Drought and economic depression are driving thousands from Oklahoma. As their land becomes just another strip in the dust bowl, the Joads, a family of sharecroppers, decide they have no choice but to follow. They head west, towards California, where they hope to find work and a future for their family.

Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

This is a portrait of people on the margin of society, dependent on one another for both physical and emotional survival. Written in 1945, this book focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual.

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle
Lire la suite Fermer

Both a fast-paced story of social unrest and strike, and the tale of one young man''s struggle for identity, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE is a novel about the apocalyptic violence that breaks out when the masses become the mob. Set in California apple country, a strike by migrant workers spirals out of control, as principled defiance turns into blind fanaticism. Caught in this upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who finds himself briefly becoming the leader of the strike before being crushed in its service. IN DUBIOUS BATTLE explores and dramatises many of the ideas and themes key to Steinbeck''s writing.>

The Wayward Bus travels through the backroads of the lush California countryside, transporting the lost and the lonely to new destinations. Juan Chicoy is at the wheel, a man of the land, hot-blooded and uninhibited. His passengers include Ernest, a travelling salesman out for fun, seventeen-year-old Kit, also known as Pimples, and Camille the stripper who dances at stag nights and takes the star-struck young Norma under her wing. This powerful and unsentimental novel becomes a story of crisis and passion, love and longing, as the travellers reveal their secrets and journey away from their pasts and towards, possibly, the promise of the future. The Wayward Bus, with its profound insight into human desires and failings, remains one of Steinbeck's most powerful novels. Lire la suite Fermer

Collected here for the first time in a deluxe paperback volume are six of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck's most widely read and beloved short novels-'Tortilla Flat, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row and The Pearl. From Steinbeck's tale of commitment, loneliness, and hope in Of Mice and Men, to his tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of Monterey society in Cannery Row, to The Pearl's mythic examination of the fallacy of the American dream, Steinbeck created stories that were realistic, rugged, and imbued with energy and resilience.

It would be impossible to overstate John Steinbeck's enduring influence on American letters. Profuse with a richness of language, sly humor, and empathy for even his most flawed characters, Steinbeck's books are still widely read and deeply relevant today.
The Portable Steinbeck is a grand sampling of his most important and popular works. Here are the complete novels Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony, together with self-contained excerpts from several longer novels, the text of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a fascinating introduction by Pascal Covici, Jr., son of Steinbeck's longtime editor, and a new introduction from leading Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw that puts Steinbeck in the context of the 21st century

Jacob and Edna have fallen on hard times. They haven't lost everything the way others have, but they have lost enough. When one of their hens stops laying eggs, it seems like the final straw. Jacob is determined to solve the mystery. What he discovers is as heartbreaking as it is revelatory.

This is just one of the remarkable stories in Burning Bright - an award-winning collection that confirms why Ron Rash has won comparisons with John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Màrquez.

It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, as Ron Rash does with the rugged, brutal landscape of the Appalachian Mountains. At the same time, again and again he conjures characters that live long in the mind after their stories have been told.
Lire la suite Fermer