The classic story of a boy who makes his own rules and the small Missouri town where he and his friends experience the adventures of a lifetime. Filled with schoolyard pranks, buried treasures, spooky caves, secret gangs, and grave robbers, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is entertainment of the highest order. The clever schemes of its eponymous hero--from tricking his friends into completing his chores to sneaking into his own funeral--are the stuff...

"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--

"The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two short story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime -- Everything that Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find."--Back cover.

"Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies-one light-skinned, the other dark-are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably...

In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there's still time,” demands the dying Sunraider....

"Can Miss Julia spring J.D. Pickens from a sheriff's clutches and investigate a cult--plus keep up appearances as a proper Southern lady?"--

In Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, a young war veteran who returns to a Tennessee mountain town to found a new religion blinds himself with quicklime and in dying finds his own salvation.

Faulkner examines the changing relationship of black to white and of man to the land, and weaves a complex work that is rich in understanding of the human condition.

The case is an unexpected bother for Inspector Witherspoon's household, already abuzz with plans for the holidays, but Scotland Yard wants this crime solved before Christmas. Now the busy sleuths must rally in support of their Inspector -- especially since the clues are harder to find than a silver sixpence in a plum pudding.

"Wedged between the bluffs and the river for which it's named, there's a small and all-but-forgotten town. Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change--and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won't...