"The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks."
As the Orient Express hurtles across Europe on its three-day journey from Ostend to Constantinople, its voyage binds together the lives of several of its passengers in a fateful interlock. The menagerie of characters includes Coral Musker, a beautiful chorus girl; Carleton Myatt, a rich Jewish businessman; Richard John, a mysterious and kind doctor returning to his native Belgrade; the spiteful journalist...

MI6's man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true...

First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene's most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still...

"The Adventures of Augie March is the great American Novel. Search no further." -Martin Amis

As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this novel by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Deptression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. His own oddity is reflected in the companions he encounters--plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and "hole-and corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn...

"Rebecca West's magnum opus . . . one of the great books of our time." --The New Yorker

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly...

This edition features George Orwell's best known novels - 1984 and Animal Farm - with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

Animal Farm is Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution -- an...

From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of God Is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages--with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices--past and present--that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and...

In this widely acclaimed biographical essay, Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. In true emulative and contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem. Answering both the detractors and the false claimants, Hitchens tears down the facade of sainthood erected by the hagiographers and rebuts the critics point by point. He examines Orwell and his perspectives on fascism, empire, feminism, and Englishness, as...

Christopher Hitchens, provocateur and contrarian on the Left, makes the news as often as he reports it, and writes about the most controversial news and current events. Christopher Caldwell is a fresh and objective columnist in the opposite camp. Together, they present the best writing from opposite corners of the political ring at the end of the last century. These incisive observers examine each other's choices and discuss in separate introductions just what they think of the picks. "Hitchens has made a career of disagreement and dissent, of being a thorn in search of a side."Publishers...

-I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.- Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliche, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa (-a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud-), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael...

Since the end of the Cold War so-called experts have been predicting the eclipse of America's "special relationship" with Britain. But as events have shown, especially in the wake of 9/11, the political and cultural ties between America and Britain have grown stronger. Blood, Class and Empire examines the dynamics of this relationship, its many cultural manifestations--the James Bond series, PBS "brit Kitsch," Rudyard Kipling--and explains why it still persists. Contrarian, essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens notes that while the relationship is usually presented as a matter of...