The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories

From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

An exciting and must-have collection of classic, hard-boiled crime and espionage novels from masterful mystery writers in beautiful, enduring hardcover editions with elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers.

Titles included:

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

This collection features three classics from the master of the noir novel--each of which was made into a classic Hollywood film--along with five otherwise unavailable short stories. Ribbon marker.

James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for The Cross of Lorraine, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literay career that included a professorship at St. John's College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.