"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...

"Stephen Crane's immortal masterpiece about the nightmare of war was first published in 1895 and brought its young author immediate international fame. Set during the Civil War, it tells of the brutal disillusionment of a young recruit who had dreamed of the thrill and glory of war, only to find himself fleeing the horror of a battlefield. Shame over his cowardice drives him to seek to redeem himself by being wounded -- earning what he calls the "red...

Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. [This book] is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man.