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In Oh, William! Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William , she confesses, has always been a mystery to me . Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. William asks Lucy to join him on a trip to investigate a family secret, which surprises her. It’s one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to...
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In Modiano’s Missing Person , Guy Roland is an amnesiac detective who has lost his memory ten years before the beginning of the story, which opens in 1965. His employer retires and closes the detective agency. Roland embarks on a search for his own identity. I guess he didn’t get vacation days. His investigations uncover clues to a life that seems to stop during the Second World War. It seems that he is Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from...
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Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees has elements of both the fable and the epic and it 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.
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A Confederate General from Big Sur is a diffuse and rambling novel that occasionally sparkles. Before going their separate ways, narrator Jesse and his pal Lee Mellon converge, drink, and then go their separate ways. They conduct an epistolary correspondence and meet up again. Elaine and Elizabeth are the women in Jesse and Lee’s lives. They have lesser though critical roles in bringing this first novel to its anticlimax. As the novel progresses, Mellon’s delusions become increasingly intertwined with the...
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Damon Galgut wrote The Promise, which was published in 2021. Set in South Africa, the story revolves around a family and their struggles with identity, secrets, and the legacy of apartheid. The novel begins with a young boy named Amor, who witnesses a violent incident involving his mother and a stranger. This event sets in motion a chain of events that spans several decades, as the narrative follows the lives of four characters: Amor, his sister Marion, their mother Rachel,...
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Cloud Cuckoo Land is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries. Anna is a young seamstress living in Constantinople in the 15th century. The Ottoman army conscripts village boy Omeir is they prepare to take the city. Zeno, in the present, a Korean War veteran, works in a library in Idaho translating Ancient Greek texts. At the same time, Seymour, a disturbed autistic youngster, becomes caught up with a group of eco-terrorists. Konstance, in the 22nd century, is a...
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Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein , his final novel, was published in 2000. Bellow was eighty-five years old and it received widespread critical acclaim. Ravelstein tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. 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...
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With The Magic Mountain , Thomas Mann external link rose to the front ranks of the great novelists. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The novel’s setting is an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. It is a community that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. Within the sanatorium, Hans encounters a diverse cast of characters, each representing different worldviews and ideologies. These include, mainly, the enigmatic...
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the debut novel by the American author Carson McCullers. She was 23 at the time of publication. The novel is about a deaf man, John Singer, and the people he encounters in a depression-era town in Georgia. Among the characters who gravitate towards Singer is Mick Kelly, a young girl with a passion for music and a longing for a more meaningful existence. Mick finds solace in her interactions with Singer, who...
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John W. Campbell Jr. wrote Who Goes There? was published in 1938. The story revolves around a group of scientists in Antarctica. They discover an alien life form trapped in the ice and struggle to survive as the alien threatens to infiltrate and take over their bodies. The scientists, stationed at an isolated research outpost, uncover a crashed spacecraft buried beneath the ice. Within it, they find a frozen alien creature. As they thaw it out, they realize that it...
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via Thomas Pynchon’s intro: "Oakley Hall’s legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. "Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues...
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Chinese author Liu Cixin wrote The Three-Body Problem , which was published in 2008. It is the first book in the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. The story weaves together elements of physics, politics, and human nature, taking readers on a journey that spans both time and space. 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. This traumatic event sets the stage...
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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 that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their creation, they produce a map. The map indicates the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled. It’s a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful...
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Jonathan Letham wrote Motherless Brooklyn , which was published in 1999. The novel tells the story of Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel works for a small detective agency in Brooklyn, New York, run by Frank Minna. Minna serves as a mentor and father figure to him. When Frank is fatally shot during a routine investigation, Lionel becomes determined to find his killer. As Lionel delves deeper into the investigation, he navigates the gritty streets of Brooklyn,...
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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. Published in 1881, the novel has a unique style of short, erratic chapters shifting in tone and style. Instead of the clear and logical construction of a normal nineteenth-century realist novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (full title) makes use of surreal devices of metaphor and playful narrative construction. It is considered the first...
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A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which reached publication in 1980. It took eleven years after Toole’s suicide to find an audience. Toole’s mother brought the work to Walker Percy and then he to his publisher. The book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success. A Confederacy of Dunces earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 external link . The novel chronicles Ignatius’ misadventures as he navigates...
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A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man’s scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it. (wikipedia)
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Kazuo Ishiguro sets Klara and the Sun in a dystopian future when some children are genetically engineered for enhanced academic ability. On-screen tutors provide educations. Society limits socialization so parents who can afford it often buy their children androids as companions. Klara, one such android companion, is the narrator of the book. A teenage girl named Josie picks out Klara and has her mother purchase her. Josie suffers from an unspecified illness, and her mother hopes that Klara will provide...
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Black Rain (黒い雨, Kuroi Ame) is a novel by Japanese author Masuji Ibuse. Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. The novel is based on historical records of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book alternates between Shizuma Shigematsu’s journal entries and other characters from August 6–15, 1945, Hiroshima, and the present. The present time in the novel takes place several years later. At this time Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko...
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Harlan Ellison wrote City on the Edge of Forever for Star Trek, which was never used in its original form. It took more than ten months for Gene Roddenberry to rewrite Ellison’s work. Steven W. Carabatsos and D. C. Fontana, both story editors on the show, undertook re-writes of the teleplay, and changes have also been attributed to producer Gene L. Coon. The experience led to animosity between Ellison and Roddenberry for the rest of the latter’s life, in particular...
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Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas is a collection of three short works by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. It was posthumously published by Alfaguara in September 2017. An English translation by Natasha Wimmer was published by Penguin Press on 16 February 2021. The book collects three short pieces, Cowboy Graves , French Comedy of Horrors , and Fatherland . It is accompanied by an afterword by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas as well as a note on the text by Bolaño’s widow,...
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Eudora Welty wrote the short story “Why I Live at the PO”. It is a first-person narrative that revolves around the character known as Sister. She recounts the events leading up to her decision to leave her family home. She moves to the local post office instead (P.O.). Welty narrates “Why I Live at the PO” with Sister’s somewhat unreliable voice. Sister describes her family dynamics. They are filled with conflict and dysfunction. She feels overshadowed and mistreated by her...
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The Cyberiad are the stories of Trurl and Klapaucius, master inventors and engineers known as “constructors,” who have created marvels for kingdoms. Friends and rivals, they are constantly outdoing and challenging each other to reveal the next great evolution in cybernetics, and the exploits of these brilliant men are nothing short of incredible. From tales of love, in which a robotic prince must woo a robotic princess enchanted by pleasures of true flesh, to epics of battle, in which the...
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E.L. Doctorow authored Ragtime, a historical novel, and it was published in 1975 . Set in the early 20th century, the story weaves together the lives of fictional and historical figures, capturing the spirit of an era marked by rapid social and cultural changes.The narrative follows three primary storylines that converge throughout the novel. The first revolves around an upper-class white family living in New Rochelle, New York. The family consists of the Father, Mother, and their Younger Brother. One...
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Brazilian author Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist to make himself a legend. Just my guess. We follow an Andalusian shepherd named Santiago who embarks on a quest to discover his personal legend. Or his ultimate purpose or destiny in life. Whatever, right? Santiago’s journey takes him from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a hidden treasure. Along the way, he encounters a series of characters who serve as mentors and guides. Melchizedek, the king of...
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Rasselas, the fourth son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley called The Happy Valley, “till the order of succession should call him to the throne”. Rasselas enlists the help of an artist who is also known as an engineer to help with his escape from the Valley by plunging out through the air, though they are unsuccessful in this attempt. Rasselas grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place and, after...
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The Silmarillion is the tale of the creation of the world. In the First Age, is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part. The three Silmarils were jewels created by Fëanor, the most gifted of the Elves. Within them was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor before the Trees themselves were destroyed by Morgoth, the...
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The novel follows Professor Jack Gladney, who teaches Hitler studies at a small liberal arts college in rural New York. He lives there with his fourth wife Babette and their blended family. Jack is obsessed with avoiding death and stockpiles iodine tablets in case of a chemical spill from a nearby plant. One day while shopping at the local mall with his family, a strange toxic cloud appears and they have to evacuate. This event sparks an existential crisis in...
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With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best anglophone writers. Now, in William Trevor’s Last Stories , the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales. Nine have never been published in book form before. The stories illuminate the human condition. Subtle yet powerful, Trevor gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people. We encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet...
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Humboldt’s Gift , which Saul Bellow initially intended to be a short story, is a roman à clef about Bellow’s friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. It explores the changing relationship between art and power in a materialist America. This theme is addressed through the contrasting careers of two writers, Von Humboldt Fleisher (to some degree a version of Schwartz) and his protégé Charlie Citrine (to some degree a version of Bellow himself). Fleisher yearns to lift American society through...
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