First published in 1989, this novel tells the story of two friends, John Wheelwright and Owen Meany, who grew up together as boys, but who have different backgrounds and appearances. Owen, for one thing, remains stunted at under five feet tall as an adult. He also believes he has a purpose to accomplish. Themes include the importance of faith, and the concept of fate.

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

The Folded Leaf, first published in 1945, is a classic American coming-of-age novel. In the suburbs of Chicago in the 1920s, two boys initiate an unusual friendship: Lymie Peters, a skinny and somewhat clumsy boy who always gets good grades, and newcomer Spud Latham, a star athlete and mediocre student. Spud accepts Lymie's devotion without questioning it, but once high school ends and the boys enter college, tensions begin to arise between them....

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, three teenagers in West Germany head for Berlin to join a May Day rally on the Communist side of the divided city, only to find themselves arrested by the East German secret police.

"Danny Timmons has looked up to Jack Bailey ever since Jack saved two small children from drowning during the Great Flood of 1940. Now, with his father away fighting in World War II and his mother about to have a new baby, Danny relies on Jack's friendship and guidance more than ever. So when Jack goes missing without a trace from their small Appalachian town, Danny is determined to find him. He wonders if Jack's abusive father could be behind his...

Boyhood trauma returns to haunt the lives of several men when the daughter of one of them is murdered and another, now a homicide detective, takes the case.

Green Town, Illinois is visited by Mr. Dark and his Pandemonium Carnival. Terrifying things begin to happen when two adventurous boys stumble onto the Carnival's deadly and destructive secret.

After surviving a coma, 13-year-old Frankie Hermans is left paralyzed, mute, and bound to a wheelchair. He sees his life as hopeless until he meets Joe Speedboat, a new boy in town whose sheer kinetic energy and boundless enthusiasm gives Frankie--and the rest of his sleepy Dutch town--a new lease on life.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart - half...