Both Flesh and Not
David Foster Wallace
Apart from the essay on Roger Federer, the rest are Wallace hitting serves past the line.
Grey Bees
Andrey Kurkov
…dramatizes the conflict in Ukraine through the adventures of a beekeeper and his frenemy in what seems to be in the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine.
A Confederate General from Big Sur
Richard Brautigan
Before going their separate ways, narrator Jesse and his pal Lee Mellon converge, drink, and then go their separate ways.
Exhalation - Stories
Ted Chiang
Chiang's collection tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.
The Promise
Damon Galgut
Set in South Africa, the story revolves around a family and their struggles with identity, secrets, and the legacy of apartheid.
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr
_Cloud Cuckoo Land_ is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries.
The Periodic Table
Primo Levi
Primo Levi's _Periodic Table_ is a group of autobiographical episodes of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime and afterward.
Ravelstein
Saul Bellow
The novel is a roman à clef written as a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, and Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies.
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
The novel's setting is an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.
Republic
Plato
Divided into ten books, each book of The "Republic" addresses different aspects of the ideal state.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
The novel is about a deaf man, John Singer, and the people he encounters in a depression-era town in Georgia.
Who Goes There?
John W. Campbell
The story revolves around a group of scientists in Antarctica, who discover an alien life form trapped in the ice.
A Walker in the City
Alfred Kazin
Alfred Kazin's classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The Three Body Problem
Cixin Liu
The novel begins during the Cultural Revolution in China, where a young astrophysicist named Ye Wenjie witnesses her father's death at the hands of Red Guards.
Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco
Foucault's Pendulum is Umberto Eco's novel of a few Milanese book editors who are bored with their work. To pass the time they cook up an elaborate hoax…
Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Letham
The novel tells the story of Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette's syndrome
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Machado de Assis
Bras Cubas is one of the weirdest books I've read in a while and it doesn't feel like it was written in the 19th century.
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
Robert M. Sapolsky
As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage.
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
A disastrous job interview and a confrontation with the police force Ignatius to find real work as a hotdog vendor.