Written Before 2000

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Updated May 28, 2025
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Prozac nation : young and depressed in America
Wurtzel, Elizabeth
Paper Book
Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword "Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back." --New York Times "A book that became a...
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dumas, Alexandre
Paper Book
Hope. Justice. Vengeance. A classic tale you don't want to miss! Best-selling author Alexandre Dumas--who also wrote The Three Musketeers--tells this heartbreaking yet heroic tale of Edmond Dantes who takes revenge on the men responsible for his unjust fourteen-year imprisonment,...
The godfather
Puzo, Mario
Paper Book
The unforgettable saga of an American crime family that became a #1 bestseller and global phenomenon.   Since its release in 1969, The Godfather has made an indelible mark on American crime fiction. From the mind of master storyteller Mario Puzo, it traces the Corleone...
Into the wild
Krakauer, Jon.
Paper Book
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhikes to Alaska and walks alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body is found by a moose hunter. How Chris McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
The princess bride : S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure
Goldman, William
Paper Book
William Goldman's beloved story of Buttercup, Westley, and their fellow adventurers in a deluxe limited edition featuring sprayed edges and a new cover perfect for fans of the movie and the book alike. A tale of true love and high adventure, pirates, princesses, giants, miracles, fencing,...
The mists of Avalon
Bradley, Marion Zimmer.
Paper Book
Now available in a beautiful new hardcover edition is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. "A remarkable feat of imagination".--Mary Renault.
Go tell it on the mountain
Baldwin, James
Paper Book
One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times). Baldwin's classic novel opened new...
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas and other American stories
Thompson, Hunter S.
Paper Book
The 50th-anniversary edition of the classic, savagely comic account of a trip to Las Vegas that came to represent what happened to America in the 1960s--and a founding document of "gonzo journalism"--featuring the original artwork by Ralph Steadman and a new introduction by...
One flew over the cuckoo's nest : a novel
Kesey, Ken.
Paper Book
Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest<...
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
Now a Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. The Handmaid's Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (New York Times) The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its...
If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home
O'Brien, Tim
Paper Book
A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of The Things They Carried "One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam." --Minneapolis Star and Tribune Before writing...
The grapes of wrath
Steinbeck, John
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning...
The Bacchae of Euripides : a new version
Euripides.
Paper Book
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams presents this fluent and accessible version of the Athenian playwright Euripides's great tragedy. Based on the Greek myth of the god Dionysus's punishment of King Pentheus and his mother Agave, Williams' The Bacchae of Euripides...
Wise blood
O'Connor, Flannery.
Paper Book
The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes,...
Great expectations
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
One of Charles Dickens's most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the young Pip's first terrifying encounter with...
Tarzan of the Apes Tarzan Series, Book 1
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Audiobook
Born of noble stock to parents who become marooned on the savage West African coast, the young Lord Greystoke is orphaned in his first year of life. Named Tarzan by the great apes that raise him, he must learn the law of the jungle to survive. As he matures, his strength and agility develop to match...
Rose Madder
King, Stephen
Paper Book
The house of the spirits : a novel
Allende, Isabel
Paper Book
This "spectacular... absorbing and distinguished work...is a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America" (The New York Times Book Review). The House of the Spirits, which introduced Isabel...
Angela's ashes : a memoir
McCourt, Frank.
Paper Book
Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the...
High-rise
Ballard, J. G.
Paper Book
When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on "enemy" floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re...
The deep end of the ocean
Mitchard, Jacquelyn.
Paper Book
It happened in a flash. One minute Beth Cappadora wa the happily married mother of three. The next minute, one of them, her favorite child, three-year-old Ben, was missing. Was he kidnapped? No one knew, and as minutes lengthened into hours, days, weeks, months, years, even the woman police officer...
Hannibal
Harris, Thomas
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Is it as good as Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs? No . . . this one is better."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review You remember Hannibal Lecter: gentleman, genius, cannibal. Seven years have passed...
Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
Albom, Mitch
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The blockbuster book that is one of the top-selling memoirs of all time and is the basis for the Emmy Award-winning film and stage adaptations that have been produced continuously worldwide since 2002 * An unforgettable story of friendship...
The remains of the day
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Paper Book
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER * From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is "an intricate and dazzling novel" (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.   This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly...
The pillars of the earth
Follett, Ken.
Paper Book
Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known. Everything readers...
Love in the time of cholera
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying...
Maus : a survivor's tale
Spiegelman, Art.
Paper Book
The bestselling first installment of the graphic novel acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker) * PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * One of Variety's...
The diary of a young girl : the definitive edition
Frank, Anne
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Updated with enlightening new material, this is the complete, definitive edition of Anne Frank's diary, "the single most compelling personal account of the Holocaust" (The New York Times Book Review) Discovered in the attic where she spent the last...
Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison "A...
The horse whisperer
Evans, Nicholas
Paper Book
A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenage girl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother's quest begins -- to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to.....
Into thin air : a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster
Krakauer, Jon.
Paper Book
When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin his long, dangerous descent from 29,028 feet, twenty other climbers were still...
Patriot games
Clancy, Tom
Paper Book
The phenomenal bestselling author of The Hunt for Red Octoberand The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy is one of America's most acclaimedstorytellers. Now he targets a CIA analyst and his family in the deadliest game of our time --international terrorism. In an explosive wave of violence, an ultra-left...
The thorn birds
McCullough, Colleen
Paper Book
"Beautiful....Compelling entertainment." --New York Times One of the most beloved novels of all time, The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough's sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback, returns to enthrall a new generation.<...

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