Anthony Heald

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling novel about a peasant farmer and his family in early twentieth-century China.
The Good Earth is Buck’s classic story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple’s fortunes improve over the years: They have sons, and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property...

Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey,...

The compelling account of recklessness, tragedy, courage and rescue, a book whose sobering depiction of Nature's danger is, tempered by unforgettable portraits of the triumphant human spirit.

In the tradition of Tuesdays with Morrie and Small Miracles, a screenwriter and playwright shares funny, poignant, and deeply inspiring stories about communications from the other side. A postcard from heaven is not a revelation from on high—rather, it's “a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of a presence” of someone who's passed away. These eerie coincidences are uncanny enough to suggest that they come from the spirits...

The destruction of Atlanta is an iconic moment in American history—it was the centerpiece of the hugely successful book and movie Gone with the Wind. But though the epic sieges of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Berlin have all been explored in best-selling histories, the one great American example has been treated only cursorily as a footnote. Marc Wortman remedies that conspicuous absence in grand fashion with The Bonfire, an absorbing narrative history...

Two drugged-out couples contemplate life and morality in "Leviathan," a classic short-story by the masterful Tobias Wolff. For Helen's thirtieth birthday party, her husband decides to throw her a small party. Armed with booze and three grams of cocaine, the four partyers-Helen, her husband, and another couple-spend the night and the next morning in a drug-induced stupor. As their talk turns to past misdeeds and shameful acts, the couples begin to...

One of Tobias Wolff's classic tales, "The Liar" is the story of a deceitful teenage boy and his religious, resolute mother. James is a liar. He enjoys inventing fantastic stories about his family, particularly his mother. Margaret is orderly, stubborn, and judgmental-a woman who throws rocks at hungry bears and never misses four o'clock Mass. She loves her children but has always struggled with James. Like his deceased father, he's fascinated by...

In this short-story from Our Story Begins, three friends confront their relationships to one another as they work on plans to build their very own airplane. Clark's parents are rich, supplying the boys with all they need to follow their pursuits, making films and building catapults. Meanwhile, Freddy's family is dealing with the loss of his older brother, and Freddy's friends are having a hard time knowing how to act around him anymore. The boys...

Tobias Wolff's masterful short-story about one woman's quiet revenge on the pomposity and arrogance of academia Meticulous, funny, eccentric-Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless. The closing of Brandon College, the institution...