Notable Novels: 1970s

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

A fictional memoir illuminating Aaron Burr's life and times, highlighting his political accomplishments and fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton.

This is the story of a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it is not an Earth book, has never been published on Earth, and, until the terrible catastrophe occurred, was never seen or even heard of by any Earthman. Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book. Or, this is the story of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a number-one best seller in England, a weekly radio series with millions of fanatic listeners, and soon to be a television...

The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history,...

People who make their own rules when they know they're right...people who get a special pleasure out of doing something well (even if only for themselves)...people who know there's more to this whole living thing than meets the eye: they'll be with Jonathan Seagull all the way. Others may simply escape into a delightful adventure about freedom and flight. Either way it's an uncommon treat.

Dana, a Black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned...

After John Blackthorne shipwrecks in Japan, he makes himself useful to a feudal lord in a power struggle with another and becomes a samurai.

Calvino shows that the novel, far from being a dead form, is capable of endless mutations. If on a winter's night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author.

A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.

"Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write"--Page [4] of cover.