Books by E.L. Doctorow

A superb collection of fifteen stories—including “Wakefield,” the inspiration for the film starring Bryan Cranston—by the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope, or an actual glimpse of greatness. In “A House on the Plains,” a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. In “Walter John Harmon,” a man starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction. “Jolene: A Life” follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. “Heist,” the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the bestseller City of God. “The Water Works,” about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow’s revisions. These fifteen stories, written from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, and selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015, are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. Praise for Doctorow: Collected Stories “Here, without the framework of historical context that defines his best-known novels, we discover a Doctorow equally adept at plumbing the contemporary American psyche and are reminded of literature’s loss following his death.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “These tales—sketches, really, wide-ranging in time, place and circumstances—are penned by a modern master. . . . What makes Doctorow’s historical novels brilliant is their engaging prose, smart writerly style, unconventional narratives and inventive and entertaining plots. Same for these dog-eared, pre-owned stories.”—USA Today Praise for E. L. Doctorow “He has rewarded us, these forty-five years, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call ‘aspirational verve’—he sees us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also sees past that—to what we might, at our best, become.”—George Saunders “Doctorow did not so much write fiction about history as he seemed to occupy history itself. He owned it. He made it his own.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates “On every level, [Doctorow’s] work is powerful. . . . His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced, and complemented by a gigantic vision.”—Jennifer Egan “[He wrote] with such stunning audacity that I can still remember my parents’ awed dinner-table conversation, that summer, about a novel they were reading, called Ragtime, that went up to the overgrown wall enclosing the garden of fiction and opened the doorway to history.”—Michael Chabon “Doctorow’s prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.”—Don DeLillo “A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.”—Joyce Carol Oates

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery—and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration—is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America’s preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time. Praise for City of God “A grander perspective on the universe . . . a novel that sets its sights on God.”—The Wall Street Journal “Dazzling . . . The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole.”—Time “Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days.”—Los Angeles Times “Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence.”—Chicago Tribune “One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years . . . Reading City of God restores one’s faith in literature.”—The Houston Chronicle

This brilliant novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, AND THE TELEGRAPH Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” Praise for Andrew’s Brain “Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorow’s remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks—the best kind.”—USA Today “Cunning [and] sly . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he’s both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He’s a fool, but he’s no innocent.”—The New York Times Book Review “A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [Andrew’s Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons they’ve never imagined.”—The Plain Dealer “Andrew’s ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.”—Associated Press “[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.”—More “A quick and acutely intelligent read.”—Entertainment Weekly

E. L. Doctorow has been hailed as “a writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), “a virtuosic storyteller with enormous range” (People), and “a national treasure” (George Saunders). He has achieved a distinguished standing in American letters with his profound fiction, novels of great inventive power. The three bestsellers in this eBook bundle are classic Doctorow. From the defining moments of the Civil War to the heady days of the young twentieth century, the subjects and themes herein span, in the words of Don DeLillo, “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” RAGTIME “An extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of the country . . . in a fluid musical way that is as original as it is satisfying.”—The New Yorker One lazy Sunday afternoon in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside the home of an affluent American family. Almost magically, the line between fact and fiction, between real and invented characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s brilliant fictional creations, including an immigrant Jewish peddler and a ragtime pianist from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice brings this shimmering masterpiece to a shocking climax. THE MARCH “Spellbinding . . . a ferocious re-imagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange.”—Time In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times. HOMER & LANGLEY “Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.

The long-unavailable work by one of America''s most eminent writers. Drinks Before Dinner, called “witty and provocative” by the New York Times, is E.L. Doctorow’s only play. A tour-de-force of language and ideas concerning the individual’s role in and response to contemporary America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the economically privileged. As Doctorow writes in his introduction, “[This play] deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the apocalypse. . . .”

From a master of modern American letters comes an enthralling collection of brilliant short fiction about people who, as E. L. Doctorow notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.” Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous classics, All the Time in the World is resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow.

Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage–a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably–and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Praise for Welcome to Hard Times “A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil.”—The Washington Post “We are caught up with these people as real human beings.”—Chicago Sun-Times “Dramatic and exciting.”—The New York Times “Terse and powerful.”—Newsweek “A taut, bloodthirsty read.”—The Times Literary Supplement “A superb piece of fiction.”—The New Republic

First published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be—a singular tapestry hailed as “an extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of the country” (The New Yorker) between the turn of the century and the First World War. Selected by the Modern Library and The Guardian as one of the 100 best novels of all time The inspiration for the Tony Award–winning musical! The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, THE KANSAS CITY STAR, AND BOOKLIST Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.

“An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.” –The Washington Post Book World One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.” “Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow’s] poetic imagination.” –The New York Times Book Review “Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders.” –Boston Sunday Herald “Enthralling . . . a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last.” –Chicago Sun-Times “An immense, extraordinary achievement.” –San Francisco Chronicle

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live. Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security. Two of these stories have already won awards as the best fiction of the year published in American periodicals, and two have been chosen for annual best-story anthologies. Composed in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.

Rich with philosophical asides, historical speculations, personal observations, and literary judgments, "Reporting the Universe" ranges from the circumstances of Doctorow''s own boyhood and early work to the state of modern society.

Read, listen, and sing along to the timeless poetry of togetherness and diversity in this new songbook by Dawud Wharnsby. Beautifully illustrated throughout by Shireen Adams, and with a free audio CD, children and adults will be inspired and absorbed for hours. Smiles, warm and shining, like the sun upon our faces.Hope as rich and green as the trees of an oasis.The colours of Islam bloom in so many places,So many different colours of Islam. Fill the world with colour, paint it everywhere you go.Paint everything you see, and tell everyone you know.Qur''an will be your paint, and your brush will be iman,So fill the world with colour, every colour of Islam. Dawud Wharnsby was born in Canada in 1972. He has been writing stories, songs, and poems for people of all ages for many years. When he is not traveling to sing with audiences around the world, he loves being with his family—hiking in the mountains near his home, growing vegetables, and fixing things that get broken around the house. Dawud lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World''s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow''s characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist''s re-creations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters.

A son is set the task of concealing his father''s death; a drowned child is callously handled by rescuers; a lonely schoolteacher is shot by a hunter; a boy witnesses his mother''s act of infidelity; a car explosion kills a foreign schoolgirl; and the middle-aged author of these tales depicts his own consciousness. In a perceptive work about a writer of stories, acclaimed author E.L. Doctorow opens to the reader the creative imagination of a writer.

Novel of a young boy''s life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World''s Fair.

During the Great Depression of the ''30s, a passionate, young New Jersey man leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds is a life so different from his own that it changes his destiny. A haunting story of dreams and desires, repackaged to match Doctorow''s other bestsellers. Reprint from Bantam. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.