In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorows hands the great march becomes a floating world, a...

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations....

One of Americas premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and Worlds Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live.

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line...

"In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain - sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs, ideas for movies, obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age. But now he has found a story he thinks may become his next novel. The large brass cross that hung behind the alter of St. Timothy's,...

From the E.L. Doctorow novel of 1906 America, a compelling story of human emotions and a reflection of the innocence, excitement and drama of an important time in America's history.

A successful suburbanite commuter Howard Wakefield takes a perverse detour from family life: He vanishes without a trace. Hidden in the attic of his carriage house garage, surviving by scavenging at night, Howard secretly observes the lives of his wife and children and neighbors. Wakefield becomes a fraught meditation on marriage and identity, as Howard slowly realizes that he has not in fact left his family, he has left himself.