Modern American Classics

Step into Ernest Hemingway’s unforgettable world with a version designed for today’s reader. This refreshed edition of The Sun Also Rises: Adapted for Modern Readers keeps Hemingway’s spare, powerful voice while offering lightly clarified language, clean, contemporary formatting, and readable typography. Obsolete usages are gently updated, dense passages subtly smoothed, and dialogue punctuation modernized, helping you move effortlessly through the story without footnotes—so the emotions, not the mechanics of the page, command your attention. Set among the cafés of 1920s Paris and ...

THIS EDITION of The Great Gatsby not only preserves the charm and elegance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale but also carefully adapts the language for today’s readers. By modernizing vocabulary and clarifying cultural references, this version remains faithful to the original story while making it accessible and engaging for a new generation. Perfect for casual reading, book clubs, educational use, or family discussions, this adaptation offers a fresh take on a timeless masterpiece. Step into the opulent world of Jay Gatsby and the Jazz Age, where ambition, love, and the American ...

A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman. IN THE PAST fifty...

Join Tom Sawyer on his unforgettable adventures along the mighty Mississippi River in this modernized edition of Mark Twain's classic tale. Crafted for today's readers, this adaptation offers a seamless reading experience with clean formatting and contemporary typography. The language has been gently updated for clarity, ensuring that Twain's wit and charm shine through without losing the essence of the original narrative. Dive into a timeless story with ease and enjoyment like never before. Set in the vibrant world of 19th-century Missouri, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer explores themes of ...

Brought to you by Penguin. When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among...

Dive into the life of one of America's founding fathers with "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Adapted for Modern Readers." This refreshed edition breathes new life into Franklin's timeless narrative with clean formatting and contemporary typography, making it accessible to today’s readers. We've retained Franklin's original tone and themes, while lightly clarifying the language for a smoother reading experience, allowing you to appreciate the wit and wisdom of this visionary thinker without barriers. Set in the vibrant era of American independence, Franklin’s journey from humble ...

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priest's...

"[Narrator Therese] Plummer's talented performance is both illuminating and poignant." -- AudioFile Magazine Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award Fortieth Anniversary Edition This program includes a bonus conversation with the author. A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story...

When European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: the worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to...

Answer the call of adventure with this refreshed edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, adapted for modern readers without losing its rugged soul. Clean, contemporary typography and carefully clarified language make London’s powerful prose more accessible while preserving his original tone, pacing, and intensity. Whether you’re discovering Buck’s story for the first time or revisiting a favorite classic, this edition offers a smooth, engaging reading experience for today’s audiences. Set against the harsh beauty of the Klondike Gold Rush, The Call of the Wild explores ...

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became both the recognized master of the form and one of our best-loved fiction writers. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.

Step into Gatsby’s glittering Jazz Age—without tripping over the prose. This edition tells the complete story of Fitzgerald’s classic in contemporary English. Follow Nick Carraway into a summer of champagne dreams and fragile illusions, as the mysterious Jay Gatsby pursues the one thing money can’t buy. The parties dazzle; the heartbreak lingers. If you’ve ever meant to read The Great Gatsby (or revisit it with fresh eyes), this contemporary-language edition invites you in—and doesn’t let you go.

When Garnet Raven was three years old, he was taken from his home on an Ojibway Indian reserve and placed in a series of foster homes. Having reached his mid-teens, he escapes at the first available opportunity, only to find himself cast adrift on the streets of the big city. Having skirted the...

The foundations of society are more seriously shaken today than they were in Socrates’s time. Men who, reasonably enough, see no hope of preserving the ancestral order, are building new societies of one sort or another, from all of which certain fundamental values are absent. It seems worthwhile, then, to recall a man who under similar circumstances stood for the spirit of free inquiry, for the inviolability of the individual, with that lonely honesty and courage which are the badge of human dignity. — From the “Author’s Note” “Mask of Silenus deserves both reading and pondering...

The Composer's Canvas By Dr. Monique Rodgers Amara Scott is a rising star in the world of classical music, but her path is anything but traditional. As a young African American composer, she’s breaking stereotypes and blending genres to create a sound that’s raw, powerful, and uniquely hers. From struggling to make ends meet in New York City to going viral with her groundbreaking music, Amara’s journey is filled with passion, heartbreak, and resilience. But the spotlight brings challenges—backstabbing mentors, industry gatekeepers, and the relentless pressure to prove herself. When ...

Rediscover one of America’s greatest adventures — now told in clear, modern language that captures all the wit, humor, and heart of Mark Twain’s classic masterpiece. Join young Huck Finn as he escapes his troubled home life and journeys down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave seeking freedom. Their daring voyage is filled with danger, laughter, and moral awakening — a timeless story about friendship, courage, and the fight for what’s right.

The late 16th-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default.

National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, reveals how California’s Gold Rush forged the modern United States—and lit the long fuse to civil war In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow...

There are more slaves in the world today than any other time in history.Enter the world of human trafficking and explore what we can do together to end this global crime. Where Were You?: A Profile of Modern Slavery by Matthew Friedman provides an up-to-date overview of human trafficking, a...

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.