Author: Malcolm Lowry
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: classics, perennial, novel, volcano
Number of Pages: 432
Published: 2000-05-01
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0060955228
ISBN-13: 9780060955229

Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Here the consul’s debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life. Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul’s life--the Day of the Dead, 1938. His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. Yvonne’s mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh,

Author: Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: classics, perennial, america, democracy
Number of Pages: 800
Published: 2000-08-01
List price: $20.00
ISBN-10: 0060956666
ISBN-13: 9780060956660

Tocqueville’s monumental book is as relevant today as when it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century, and it remains the most comprehensive, penetrating, and astute picture of American life, politics, and morals ever written -- whether by an American or, as in this case, a foreign visitor. This special edition contains the entire two volumes of Democracy in America, based on the second revised and corrected text of the 1961 French edition, meticulously edited by the distinguished Tocqueville scholar J.P. Mayer.

Author: Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: tie, novel, love, songs, kings, play, mambo
Number of Pages: 480
Published: 2005-07-01
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 0060845309
ISBN-13: 9780060845308

It’s 1949, the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become, by night, stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created an enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author in

Author: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: literary, investigation, experiment, volume, archipelago, gulag
Number of Pages: 704
Published: 2007-08-01
List price: $21.99
ISBN-10: 0061253715
ISBN-13: 9780061253713

Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: novel, vine, gourd, jonah
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 2008-01-01
List price: $13.99
ISBN-10: 0061350192
ISBN-13: 9780061350191

Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, originally published in 1934, tells the story of John Buddy Pearson, "a living exultation" of a young man who loves too many women for his own good. Lucy, his long-suffering wife, is his true love, but there’s also Mehaley and Big ’Oman, as well as the scheming Hattie, who conjures hoodoo spells to ensure his attentions. Even after becoming the popular pastor of Zion Hope, where his sermons and prayers for cleansing rouse the congregation’s fervor, John has to confess that though he is a preacher on Sundays, h

Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: classics, perennial, son, native
Number of Pages: 544
Published: 2005-08-01
List price: $14.99
ISBN-10: 006083756X
ISBN-13: 9780060837563

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Keywords: language, creates, instinct, mind
Number of Pages: 576
Published: 2007-09-01
List price: $15.99
ISBN-10: 0061336467
ISBN-13: 9780061336461

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America.