Vintage

The break-out novel by an unrecognized master--a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition (Washington Post Book World). Told from the point of view of a young Alabama college graduate in the 1920s, this brilliant novel recounts the exploits of a legendary jazz composer and his band on a tour that becomes a heroic journey equivalent to...

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful...

Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian migr living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband,...

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that pendant off the ear of India, Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional...

Only in America could an innocent, if drunken, guest of honor at a strip joint bachelor party become a mortal threat against Big Money and Big Government. Only in south Florida, land of roadside honky-tonks and sinister pleasure boatsnot to mention blackmail and murderwould a virtuous topless dancer join forces with a cool but clueless cop. And...

A Novel&';No other writer in recent memory has called to mind so clearly the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.&' --The Washington Post In Almost Perfect, Alice Adams brilliantly and movingly explores what happens to love when the beloved is transformed into someone unrecognizable. They were an almost perfect couple. They met when Stella Blake was not...