Hardcover Fiction

by Frederic Wakeman · Rinehart. & Company

by Taylor Caldwell · Scribner

by Margery Sharp · Little, Brown

Eighty years in the life of an English woman who elopes with her drawing master.

by H. Allen Smith · Doubleday

A riotous, bawdy, and often slapstick story about a large yellow cat who, according to numerous complaints, had been assaulting dogs, stealing tennis balls, stalking mailmen, and attacking Macy's trucks. An eccentric millionaire who loathes all canines, is struck with admiration for any cat with the guts to go out and avenge his entire race and decides to adopt him. Thaddeus Whitcomb Banner (the dog-hating millionaire), charmed by the cat's pugnacious attitude, calls his new pet, Rhubarb, a baseball term for a violent and noisy altercation. Rhubarb takes a liking to Thad and his press secretary Eric Yaeger, but he is indifferent if not downright vicious to everyone else. When his owner dies only forty-eight hours after signing his last will and testament, Rhubarb is there, sitting in his master's lap. In his will, Thad praises Rhubarb for his unsparing love and solace and thereby leaves him his entire fortune, including ownership of a professional baseball team, the New York Loons. Eric Yaeger is appointed Rhubarb's guardian, and Thad's daughter Myra, a mean-spirited young hipster doofus, is summarily disinherited. Although initially reluctant to play baseball for a team owned by a cat, Loons players are tricked into believing that Rhubarb is a good luck charm and subsequently begin winning games. Meanwhile, Myra, not about to let a cat get away with her millions, begins a lawsuit to have the will invalidated, while her lawyer is part of a scheme to have Rhubarb murdered by a woman who has a mysterious connection to Myra. As for Eric, Rhubarb's frantic guardian -- well, Eric faces challenges only a fierce and concupiscent kitty cat can provide.

by Helen Howe · Simon & Schuster

"Harvard faculty and their wives before and during World War II." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

by John Jennings · Doubleday

by Mary Jane Ward · Random House

A 75th anniversary edition of the landmark novel that forever changed the way we think about mental illness and its treatment After experiencing a nervous breakdown in 1940, novelist Mary Jane Ward was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and committed to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York. From that horrific experience came this landmark novel. The Snake Pit tells the story of Virginia Cunningham, a young white middle-class woman who finds herself in a psychiatric hospital with no memory of how she got there. It opens with Virginia in a highly confused state of mind, the reader initially as challenged as Virginia to make sense of her surroundings. Virginia's treatments seem a series of cruel punishments inflicted on her for crimes she cannot name, while the penalty for failing to follow the hospital's many seemingly arbitrary rules is transfer to another, even worse ward. The novel was memorably adapted for the screen two years after it was published, with Olivia de Havilland playing the role of Virginia, its powerful and ambivalent conclusion softened for Hollywood. Together, the book and film had an outsized influence on popular perceptions of mental illness, and The Snake Pit is often credited with setting in motion important investigative journalism and the introduction of legislation at the state level to reform the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Too long out of print, Ward's unforgettable novel belongs in the company of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden--three books it influenced or inspired.

by Howard Fast · Duell, Sloan & Pearce

by Marguerite Steen · Doubleday

A masseuse abortionist and divorcee tries to bring up her two daughters to wealth and respectability.

by W.Somerset Maugham · Heinemann

Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own times in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.

by Ruth Moore · Morrow

by Frank Yerby · Dial Press

by Ann Bridge · Chatto & Windus

by Sholom Aleichem · Crown Publishers, Inc

by Halldor Laxness · Knopf

A beautifully jacketed hardcover edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author's beloved epic novel about a stubbornly independent Icelandic sheep farmer and his spirited daughter. Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

by Nancy Mitford · Random House