From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers - the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War.

The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.

There are six articles in this edition: "Wealth of Nations", by David Remnick; "Mammoths", by Ryan Lizza; "Fraud Alert", by Jeffrey Toobin; "Wakefield", by E. L. Doctorow; "Full Exposure", by Sasha Frere-Jones; and "Gone Missing", by Anthony Lane

E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Now here are Doctorow's rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary to the comic to the cosmic. As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that "we know by what we create".

Almost hypnotic in its narrative drive, The March stunningly renders the countless lives swept up in the violence of a country at war with itself. The great march in E.L. Doctorow's hands becomes something more, a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

When a large brass cross disappears from a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, and then reappears on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side, a New York City novelist thinks the story may be his next novel. He befriends the church's maverick rector and the young woman rabbi, who are trying to discover who committed this strange double act of desecration. Doctorow's masterwork is a religious novel like no other!