"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, [this book] portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

"First published in 1886 as a 'shilling shocker, ' 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' takes the basic struggle between good and evil and adds to the mix bourgeois respectability, urban violence, and class conflict. The result is a tale that has taken on the force of myth in the popular imagination. This Broadview edition provides a selection of contextual material, including contemporary reviews of the novel, Stevenson's essay 'A Chapter on Dreams, ' and excerpts...

This amply annotated edition of Wharton's 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton's preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, "Mrs. Manstey's View." It is accompanied by the editor's comprehensive introduction and a wide array of readings on topics central to the novella: tragedy, health and fitness, sex and marriage, and turn-of-the-century New England poverty and isolation. Of her twenty-five novels and...

#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection

"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut,

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In the small town of West Annett, Maine in the 1950's, the minister Tyler Caskey is still grieving two years after the death of his wife. One daughter, Jeannie is sent upstate to live with his overbearing mother. The other Katherine has become antisocial. Tyler turns to his housekeeper Connie Hatch when her teacher suggests Katherine speak to the school counselor. This starts gossip about Katherine's stability and Tyler's possible affair with the...

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices--those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal--that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.