Special Editions

Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life at the turn of the twentieth century--now available in a limited Olive Edition.

"A masterpiece. . . . It has the completeness, [the] finality that grips and exalts and convinces."--Literary Review

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and widely considered to be Edna Ferber's greatest achievement, So Big is a classic novel of turn-of-the-century Chicago. It is the unforgettable story of Selina Peake DeJong, a gambler's daughter, and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity and her sanity in the face of marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood.

A brilliant literary masterwork from one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and admired writers, the remarkable So Big still resonates with its unflinching view of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success.

Additionally, Charles Dickens' celebrated short stores, "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" and "A Christmas Tree" are included and paired with equally enchanting steampunk illustrations. Those of us who cherish each holiday with Dickens in our hearts -- the man who has linked the Christmas spirit with love, forgiveness, and charity -- will treasure this rare collector's edition for this Christmas and many to come.

R. K. Narayan (1906--2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. The four novels collected here, all written during British rule, bring colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this master of literary realism.

Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness.

These pioneering novels, luminous in their detail and refreshingly free of artifice, are a gift to twentieth-century literature.

The Three Musketeers follows the career of an impoverished young gentleman, D Artagnan, who sets off to Paris to seek fortune as a member of the king s guard. Once there, he meets Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, the musketeers of the book s title, and embarks on a daring and exciting series of adventures. France is under threat, and the friends must use all their guile and ingenuity to outwit the dastardly schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the glamorous spy, Milady."

In the vein of Taylor Branch's classic Parting of the Waters, Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit Linda Hirshman delivers the enthralling, groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever--now available in a limited Olive Edition.

When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted in the summer of 1969, forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in 2011, New York legalized gay marriage and the armed services stopped enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances seem like something of a miracle.

Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, detailing the remarkable and revolutionary story of the movement that has blurred rigid gender lines, altered the shared culture, and broadened our definitions of family. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite, Victory is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts and demonstrates how, in a matter of decades, a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements.

"Remarkable for its emotional punch as for its historical insight."--New York Times Book Review

These pocket-sized titles are stunning....They make the perfect stocking stuffers! - Metro

Bought together or separately, these fiction titles are ideal stocking stuffers for the literature lover. - USA Today

The national bestseller from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.

For more than twenty years, Picador has been producing beautifully packaged literary fiction and nonfiction books from Manhattan's Flatiron Building. Our Twentieth Anniversary Modern Classics line pairs iconic books - The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - with a design that's both small enough to fit in your pocket and unique enough to stand out on your bookshelf.

The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, O. Henry's The Marry Month of May, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Bridal Party, Joy Williams's The Wedding, and Lorrie Moore's Thank You For Having Me--encompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms, meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people--young and old, rich and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without children--joining together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness.