25th Anniversary Edition Picador Modern Classics 
Published in 1988, Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City is the debut novel of a writer who would come to define our times. 
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism, paranoia. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

The Twenty-Seventh City: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Franzen, Jonathan

United States

Picador Modern Classics

Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic. Alice McDermott's striking novel, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.
Charming Billy is the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction.

Charming Billy: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

McDERMOTT, Alice

"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 Newly reissued as a Picador Modern Classic, Marilynne Robinson's brilliant, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning first novel
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.
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.

Housekeeping: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Robinson, Marilynne

"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 American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers Denis Johnson's now classic story collection chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. 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.

Jesus' Son: Stories (Picador Modern Classics, 3)

JOHNSON,DENIS

"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 the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot 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. 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.
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 Virgin Suicides: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics, 2)

EUGENIDES, JEFFREY

"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 With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation. Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater-For Madmen Only! Originally published in English in 1929, Steppenwolf's wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature. 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.

Steppenwolf: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

HESSE,HERMANN

Shusaku Endo's classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver
"Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama."-The New York Review of Books Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endo is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.

Silence: A Novel (Picador Classics)

Endō, Shūsaku

Literary

Shusaku Endo's New York Times bestselling classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver
"Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama."-The New York Review of Books Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endo is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.

Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf. Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Picador Modern Classics)

DIDION, JOAN

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me.”
In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children. 
Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”―one novel after another. This wry and visceral memoir will certainly bring new converts to Mantel’s dark genius.
“Mesmerizing.”―The New York Times
 Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (Picador Modern Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

MANTEL, HILARY

Arts & Literature

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Picador Modern Classics publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Picador Modern Classics

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Picador Modern Classics publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Twenty-Seventh City: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Charming Billy: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Housekeeping: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Jesus' Son: Stories (Picador Modern Classics, 3)

The Virgin Suicides: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics, 2)

Steppenwolf: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Silence: A Novel (Picador Classics)

Silence: A Novel (Picador Classics)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Picador Modern Classics)

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (Picador Modern Classics)