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Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siècle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era. Around Central Park carriages give way to motor cars, Prohibition to free love, but Homer and Langley adapt: their townhouse fills and empties and fills again, with servants, lodgers, tea-dancers and gangsters. They are mocked and spied on, embraced by hippies and besieged by bailiffs, but as the world turns ever more incomprehensible Homer and Langley hold fast to their principles of self-reliance, courage, kindness and love, and they endure.
From a master of modern American letters comes an enthralling collection of brilliant short fiction about people who, as E. L. Doctorow notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.” Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous classics, All the Time in the World is resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow.
FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment, and after a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunning fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, The Book of Daniel is an intensely moving tale of political martyrdom and the search for meaning.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times-funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound.
“An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.” –The Washington Post Book World One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the po...
In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.
A superb collection of fifteen stories—including “Wakefield,” the inspiration for the film starring Bryan Cranston—by the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope, or an actual glimpse of greatness. In “A House on the Plains,” a mother has a plan for financial indepe...
This book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow.
Winner of the National Book Award • “Marvelous . . . You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.”—The New York Times Hailed by critics from coast to coast and by readers of all ages, this resonant novel is one of E.L. Doctorow’s greatest works of fiction. It is 1939, and even as the rumbles of progress are being felt worldwide, New York City clings to remnants of the past, with horse-drawn wagons, street peddlers, and hurdy-gurdy men still toiling in its streets. For nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler, life is stoopball and radio serials, idolizing Joe DiMaggio, and enduring the conflicts betw...