A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

The inhabitants of the Rochester house wield a strange power over their neighbors.

For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the...

In Depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences.

Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, the hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody tends and trains his horse, restlessly anticipating the moment he will sit high upon Gabilan's saddle. But when Gabilan falls ill, Jody...

“Teems with sharp observation, profound moral insight, high satiric wit, and all manner of aesthetic delight.” –The New York Times Book Review

A Penguin Classic

This definitive edition brings together all the works that Pulitzer Prize-winning Marianne Moore wished to preserve, covering more than sixty years of writing, and incorporating the final revisions she made to the texts. The poems...

A horse in nineteenth-century England recounts his experiences with both good and bad masters.

"As the ward of the widowed physician Dr. Leslie, young Nan Prince becomes interested in medicine. But when she enters a medical college, she finds she must choose between marriage and a career as a doctor, between the expectations of society and her duty to her true self. In part an homage to Sarah Orne Jewett's beloved father, A Country Doctor portrays an America on the verge of change and Nan, ultimately, as a courageous young woman with a new...

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, and centers on the design, production and dispatch...

Narrated by a young Native American living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, Winter in the Blood is the story of a man living out the tragedy of his people. Intelligent, sensitive, and self-destructive, he is haunted by the untimely deaths of his father and older brother and the shards of his once proud heritage. He sleepwalks through his days working on his stepfather's cattle ranch and consoles himself with alcohol and women. An ironic...