Award-winning biographer Andrew Levy shows how modern readers have been misunderstanding HUCKLEBERRY FINN for decades. Mark Twain’s masterpiece is often discussed either as a carefree adventure story for children or a serious novel about race relations, yet Levy argues it is neither. Instead, HUCK FINN was written at a time when Americans were nervous about youth violence and “uncivilized” bad boys, and a debate was raging about education, popular culture and responsible parenting --- casting Huck’s now-celebrated “freedom” in a very different and very modern light.

Through Frank Bascombe, we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the 20th century. Now, in LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU, author Richard Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity.

Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track --- until the recession hits and she gets downsized. However, she is offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic in Virginia for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back. Samantha’s new job takes her into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, and within weeks she finds herself engulfed in litigation that turns deadly.

Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air," points out that, while THE GREAT GATSBY may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power. Offering a fresh perspective on what makes GATSBY so great and utterly unusual, SO WE READ ON takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths.

The bestselling author of NIXONLAND has written a dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America’s greatest city, THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE asks the question: What does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flag --- or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

The Statue of Liberty has become one of the most recognizable monuments in the world: a symbol of freedom and the American Dream. But the story of the creation of the statue has been obscured by myth. In reality, she was the inspiration of one quixotic French sculptor hungry for fame and adoration. LIBERTY'S TORCH tells the story of an artist, entrepreneur and inventor who fought against all odds to create this wonder of the modern world.

The taciturn Wyatt Earp whiles away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc Holliday is more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge, Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history, two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends.

On an oppressively hot Monday in August of 1966, a student and former marine named Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker of guns to the top of the University of Texas tower and began firing on pedestrians below. Before it was over, 16 people had been killed and 32 wounded. It was the first mass shooting of civilians on a campus in American history. Elizabeth Crook's latest novel, MONDAY, MONDAY, follows three students caught up in the massacre.

THE DUKE, THE LONGHORNS, AND CHAIRMAN MAO is a fly-on-the-wall exploration of a wild weekend and an immersion into the John Wayne mythology: his politics, his inspirations, the plots to assassinate him, his connections to Stalin, Khrushchev and Chairman Mao, and the death of the Western.