayal.

The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary connement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class - married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But they will meet again....

What do you do when murderers have killed your wife and destroyed your daughter? Until that awful moment Paul Benjamin was an ordinary man - but the unspeakable violence that shattered his life turned him into someone quite different. Someone destiny was shaping into a bizarre instrument of vengeance. This is the novel that spawned the classic movie starring Charles Bronson.

This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.

An American writer of travel guides in need of a new location chooses to travel to a small and obscure Eastern European country. The moment Grafton crosses the border he is in trouble, much more than he could have imagined. His passport is taken by guards, and then he is detained for not having it. He is released into the custody of a family, but is again detained. It becomes evident that there are supernatural agencies at work.

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

On August 14, 1975, eight daring thieves ransacked 148 massive safe-deposit boxes at a secret bank used by organized crime, La Cosa Nostra, and its associates in Providence, Rhode Island. The crooks fled with duffel bags crammed full of cash, gold, silver, stamps, coins, jewels, and high-end jewelry. The true value of the loot has always been kept secret, partly because it was ill-gotten to begin with, and partly because there was plenty of incentive to keep its true worth out of the limelight.

90 Church is both the unbelievable memoir of one man's confrontation with the dark corners of the human experience and a fascinating window into a little-known time in American history. Learn the story of the agents who make the DEA look like choirboys.