E. L. Doctorow

"E. L. Doctorow selected some of his finest stories to create this pinnacle collection, his final project before his death. There are 15 stories total, including "The Water Works," "Jolene," "All the Time in the World," and Doctorow's own revision of "Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate.""--

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient...

A free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York's fabled Collyer brothers depicts Homer and Langley as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, facing odyssean perils as they struggle to survive the wars, political movements, and technological advances of the last century.

Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Controversial for its honest depiction of work, desire, and urban life, Sister Carrie has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Despite poor reviews upon publication, the novel is now considered a landmark of American literature. Tired of the countryside, Carrie Meeber moves to Chicago to live with her older...