Cult Classic Novels

"The hero-narrator of 'The Catcher in the Rye' is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden...

[Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. "A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine" (The...

From the Publisher: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five...

"Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants--a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made"--

This is the story of a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it is not an Earth book, has never been published on Earth, and, until the terrible catastrophe occurred, was never seen or even heard of by any Earthman. Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book. Or, this is the story of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a number-one best seller in England, a weekly radio series with millions of fanatic listeners, and soon to be a television...

The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society. When it was first published in 1967, The Outsiders defied convention with its immediate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of Ponyboy and his struggle to find a place for himself in a difficult world. Thirty years later, it speaks to teenagers as powerfully as ever. Puffin is proud to publish...