fiction

Ethan Frome

The story of a disillusioned farmer trapped in a loveless marriage whose desperate attempt to escape with his wife's young cousin ends badly.

The House of Mirth

Set in the ruthless high society of Gilded Age New York, The House of Mirth traces the tragic downward spiral of Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished woman whose moral conscience repeatedly prevents her from securing a wealthy marriage for survival.

The Undiscovered Chekhov

Unpublished works collected and translated by Peter Constantine

Transcription

A former student travels to interview his 90ish professor for a magazine article. His recording device (an iPhone) breaks just before…

Feelings

A short story about how to achieve empathy through compassion and imagination using the complexities of young children and adults as a prism.

The Discovery of Heaven

God has become profoundly disillusioned with humanity—specifically our technological arrogance, moral failures, and the dangerous hubris of splitting the atom.

Vigil

a woman who died tragically in her early twenties during the 1970s and now serves as an ethereal death doula.

Museums and Women and other stories

A collection of short stories.

Satantango

Labyrinthine masterpiece that captures the slow-motion collapse of a Hungarian collective farm.

The Golden House

Nero Golden, patriarch in his twilight, a Lear in a silk dressing gown, presiding over a trio of sons who embody current fractured anxieties.

The Assault

A truly remarkable novel that begins with a tragic turn of events for the Steenwijk family

Stoner

William Stoner, a dedicated Missouri farm boy turned English professor whose modest career, unfulfilling marriage, and late-in-life love affair reveal the profound beauty, dignity, and quiet tragedy of an ordinary existence.

The Enigma of Arrival

V.S. Naipaul novel about an immigrant's experience of England.

Tomorrow x3

tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.webp A friend’s daughter was assigned this book in class (high school) and she recommended it highly, so I figured, ok, I know she’s a bright young woman with a dad with good taste in friends, so I read the first free chapters and was hooked. First, it’s about the gaming industry, second it’s about young entrepreneurs, third it’s about friendship, fourth it has allegorical underpinnings from a certain Greek epic, fifth, it touches on many contemporary hot-button political issues...

Shadow Ticket

Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket arrives like a cipher slipped under the door of contemporary America.

What We Can Know

The thematic core of the novel interrogates the limits of knowledge and memory.

The Swimmer

Ned Merrill is at a party and suddenly envisions himself as a great man about to embark on a swim across the county by way of backyard pools in a tony suburban NY community.

Antarctica

I separate these very well-written stories into the following categories: dark, sad or scary.

Seven Empty Houses

Argentinian writer Schweblin has written the finest story I've yet read about someone experiencing dementia…

Cuba Libre

Cuba Libre Leonard made extensive use of research and a researcher named Gregg Sutter for many of his novels, and Cubra Libre seems to be one of the more exhaustively researched and well-penned (he never used a computer or word processor, and rarely a typewriter) books in his oeuvre. Leonard, who began as a writer of westerns, then turned to city crime books, is back in semi-familiar territory in this book with a cowboy protagonist (Tyler) running horses to Cuba....

The Hunted

An unfortunate bit of timing has our hero captured in a front page story

The River Between

The River Between A wake-up book for the study of post-colonialism in Africa and a spark point for outrage by public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens from what was made known to the world (female genital mutilation). It will challenge anyone’s worldview and where they sit on the moral relativist scale. The choice presented in this novel between the Christian missionaries and indigenous tribal rights is unrealistic. A young man of the Gikuyu tribe named Waiyaki is the focal point in...

Speedboat

There is a vibrant quality running through the narrator's life that I would equate to a good noir detective novel that keeps the page-turning pace up, with the occasional weirdo wandering into the story (more than a few times)

M31

UFO nutjobs find themselves in an extremely well-written novel.

Quicksand

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession.

The Kreutzer Sonata

A novella that is the confession of Pozdnyshev, a man who recounts the tragic unraveling of his life and marriage. Very Russian fare.

The War Against Cliché

Essays on the intricacies of literature, focusing on the importance of originality,

Josephine the Singer

Narrated by fellow mouse, who reflects on Josephine's (a mouse) significance

The Guide

A young man falls for a dancer and in promoting her falls into debt, and

Malgudi Days

Short tales by R.K. Narayan taking place in the fictional town of Malgudi.