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...

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 ...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'ONE OF THE GREATEST AMERICAN NOVELS EVER WRITTEN' 'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man...

"[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...

Matt Bomer's heart-rending narration in this new audiobook edition offers a fresh and poignant listening experience of Hanya Yanagihara's timeless modern classic. Perfect if you're an A Little Life fan or a new listener. 'I'm not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought...

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 ...

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.

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.

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...

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...

From an award-winning author comes a stunning and deeply moving book based on the popular spiritual "Standing in the Need of Prayer." The classic lyrics have been reworked to chronicle the milestones, struggles, tragedies, and triumphs of African American history. This inspirational audiobook...

Narrator Jenna Ushkowitz is an award-winning actress, singer, producer, and podcast host best known for her role as Tina Cohen-Chang on Glee. Meet Anna K! Every happy teenage girl is the same, while every unhappy teenage girl is miserable in her own special way... At seventeen, Anna K is at the...

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 ...

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. Discover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers. 'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is...

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year...

A hundred years after Fitzgerald, the novel comes back — not as reprint, not as homage, but as retelling in the now. The Great Gatsby was never a period piece. It was mistaken for one because of its vocabulary — the roadsters, the gin, the telephone rings in the hall. Strip the 1925 surface away and what remains is a novel about performed wealth, curated identity, casual bigotry at a dinner table, and the specifically American ache of building a fraudulent self to become worthy of someone who stopped being worth the worship long ago. In other words: a novel about now. The Great Gatsby: ...

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...