“I Served the King of England” was born during one summer month in blinding sunlight. The narrator, Ditie, a waiter, becomes a millionaire and owner of a hotel, but he loses everything when Communists seize power. Ditie's surname ...read more

Foreword by Dave Eggers

Smart, whimsical, and often scathing, the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut influenced a generation of American writers—including Dave Eggers, author of this volume’s Foreword. In these previously unpublished ...read more

Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. It was Waugh's first published novel; an earlier attempt, entitled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and ...read more

This short novel tells the story of Hugh Person, a young American editor, and the memory of his four trips to a small village in Switzerland over the course of nearly two decades. He first visits the village as a young man, along with his father. ...read more

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California, ...read more

There is no writer more quintessentially American than John Steinbeck. More than forty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Yet his nonfiction-the writings in which he spoke directly about his ...read more

What Maisie Knew is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in the Chap-Book and (revised and abridged) in the New Review in 1897 and then as a book later in ...read more

The Mandarins (French: Les Mandarins) is a 1954 roman-à-clef by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize in 1954 for The Mandarins.

The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French ...read more