- “It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”
“I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or—the color work in a ten-cent magazine.”
Read of the Day: Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million by O Henry
Click the photo to read this fantastic collection of short stories.
“I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.”
“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”
Read of the Day: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Click the photo to download and read a pdf version of this fascinating novel, which earned Vonnegut a Master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago (where his original thesis was rejected).
“Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no “moments of truth.” It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one’s own unanswered.”
Read of the Day: V. by Thomas Pynchon
This award-winning, Modernist novel is available on Amazon for as little as a dollar.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
Read of the Day: “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
Click the photo to read this 434-line modernist poem, which Eliot had originally titled, “He do the Police in Different Voices.”
“They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.”
Read of the Day: Daisy Miller by Henry James
Click the photo to read this classic work of American literature.
“You’re bound to get idears if you go thinkin’ about stuff.”
Read of the Day: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Click the photo for a pdf version of this classic American novel.
“They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”
Read of the Day: On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Click the photo for a .pdf version of Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, which is often lauded as one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Read of the Day: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens)
Click the photo for a .pdf download of what is arguably the greatest (and most controversial) American novel ever penned.
“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
Read of the Day: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Click the photo to download a full-text (doc) version of this groundbreaking and award-winning collection of short stories.
“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”
Read of the Day: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Click the photo for a free .pdf version of the novel.
- “It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”
Read of the Day: Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales Of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson
Click the photo for a full-text version of this “short story cycle” novel.
“I’ve got to get some seeds. I’ve got to get some seeds, right away. Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground.”
Read of the Day: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Click the photo for a .pdf version of this both iconic and tragic American play.
“You are all a lost generation.” -Epigraph, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Read of the Day: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Click the photo to download a full-text pdf version of the novel.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
Read of the Day: Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
Click the link below for a full-pdf version of the novel:
http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/huxley/bravenewworld.pdf
“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool… You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow… And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
Read of the Day: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Click the photo for a full-text version of the novel
