In the ruggedness of the beautiful Kentucky mountains, Honey Lovett has always known that the old ways can make a hard life harder. As the daughter of the famed blue-skinned Troublesome Creek packhorse librarian, Honey and her family have been hiding from the law all her life. But when her mother and father are imprisoned, Honey realizes she must fight to stay free, or risk being sent away for good.

Chadwick Buford is a young Kentucky boy with the unnatural luck to keep getting complete strangers to take him and raise him for a time. After his foster parents die, Chad is taken in by the Turner family. Young daughter Melissa Turner falls in love with Chadwick. When Chad is separated from the Turners, he's then taken in by Major Buford. Although Chad doesn't know much about his own family past, the Major believes Chad is the descendent of a long lost relative of the man's.

Originally published in 1907, The Shepherd of the Hills is Harold Bell Wright's most famous work. In The Shepherd of the Hills, Wright spins a tale of universal truths across the years to the modern-day reader. His Eden in the Ozarks has a bountiful share of life's enchantments, but is not without its serpents.

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.

Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Fremont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman's full measure for the first time—and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud.

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces listeners to one of his most powerful creations: Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland tracks The Man in Black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake.

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.

Around a low-burning fire in a jungle clearing, a small group of late travelers huddles: a merchant, a Sikh with his son, a farmer. Silently, two men, flanking one of the travelers, crouch forward. A dirty cloth flashes momentarily and jerks around the traveler’s neck. One of the men tugs the cloth, the other forces the traveler’s head over to one side. Thuggee death has struck; Kali is assuaged.

Where the real frontier begins...A young cowpuncher stakes a claim that can only be sealed with fists and a .44 Colt.... A gunfighter, tired of violence, finds himself pushed down a trail of bloody revenge.... From purple sage to gambler's gold, from a senorita's tempting smile to a splash of blood in the dust, here are stories with a distinctive L'Amour twist.

A quiet farmer defends his honor in a moment of panic and luck...only to find true courage on the run from the dead man's brothers.

Harry Destry was a rough-and-tumble fighter who never lost a battle. But after six years in jail for a robbery he didn't commit, he comes back a changed man. The townsfolk believe he's beaten. They think all the fight's gone right out of him. And that's exactly what Destry wants them to think....

He is the Virginian-the first fully realized cowboy hero in American literature, a near-mythic figure whose idealized image has profoundly influenced our national consciousness. This enduring work of fiction marks the birth of a legend that lives with us still.

In this romantic and raw adventure set in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming of 1886, an anonymous college graduate ventures out west where he encounters gun fights, lynching, cattle rustlers, high-stake poker games, Indian attacks, and a brave, honest and imposing cowboy known simply as the Virginian. Presented as the archetypal, ideal hero of the "western" genre (which was novelized for the very first time in this same book), the Virginian, a foreman at Shiloh Ranch, carries a strong sense of justice.

To the Last Man is Zane Grey's archetypal tale of a bitter feud between two unforgiving factions: the ranchers led by Jean Isbel and, on the other side, Lee Jorth and his band of cattle rustlers. In the grip of a relentless code of loyalty to their own people, they fight the war of the Tonto Basin, desperately, doggedly, to the last man, neither side seeing the futility of it until it is too late.

Zane Grey, an author synonymous with the daring tales of the Wild West, delivers an exciting tale in this phenomenal best-seller, The U.P. Trail. As the country changes around them, a group of Wyoming residents ban together to fight the coming of the Union Pacific Railroad. But railroad engineer Warren Neale, struggling against the terrain, the climate, the populace and even his girlfriend’s abduction, is determined to see his project to completion.