The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden...

A master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. In June 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaugher. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother,...

A conflict of loyalties between Gene and his fearless friend, Phineas, leads to tragedy.

From a tormented orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. His cravings take him to Paris at age eighteen to try his hand at art, then back to London to study medicine. But even so, nothing can sate his nagging hunger for experience. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever.

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that author Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going...

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative voice in contemporary fiction. This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular, hilarious, and devastating.

For generations the Millers have lived in Miller's Valley. Mimi Miller tells about her life with intimacy and honesty. As Mimi eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes the people around her, she discovers more and more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities of friendship and the risks of passion, loyalty, and love. Home, as Mimi begins to realize, can be a place where it's just as...

Newton Booth Tarkington (1869—1946) was an American dramatist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Among only three other novelists to have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once, Tarkington was one of the greatest authors of the 1910s and 1920s who helped usher in Indiana's Golden Age of literature. In his 1914 work "Penrod", Tarkington presents a series of sketches that depict the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy called Penrod Schofield living...

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: it's Franny and Jim's thirty-fifth anniversary, and their daughter has graduated from high school. The sunlit island also promises an escape from the tensions simmering at home. But all does not go according to plan: secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated....