Pastoralia (George Saunders)
My favorite collection of Saunders' short stories until Tenth of December came out.
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Stella Maris (Cormac McCarthy)
Plenty of philosophical themes in this patient - psychologist dialogue
Read more →The Passenger (Cormac McCarthy)
Really well done multiple personality disorder character. Also a side mystery plot.
Read more →Passing (Nella Larsen)
Two light-skinned Black women from the same neighborhood follow very different trajectories in life and one day reconnect.
Read more →Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman)
Retirees spend Thursdays solving old mysteries for enjoyment.
Read more →New Yorker Hiroshima Issue
The entire contents of The New Yorker issue containing John Hersey's Hiroshima essay had an unfortunate cover illustration.
Read more →The Captive Mind (Czesław Miłosz)
Essays out of central Europe during the First Cold War by one of Poland's leading intellectuals.
Read more →We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
The book that influenced Orwell, Huxley and Rand.
Read more →Effi Briest (Theodore Fontane)
Set in 19th-century Germany, the story follows the life of Effi Briest, a young woman who enters into a socially advantageous but ultimately troubled marriage.
Read more →The Pole (J.M. Coetzee)
A Polish pianist with an unpronounceable last name (let's call him W) comes
Read more →Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata)
The novel revolves around Keiko Furukura, a socially awkward woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years.
Read more →The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead)
A chilling novel based on a true story, which begins with hope and ends in tragedy.
Read more →My Cheesecake Shaped Poverty (Haruki Murakami)
“My Cheesecake Shaped Poverty” is a Murakami short story that first appeared in The New Yorker ( my-cheesecake-shaped-poverty.pdf ). This very short story is part of The New Yorker’s flash fiction series, so it’s unlikely it is more than 1000 words. The time is 1973. A young newlywed couple desires to move into their first home. They don’t have much money, so the estate agent looks them up and down and hesitantly takes them to the “Triangle Zone” property. It...
Read more →The Bear (William Faulkner)
The Bear follows a young boy named Isaac McCaslin, who goes on numerous hunting trips into the wilderness with his uncle and other men.
Read more →The Glass Hotel (Emily St. John Mandel)
Vincent is a bartender at the Glass Hotel, or as it's first called, Hotel Caiette.
Read more →The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Dispossessed is about a planet and its moon and the clashing cultures…
Read more →Lucy By the Sea (Elizabeth Strout)
The novel begins with William Barton visiting his ex-wife in NYC as the COVID-19 epidemic begins.
Read more →The Lives of Animals (J.M. Coetzee)
A work tha explores the moral and ethical dimensions of animal suffering.
Read more →The Return (Hisham Matar)
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing…
Read more →Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
The novel begins with the childhood incident that shapes Ramsay's life.
Read more →Liberation Day (George Saunders)
A collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair,
Read more →Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Never Let Me Go is a thought-provoking dystopian novel written…
Read more →The Box Man (Kobo Abe)
An eerie and evocative masterpiece with a nameless protagonist.
Read more →Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan)
An eventful Christmas in a small Irish town.
Read more →To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway)
Hemingway's _To Have and Have Not_ is a commentary on the time of The Great Depression told from multiple viewpoints.
Read more →Emma (Jane Austen)
Emma is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray. So, it's fun.
Read more →Sula (Toni Morrison)
Set in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, the story spans several decades and explores the complex relationship between two Black-American women, Sula Peace and Nel Wright.
Read more →Honeymoon (Patrick Modiano)
Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career.
Read more →Collected Stories by Donald Barthelme (Donald Barthelme)
His scrambled visions of history yield unexpected insights. And his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, was for him a guiding light. Delight in his frequently subversive ideas, the pleasures of a consummate stylist whose sentences are worth marveling at and savoring like a well-marbled ribeye.
Read more →Entropy (Thomas Pynchon)
explores the concept of disorder through a chaotic New Year's Eve party; other stories included in the volume
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