"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...

Easy Rawlins' life begins to fall apart around him when he arrives home from work to find a friend has left his daughter on Easy's doorstep, another friend has gone missing and is wanted by the police, and his girlfriend is leaving him to marry another man, forcing Easy to find a way to save his friends and protect his own heart.

Traveling to recently unified Berlin in search of a little-known avant-garde jazzman whom he believes to be a musical kindred spirit, disaffected Los Angeles DJ Darky encounters the dramatic local changes that have transpired after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and ruminates on a range of cultural, social, and philosophical topics.

We last saw Easy Rawlins in Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives. Soon, he and his murderous sidekick, Mouse, are cruising the mean streets of L.A. in all their psychedelic 1967 glory to look for a young black man who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator's Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual,...

"A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt...

A golf novel in which Bagger Vance, a caddy who holds the secret of the Authentic Swing, has a profound influence on the life of a young boy.

"The Confessions of Nat Turner reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, William Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations-and hopes-which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who had held his people in bondage."--provided by publisher

Kingdom County, Vermont, is tucked between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains not far from the Canadian border, a small town of proud people with long memories. When the new preacher, Walter Andrews, came to town, he was an outsider, a stranger. He was also a black man. It was the summer James Kinneson turned thirteen. Son of the newspaper owner and younger brother of the town's fiery defense lawyer, James witnessed the shattering events...

This combination of superbly developed characters, a realistic story line, and descriptions that profoundly capture the essence of this country's urban experience—in black and white—is the formula for the making of this truly great American novel.