Dave Ross

All posts tagged with reading

247 posts found

The Discovery of Heaven

The Discovery of Heaven (DoH) is framed by an ongoing conversation between two angels in heaven, looking down upon Earth. God has become profoundly disillusioned with humanity—specifically our technological arrogance, moral failures, and the dangerous hubris of splitting the atom. Feeling that mankind has broken its side of the spiritual bargain, God decides to terminate His covenant with the world. To do this, he demands the retrieval of the physical stone tablets containing the original Ten Commandments, removing them from...

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Vigil

This is the finest climate change novel I’ve read, but it’s way more than that. It’s a novel about empathy. About coping in a deterministic world, where capitalism has consumed itself, left billions in hell while enriching a few. Vigil centers on Jill “Doll” Blaine, a woman who died tragically in her early twenties during the 1970s and now serves as an ethereal death doula. Operating in a liminal, afterlife space reminiscent of Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo...

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Mother River

Currently reading. The 13 stories are: Mother River Stone Village Smog City The Drummer Boy The Neighborhood The Young Man Who Loved to Think Deeply Something to Do with Poetry The Inside Story The Lion King At the Edge of the Marsh Night in Xishuangbanna The Goddess of Xishuangbanna Love in Xishuangbanna

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Museums and Women and other stories caught my eye recently because it’s a) on a bookshelf currently in view and b) I haven’t read any Updike for about 30 years. I think the last book of his was either his epistolary novel, S. , or Roger’s Version . However, the first time I encountered Updike was in a university course blandly called Arts and Literature, and the story “Museums and Women” was on the syllabus and handed out on photocopied...

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To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969

Larry Levis brings raw emotion to his poetry; “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969” goes from zero to sixty in 3 seconds. Weather and the elements seem to have an agency of their own. We’re buffeted from cold blasts on a farm to an smelting plant somewhere, with blasts from a furnace rendering iron into molten goo. I linger on the wall of flame he saw as he ponder’s his father’s hatred of...

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Satantango

László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is a bleak, labyrinthine masterpiece that captures the slow-motion collapse of a Hungarian collective farm. The novel is set in a desolate, rain-slicked landscape where the inhabitants are trapped in a state of perpetual decay, waiting for a miracle or a catastrophe. This sense of paralysis and the impending arrival of a “messiah” immediately evokes the shadow of Samuel Beckett. Much like Waiting for Godot , the villagers are suspended in an existential void, though Krasznahorkai twists...

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Palestinian Walks

Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks is a series of reflective essays about moving through the landscapes of the West Bank and Gaza region, where walking becomes both a practical act and a way of thinking. Rather than writing conventional travel reportage, Shehadeh treats the route itself as a narrative device—using roads, paths, hills, fields, and ruins to explore how everyday geography is shaped by politics, memory, and loss. The book’s atmosphere is quiet and observant, with the ordinary details of terrain...

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The Guest House

Translated by Coleman Barks This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and...

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The Golden House

In the humid, over-ripened air of a post-Obama Manhattan, where the sunlight hits the brownstones of Greenwich Village with a cloying, amber insistence, we find the “Gardens”—a private enclave of old-world quietude suddenly invaded by the operatic. Nero Golden, a man of heavy, sepia-toned secrets and a girth that suggests a kingdom lost or perhaps merely packed into high-end luggage, arrives with his three sons like refugees from a myth that has lost its footing. They have shed their Indian...

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The Assault

A truly remarkable novel that begins with a tragic turn of events for the Steenwijk family, who live on a street of four houses on a quay in Haarlem (The Netherlands). Gunshots ring out, a man falls off a bike, someone drags the corpse from the front of one household to the front of the Steenwijk’s household, all as the Steenwijks look on in horror. The time is near the end of WWII, but the Gestapo are still very much...

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi) is a poetic travel narrative recounting his 1689 journey from Edo (modern Tokyo) into Japan’s remote northern interior. Written in a refined blend of prose and haiku known as haibun, the work records not only the physical stages of his journey but also a spiritual pilgrimage shaped by Zen Buddhism, literary memory, and a deep sensitivity to impermanence. Though the narrative is relatively brief, it distills vast emotional...

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Stoner

It’s all spoilers below, so get the book and read it. I found it engaging, though I have a bit of trouble with the premise some back of the book blurb makes about ‘readers worldwide’ are coming to a new appreciation of this book. William Stoner feels stuck on a family farm, performing the same chores day-in-day-out. Perhaps his parents pick up on this and decide to send him to university to pursue a course in agriculture, which he gladly...

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The Enigma of Arrival

The story unfolds in the Wiltshire countryside, where the protagonist rents a modest cottage on the grounds of a decaying manor estate owned by a reclusive landlord named Mr. Phillips. This setting becomes a microcosm for broader themes. The narrator, a thinly veiled version of Naipaul, recovering from illness and the exhaustion of his earlier travels, immerses himself in the rhythms of rural life. He observes the changing seasons, the estate’s crumbling grandeur, and the lives of its inhabitants: the...

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Tomorrow x3

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 regarding...

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Shadow Ticket

Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket arrives like a cipher slipped under the door of contemporary America. The milieu of the novel is Milwaukee in the 1930s: Prohibition in the states, the Depression, and a tilt toward fascism gripping the world. Later, the action will move to Europe—specifically, Budapest. Hicks McTaggart is a former strike-buster who became a private eye in the employ of Unamalgamated Investigations. His boss is Boynt Crosstown. One day, a new case arrives, and Hicks is assigned to it:...

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What We Can Know

The thematic core of the novel interrogates the limits of knowledge and memory. Through Metcalfe’s pursuit to uncover the missing poem, McEwan delves into complex discussions on historical context, interpretation, and speculation. The characters grapple with the realization that much of what they perceive as “known” is inherently colored by their experiences and biases. The question posed by the novel’s title—“What can we know?”—echoes throughout as Metcalfe attempts to reconstruct not only the events surrounding the poem but also the...

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The Swimmer

The Swimmer is John Cheever’s best known story, and probably as anthologized as Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz or Updike’s A & P . 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 New York State community. He thinks of all of the family pools he’d have to navigate, and without any announcement, he,...

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In Xanadu

A travel adventure to commemorate Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road, Scottish historian (Cambridge student at the time he took this journey), William Dalrymple, uses older historic narratives and maps to help guide him and fellow travelers from the Holy Land to Xanadu (Shan-tu, just north of Beijing). Dalrymple's more recent book, The Golden Road posits that Indian ships were a more economical and vital trade route than the better known (and slower) land route of the Silk Road....

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Antarctica

Antarctica is Claire Keegan’s first collection of short stories. I separate these very well-written stories into the following categories: dark, sad or scary. Many stories take place during the winter months or have some aspect of cold about them. Most stories deal with marginalized families or persons, mostly poor and rural. I read all of the stories twice.

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Seven Empty Houses

The seven stories and seven houses, as in Samanta Schweblin’s short story collection’s title, are likely linked, though on my first reading, I’m not inclined to make more than that surface connection. Schweblin, an Argentinian writer, has written the finest story I’ve yet read about someone experiencing dementia. Her method puts us in a position of some confusion with shifting inner thoughts of the protagonist, and repetitions of various memories, notes and labels on various items, so it takes a...

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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 plan...

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The Hunted

Elmore Leonard is a guilty pleasure of mine. I read far more of his works than I note on this blog, but the simple matter is: I should note them. In The Hunted we find Al Rosen living the good life in Israel, where the State Department relocated him in the witness protection program. Rosen wore a wire to snare two other baddies, but the grand jury didn’t indict them. Al knew those guys were going to come after him,...

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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 impossible. A young man of the Gikuyu tribe named Waiyaki is the focal point in Thiong’o’s novel. At...

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Things Become Other Things

This is a great book to own in its physical form, as numerous photos are interspersed throughout the essays on the natural beauty of Japan’s Kii Peninsula and its disappearing villages and life. A map plots Mod’s route along the eastern coastline, through once-thriving villages, many now reduced in many areas to a few kissas (akin to diners, though much smaller and offering a far sparser menu than their counterparts in, say, New Jersey), some ryokans here and there, and...

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Speedboat

So now, halfway through Speedboat, and past the Speedboat “chapter” (it’s a novel), I think it’s growing on me. I’m writing this review in two halves to see if I can make a guess about its structure. The main character, the narrator, is a journalist named Jen Fain, who was born sometime after WWII. Each section has a title that connects tangentially with the various smaller stories (sometimes just a sentence or two) contained in it. The writing is absorbing...

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Ralph Fiennes' Four Quartets

An important theme of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is how we interpret what is handed down through tradition. In his early essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), he touches on this dynamism of how tradition becomes redefined with every new giant talent using a metaphor drawn from science. Twenty-odd years later, a series of four larger poems (each a quartet) emerged somewhat wider in scope than “The Wasteland” and more sophisticated: Burnt Norton (1936) East Coker (1939) The Dry...

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M31

M31 is the oddest book I’ve read in a while, and for that, I am grateful. At the outset, a family living in a transformed clapboard church in disrepair watches on eagerly as they view lights approaching from afar. Given the title of the book, we guess that this is perhaps a sighting of a UFO. However, it turns out to be a couple of like-minded people who have had the UFO experience of being ‘taken aboard a ship and...

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Hitch-22

Christopher Hitchens reflects on his upbringing, the influences that shaped him, and the philosophical foundations of his worldview. The memoir serves as both a personal narrative and a broader commentary on culture, politics, and belief. One of the book’s strengths is Hitchens’ engaging writing style. His eloquence and command of language draw readers in, making complex ideas accessible. His vivid storytelling, combined with sharp wit and humor, keeps the narrative lively and compelling. We are treated to a rich tapestry...

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Quicksand

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of a good family, married to a dully respected lawyer, tells a story of temptation and betrayal. Sonoko is infatuated with the beautiful art student and femme fatale Mitsuko, a woman so seductive and heartless she can even turn Sonoko’s husband into her own accomplice. Filled with intrigue and treacherous romance, I was entranced by this, Tanizaki’s first novel. The writing is extremely engaging...

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The Kreutzer Sonata

Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata is not only a profound exploration of marriage, jealousy, and the destructive power of unchecked desire but also a deeply personal work that reflects Tolstoy’s struggles and philosophical evolution. Framed as a conversation overheard on a train, the novella centers on the confession of Pozdnyshev, a man who recounts the tragic unraveling of his life and marriage. His story serves as a critique of societal norms, particularly those surrounding relationships, sexuality, and the institution of...

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The War Against Cliché

The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis is a collection of essays that delve into the intricacies of literature, focusing on the importance of originality and the pitfalls of cliché. Amis critiques the tendency of contemporary writers to rely on worn-out phrases and familiar tropes, arguing that such reliance undermines the power and clarity of their work. He advocates for a commitment to fresh expression, emphasizing that true literary artistry demands innovation and a willingness to challenge conventional norms. In...

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The Wager

I first heard of David Grann when he was a guest on Paul Giamatti’s and Stephen Asma’s podcast, Chinwag. At that time, Grann had just come out with a book of essays called The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which I read and enjoyed in 2024. Grann is also the notable author of the book that Scorcese’s award-winning film Killers of the Flower Moon is based on. The Wager, which I’ve begun reading, and am in the grip of, is about...

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Josephine the Singer

“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is a poignant short story by Franz Kafka that centers on Josephine, a mouse celebrated for her singing talent. Within the community of the Mouse Folk, her performances are seen as a source of joy and unity, yet they also reveal deeper themes of identity, art, and existential struggle. The story is narrated by another mouse, who reflects on Josephine’s significance within their society. He admires her talent but also feels compelled to...

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The Guide

The Guide follows the life of Raju, a charming and ambitious young man who starts as a tour guide in the fictional town of Malgudi (Narayan has written many stories set in Malgudi). Raju’s life takes a turn when he meets Rosie, a talented dancer married to the wealthy but neglectful archaeologist, whom Raju gives the name Marco after a well-known adventurer. Captivated by her passion and beauty, Raju becomes romantically involved with Rosie, leading to her decision to leave...

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Malgudi Days

Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan as translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. I’m going to take Lahiri’s advice in the book’s introduction and read one story per day for a month. So begins my reading in 2025. —♦——♦——♦— These short parables are somewhat like Aesop’s, though sometimes the lesson isn’t as clear, yet the predicaments people find themselves in are always unique. In “Engine Trouble,” a poor fellow spends a few annas on a lottery drawing at a carnival. He ends up...

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The Map and the Territory

The pretentiousness of the contemporary art world is just one of the targets in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory. The protagonist, Jed Martin, is a talented painter and photographer who rises to fame in the art world, which he is largely indifferent to. He initially gains recognition for his artistic yet simple photographs of everyday objects. One day, he looks at a Michelin map and finds beauty in it. At an early exhibition of his works, he includes...

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The Festival of Insignificance

Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance centers around four main characters: Alain, a laid-back and somewhat indifferent man; his friend Ramon, a lively and passionate individual; the enigmatic and beautiful Clara; and the reflective and thoughtful character, the narrator, who reflects on the nature of their lives and relationships. Set against the backdrop of Paris, the characters navigate their day-to-day experiences, grappling with the superficiality and fleeting nature of modern life. Kundera introduces the notion of insignificance as a central...

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Hunter of Stories

By Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and published posthumously, Hunter of Stories offers glimpses into hidden histories, mythologies, and the untold crimes inflicted on indigenous peoples by European explorers and later by large nation-states seeking to exploit the natural resources and workers. Galeano’s idealism comes through even as he retells hard histories in one- or two-page-long chapters. As he notes in one of the stories, “Why not write the big story of the past by telling the little one?” Two samples,...

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Open Veins of Latin America

The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano is a seminal work that examines the historical and socio-economic exploitation of Latin America. First published in 1971, it combines history, economics, and personal narrative to provide a critical perspective on the continent’s colonial and post-colonial experiences. Historical Context Galeano begins with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, marking the start of a relentless exploitation of Latin America’s resources. He details how...

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Trust

Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust intricately weaves multiple narratives to explore themes of wealth, power, and the nature of truth. A tale that revolves around a wealthy financier, Benjamin Rask, and his enigmatic wife, Helen. The novel is structured in four parts: two contrasting narratives about Benjamin and Helen, a fictional biography, and an account of their financial dealings. As the characters’ perspectives unfold, the reader encounters differing accounts of their lives and relationships, prompting questions about the reliability of storytelling...

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The Dog of the South

I can read a Portis novel, come to the end, turn back to page one, and start right over. Two reasons: he often has ambiguous endings, and his writing is magnetic. Also, there are characters I want to revisit before bidding them farewell. Ray Midge, a bean counter in Arkansas, is our leading man and narrator. One day, his wife leaves him for Guy Dupree, but what’s worse is that she takes his car. Seems that in this book, or...

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Clay

“Clay” is one of the short stories found in Joyce’s collection The Dubliners . In “Clay” Joyce captures multiple levels of class and religious stratification along with alcoholism and hidden cruelties enmeshed in the culture in a handful of pages with incredible economy. Our protagonist, Maria, a servant working at Dublin by Lamplight Laundry, The laundry work reminded me of Small Things Like These , but with Protestants running the business. We learn that prior to her job at the...

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Hail Mary

Saying too much here would definitely introduce spoilers, so I’ll limit my comments to the following bullet points: A few more characters than in The Martian Protagonist is an 8th grade science teacher who had been thrown out of university academia for writing a paper going against The Goldilocks Principle (organic life requires water) The sun is dimming for some reason, threatening life with mass starvation and multiple species extinction Nations decide to work collaboratively on a solution, with an...

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My Brilliant Friend

This is Elena Ferrante’s first book in the Neapolitan Novels series. It follows the intense friendship between two girls, Elena Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, growing up in a poor neighborhood in post-war Naples. The novel explores themes of identity, class, and the complexities of female friendship. As the girls navigate their lives, their paths diverge: Elena pursues education and a more conventional life, while Lila’s fierce intelligence and rebellious spirit lead her to reject societal norms. The story delves...

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In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Initial thoughts on just beginning to read this brief work: I’ve never read William H. Gass and somehow confused him with German writer and Nobel laureate Günter Grass. Perhaps this confusion emerged when I picked up Gass’s Tunnell at the library one day and it seemed to be about World War II. Regardless, I began reading this narrated piece by a lonely man stuck in small-town Indiana; he is filled with acerbic descriptions of a world fading away, but who...

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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession is a collection of essays by David Grann, who known for writing Killers of the Flower Moon . They are all true tales (some solved, others less so), and the featured essay is my favorite, as I’ve been a fan of the great detective from a young age. Watched all the PBS episodes with my family and when they were only part way through, borrowed my father’s collection of...

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Ms Ice Sandwich

Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami is a brief but oddly engaging novel narrated by a grammar school student who is enchanted by a woman working at the sandwich counter at a grocery store he passes every day. He is struck dumb by Ms Ice Sandwich’s large eyes and electric blue eyeliner. Every day during the course of a summer he enters the store, waits on a short queue and orders a sandwich, which she nabs with steel tongs and...

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Pastoralia

George Saunders published Pastoralia in 2000. The collection consists of six stories, each exploring themes of consumerism, capitalism, and the complexities of human relationships. Set in a theme park, the title story “Pastoralia” is a darkly comedic satire. Employees live and act like prehistoric cave dwellers. The protagonist, a man known as “the cave man,” struggles to maintain a sense of dignity and purpose. In the real world, we learn the cave man has a wife and they have a...

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Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy’s final novel pairs with The Passenger . It is a dialogue between Bobby Western’s sister, Alice, and her psychiatrist. The “action” takes place at a rehab facility named Stella Maris (Star of Mary in Latin). The dialogue becomes listless and bogged down in various philosophical and mathematical issues quickly. Alice or Alicia (she changed her name at one point) has picked up and wrestled with these issues into oblivion. Literally to the point that she began experiencing hallucinations,...

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The Passenger

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy starts out with a mysterious private jet crash. The novel’s protagonist, Bobby Western, leads a salvage dive to it that turns up no survivors. The salvage team had to use a torch to get into the jet and things are oddly missing: the black box and the captain’s bag. How were they removed? A day later Bobby is approached by what appear to be two federal agents. What did he find? Did he remove anything?...

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Passing

Nella Larsen external link wrote the novella Passing in 1929. The story revolves around the friendship of Irene ('Rene) Redfield, whose point of view carries the story, and Clare Kendry. Both are married. Irene to a darker skinned Black man who is a Physician in Manhattan. Clare to a racist white businessman who doesn’t know she is actually a light skin Black woman ‘passing’ as white. Both 'Rene and Clare can pass as white. Both women use 'passing' for certain...

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Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club is a best-selling detective novel by Richard Ossman. It is about a group of British pensioners living in a retirement village. They spend Thursdays solving old mysteries for enjoyment. One day, a real murder case turns up for them to solve involving a land deal and someone digging up graveyards.

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The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz external link . Essays out of central Europe during the First Cold War by one of Poland’s leading intellectuals. The Captive Mind is divided into four parts. Each part examines a different mindset adopted by intellectuals in response to the oppressive political environment. Miłosz analyzes the impact of communist ideology on the human psyche. He delves into how intellectuals compromised their beliefs, suppressed their individuality, and conformed to the demands of the ruling regimes....

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We

Zamyatin’s little-known dystopian novel We influenced Ayn Rand, George Orwell external link , and Aldous Huxley, and unlike them, he had no model. Zamyatin wrote We in 1921. The Benefactor, the one ruler, assigns numbers to citizens. Society uses pure mathematics as a religion. So the novel has the influence of the Logical Positivism of the day. The novel refers to groups and individuals as “ciphers” or “unifs.” The novel is a series of journal entries by engineer I-503. He...

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Effi Briest

Effi Briest is a novel written by Theodor Fontane and published in 1895. 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. Effi Briest, at the age of 17, marries Baron Geert von Innstetten, a much older and respected man who holds a high position in the Prussian government. The marriage is arranged by Effi’s parents for financial and social reasons. Initially, Effi is...

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The Pole

A Polish pianist with an unpronounceable last name (let’s call him W) comes to give a recital in Barcelona. The usual well-heeled arts volunteers, including one Beatriz, arranged the recital. Beatriz, whose name immediately resonates with Dante’s muse, Beatrice, will find herself in similar circumstances but will turn the tables before all is said. We soon learn W is in his 70s and Beatriz is in her early 50s. They are to meet with another couple following the recital but...

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Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman is a novel written by Sayaka Murata and published in 2016. The story revolves around Keiko Furukura, a socially awkward woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years. Keiko feels a deep sense of belonging and identity within the structured and predictable environment of the convenience store. She has dedicated herself to following the store’s rules and mimicking the behavior of her co-workers. She strives to be a “normal” person in society’s eyes....

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The Nickel Boys

The Nickel Boys is a chilling novel based on a true story, which begins with hope and ends in tragedy. Racial profiling and profiteering on the part of a reform school (Nickel School, based in Florida) and its administrator sets the plot in motion. Medieval corporal punishments for minor infractions sharpened the cruelty experienced by the students. An unfortunate favor one student tries to do for his friend puts the final period in his sentence. Studious, hard-working Elwood is done...

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My Cheesecake Shaped Poverty

“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...

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The Bear

The Bear follows a young boy named Isaac McCaslin, who goes on numerous hunting trips into the wilderness with his uncle and other men. During these excursions, they come across a bear named Old Ben who has been killing and eating livestock from local farms. The men are determined to hunt down and kill Old Ben. Over many years and hunting trips, different members of the group try and fail to kill the formidable Old Ben, who proves to be...

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The Glass Hotel

Vincent is a bartender at the Glass Hotel, or as it’s first called, Hotel Caiette. It’s a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall. It reads “ Why don’t you swallow broken glass ?” Alkaitis’s billion-dollar hedge fund empire is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives (like a Madoff external...

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The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed is about a planet and its moon and the clashing cultures of the two. Anarres – a bleak moon isolated from other worlds, happily enjoying a peaceful but poor anarchic system. Urras —a civilization of warring nations, but immense wealth and resources. Shevek of Annares is a brilliant physicist with a determination to reunite the two planets. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart....

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Lucy By the Sea

Elizabeth Strout’s novel begins with William Barton visiting his ex-wife in NYC as the COVID-19 epidemic begins. He insists on moving her from her comfortable Manhattan flat to a coastal Maine home to wait things out. For several months it’s just Lucy and William living together by the sea renewing their friendship. They become close again and receive cautious visits from their grown children Lucy makes new friends in their seaside community of Crosby, Maine. William takes on a teaching...

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The Lives of Animals

In The Lives of Animals , the idea of cruelty to animals consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello. She can no longer look another person in the eye. Humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude. And it’s taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. A fictional American university invites Costello to speak on the issue. An aging Australian writer, Costello’s son also happens to teach physics there....

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The Return

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return : Fathers and Sons and the Land in Between is the story of what he found there. The Pulitzer Prize award for Best Biography...

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Fifth Business

Published in 1970, Fifth Business is Canadian author Robertson Davies external link ’ first part of the Deptford Trilogy. The novel begins with the childhood incident that shapes Ramsay’s life. As a young boy, Ramsay witnesses a traumatic event involving his schoolmate Percy Boyd Staunton and another boy named Mary Dempster. This incident sets off a chain of events that reverberate throughout Ramsay’s life. Ramsay becomes what he refers to as the “fifth business” in the lives of the people...

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Liberation Day

Saunders continues to challenge and surprise in his latest book of stories: Liberation Day . A collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. Love Letter “Love Letter” is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson. Amid a dystopian political future that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. ⭐ Liberation Day (87k PDF) Ghoul “Ghoul” takes place in a Hell-themed section of an underground...

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Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is a thought-provoking dystopian novel written by Kazuo Ishiguro external link . The novel is set in an alternate version of late 20th-century England. Three friends, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up in a secluded boarding school called Hailsham. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go unfolds through Kathy’s introspective and nostalgic narration as she reflects on her upbringing. Her friendships and the unsettling truth about their existence are all part of such introspection. It becomes clear...

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The Box Man

The Box Man is one of Kobo Abe external link 's more abstruse and obscure novels. Best known as the author of The Woman in the Dunes , Abe combines wildly imaginative fantasies and naturalistic prose to create narratives reminiscent of the work of Kafka and Beckett. In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering...

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Small Things Like These

In Small Things Like These , it is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. (Publisher)

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To Have and Have Not

Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not is a commentary on the time of The Great Depression told from multiple viewpoints. He wrote it sporadically between 1935 and 1937. Then revised it as he traveled back and forth from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The novel portrays Key West and Cuba in the 1930s and provides a social commentary on that time and place. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers described the novel as heavily influenced by the Marxist ideology. Hemingway was...

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Emma

Characters in Emma by Jane Austen have many prejudices that Austen challenges the reader to find rather than state them. Set in the fictional country village of Highbury, the novel involves the relationships among people from a small number of families. Emma was first published in December 1815, although the title page is dated 1816. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian–Regency England. Emma is a comedy of manners. “I...

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Sula

“Sula” is a novel written by Toni Morrison, published in 1973. 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. The novel begins with the childhood friendship of Sula and Nel, two young girls who create a strong bond despite their contrasting personalities. She is rebellious, independent, and unapologetic, while Nel is more conforming and reserved. As they grow older, their paths...

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Honeymoon

In Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, Jean B., the narrator is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career. He begins to take what seems to be a journey to nowhere. Jean pretends to fly to Rio to make another film but instead returns to his Parisian suburb. He decides to spend his solitary days...

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Collected Stories by Donald Barthelme

Stories by Donald Barthelme , revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention. Collected Stories also includes the work that appeared for the first time in Barthelme’s two retrospective anthologies, Sixty and Forty . Jaded readers who already own those collections will find new stories here. Boy, will that irk them. After reading Stories by Donald Barthelme you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll rub your eyes in disbelief. His scrambled visions of history yield unexpected...

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Entropy

Thomas Pynchon wrote Slow Learner, a collection of stories, which was published in 1984, which includes the story Entropy. The collection includes five stories written during his formative years as a writer, spanning the period from 1958 to 1964. Our book group focused on the one story in particular: Entropy. The stories in “Slow Learner” generally showcase Pynchon’s experimentation with different styles, themes, and narrative techniques. Each story offers a glimpse into Pynchon’s early literary development. We see explorations of...

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The Midnight Library

In The Midnight Library on a shelf somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if...

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Bad Monkey

Bad Monkey is a wacky romp of a satirical detective story. Andrew Yancy is a disgraced former detective currently working as the city food inspector. This alone brings him into many vile situations. Not quite as vile though as discovering a severed arm on the beach. He does and promptly tosses it into his freezer to preserve evidence. He immediately sees an opportunity to solve a big crime and regain his badge and detective status. But first, he has to...

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Oh, William!

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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Oranges

John McPhee wrote Oranges in 1967. It delves into the world of Florida’s citrus industry, providing a comprehensive exploration of the orange farming and processing business. The book offers a detailed and informative look at the history, science, and economics behind the cultivation, harvesting, and distribution of oranges. McPhee introduces fun facts for aranciophiles . Such as why harvesters treat themselves to fruit from the top of the trees and only eat the top halves. Oranges are sweetest where they...

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Missing Person

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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Both Flesh and Not

Both Flesh and Not: Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by American author David Foster Wallace published posthumously in 2012. It is Wallace’s third essay collection. Apart from the essay on Roger Federer, the rest are Wallace hitting serves past the line.

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Grey Bees

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

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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Exhalation - Stories

Named one of the top ten books of 2019, Chiang’s collection tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. Profound, sympathetic, and revelatory, these are works of Chiang at his finest. Chiang’s collection tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric...

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The Promise

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

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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The Periodic Table

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. They include various themes that follow a chronological sequence. His ancestry at the start. Then his studies of chemistry and practical use of the studies in wartime Italy. A pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time, and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan follow. Subsequently, a piece about his arrest and imprisonment,...

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Ravelstein

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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The Magic Mountain

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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Republic

The revised edition of Grube’s classic translation of Plato’s Republic follows and furthers Grube’s noted success in combining fidelity to Plato’s text with natural readability while reflecting the fruits of new scholarship and insights into Plato’s thought since the publication of the first edition in 1974. Divided into ten books, each book of The “Republic” addresses different aspects of the ideal state. In Book I, Socrates engages in a dialogue with several characters, including Glaucon and Adeimantus, to examine the...

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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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Who Goes There?

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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A Walker in the City

Alfred Kazin’s classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this...

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Warlock

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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The Three Body Problem

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

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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Motherless Brooklyn

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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The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

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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Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Now in a third edition, Robert M. Sapolsky’s acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction. It also includes new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress. 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. Such...

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A Confederacy of Dunces

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

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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Uncle Vanya

19th century Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote the drama Uncle Vanya . Set in rural Russia during the late 19th century, the story revolves around the lives of an extended family & friends. The central character is Uncle Vanya. He is a middle-aged professor who feels disillusioned with his life and bitter about his wasted potential. The play explores themes of unfulfilled dreams, unrequited love, and the human capacity for self-deception. Uncle Vanya is infatuated with Yelena, the young and...

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Klara and the Sun

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

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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City on the Edge of Forever

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

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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Why I Live at the PO

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

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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Ragtime

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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Intimations

Zadie Smith authored Intimations , which was published in 2020 amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic. The book reflects on the unprecedented times and offers Smith’s observations and reflections on various aspects of life during this period. The essays in “Intimations” touch on a range of topics, including the impact of the pandemic, racial injustice, social inequality, and the role of art in times of crisis. Smith explores the ways in which the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing societal issues,...

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The Alchemist

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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The History of Rasselas

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

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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My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Known to millions as the preeminent swashbuckler of the silver screen, Errol Flynn was a complex man who lived a life far more adventurous than any of his films. In My Wicked, Wicked Ways , Flynn reveals himself to be a self-aware and cosmopolitan devotee of excitement and pleasure. With gusto, he recalls his years as a soldier of fortune in the South Seas, his trip to war-torn Spain, his battles in Hollywood with studio honchos (Jack Warner was a...

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White Noise

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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William Trevor's Last Stories

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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Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey is a collection of reality-blended fictional picaresque essays that only Patti Smith can write. Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February...

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Humboldt's Gift

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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A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders shares a version of his writing class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In the introduction of A Swim in a Pond in...

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Time's Arrow

Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves “out of blackest sleep” to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America. As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one...

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Design for the Real World

Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek is a classic anyone involved in design can benefit from. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, and the frivolous. He provides a blueprint for sensible, responsible, eco-friendly design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy. PART ONE: HOW IT IS WHAT IS DESIGN? A definition of the function complex PHYLOGENICIDE: A history of the industrial design profession THE MYTH...

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The Sportswriter

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford’s moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring. The Sportswriter...

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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Readers as diverse as TS Eliot and Lou Reed appreciated Delmore Schwartz’s story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities . Schwartz made his parents’ disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”. The Partisan Review published the story in its first issue (1937). Schwartz’s first book is titled the same and was published in 1938 when Schwartz was only 25 years old. New York intellectual circles hailed the book, making the author a well-known figure in...

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Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore is a complex and introspective novel that combines elements of magical realism, metaphysics, and psychological exploration. Murakami creates a captivating and thought-provoking narrative that explores the depths of the human experience. As the narrative progresses, the protagonist undergoes a profound personal transformation. He faces his fears, confronts his past, and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and redemption. Throughout the novel, the protagonist is haunted by the disappearance of a young girl named Mariye. Mariye has a connection...

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Cathedral

Cathedral is Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the different world of another. These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s work and overflow with the danger, excitement, and mystery. His eye is so clear, that it almost breaks your heart." Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, was a great influence on how the stories turned out.

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Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. American composer Philip Glass has also written an opera of the same name based on the book which premiered in September 2005 at Theater Erfurt, Germany. The theme of colonial imposition...

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The Invention of Morel

La invención de Morel (1940) — translated as The Invention of Morel or Morel’s Invention — is a novel by Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was Bioy Casares’ breakthrough effort, for which he won the 1941 First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires. He considered it the true beginning of his literary career, despite being his seventh book. The first edition cover artist was Norah Borges (see below), sister of Bioy Casares’ lifelong friend, Jorge...

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A Man Called Ove

Fredrik Backman wrote A Man Called Ove in 2012. It tells the story of Ove, a grumpy and solitary old man who finds unexpected connections and purpose in life. Ove is a curmudgeonly and principled individual who adheres strictly to rules and routines. He is grieving the loss of his wife and feels out of place in the modern world. Ove’s life takes an unexpected turn when new neighbors, including a young family, move in next door. Through a series...

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Flying to America

Flying to America, first published in 2007, presents all of Barthelme’s previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction. For both devotees and those new to Barthelme’s playful irreverence, erudition, and unmatched imagination, this unprecedented survey offers a rare and wonderful treat. One of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century, Donald Barthelme wrote novels, short stories, parodies, plays, satires, fables, and essays that captured the good, the bad, but most of all the strange of America, but not...

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The Plains by Gerald Murnane

In The Plains, Australian novelist Gerald Murnane explores how the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers, and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young filmmaker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library, he begins to take notes for a film...

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Love is Blind

William Boyd’s Love is Blind follows the life of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish piano tuner with a remarkable talent for his craft. The novel explores themes of love, passion, and the complexities of human relationships.Brodie Moncur, working for an Edinburgh piano company, is sent to Paris to oversee the expansion of the company’s business. There, he meets Lika Blum, a talented Russian pianist with whom he falls deeply in love. However, Lika is already involved with a famous composer...

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The Nose

Gogol wrote “The Nose” in 1836. The satirical story is set in St. Petersburg, Russia. It follows the bizarre misadventures of Major Kovalyov and his missing nose. It is a surreal and humorous tale that explores themes of identity, social hierarchy, and absurdity. The story begins with Major Kovalyov waking up one morning to find that his nose has disappeared from his face. Shocked and bewildered, he searches frantically for his missing appendage but fails to find it. To his...

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Running Dog

DeLillo’s Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller’s narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master’s early career.

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The Skating Rink

With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolano, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective.” Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators,...

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Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders’ first full-length novel. It was on The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller for the week of March 5, 2017. The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln and deals with the president’s grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel takes place throughout a single evening. It is set in the bardo...

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Impossible Owls - Essays

The essays in Impossible Owls go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. He searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he...

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Molloy

Molloy is the first of three novels initially written in Paris between 1947 and 1950; this trio, which includes Malone Dies and The Unnamable, is collectively referred to as ‘The Trilogy’ or ‘the Beckett Trilogy.’ Beckett deliberately wrote all three books in French and then, aside from some collaborative work on Molloy with Patrick Bowles, served entirely as his own English-language translator; he did the same for most of his plays. As Paul Auster explains, “Beckett’s renderings of his own...

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Riding Toward Everywhere

Riding Toward Everywhere delves into the history and culture of train hopping. Train hopping has its roots in the Great Depression era when many people hopped trains in search of work. Vollmann examines the allure of train hopping as a way to escape society’s constraints and experience a sense of freedom and adventure. He also explores the dangers and risks inherent in this lifestyle. Risks such as encounters with law enforcement, injuries, and the constant uncertainty of where the next...

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The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel by French author Alexandre Dumas (père) completed in 1844. It is one of the author’s more popular works, along with The Three Musketeers . Like many of his novels, it was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet. Another important work by Dumas, written before his work with Maquet, was the short novel Georges . Georges is of interest to scholars because...

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Underworld

The prologue of Underworld is a fictionalized account of The Shot Heard 'Round the World, a home run by Bobby Thomson in 1951. The HR won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In DeLillo’s account, the game-winning ball is caught by a young black fan named Cotter Martin. Meanwhile, J Edgar Hoover is also in the stands that day. During the game, he is informed of the game of the...

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My Struggle, Book 2

The narrative of My Struggle Book 2 unfolds through a series of interconnected vignettes, alternating between past and present. Knausgaard reflects on his strained relationship with his father, who is depicted as a distant and mysterious figure. He delves into his insecurities and the challenges he faces as he tries to find his place in the world. One of the themes of My Struggle Book 2 is Knausgaard’s struggle to reconcile personal freedom and artistic expression with the responsibilities of...

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The Time Machine

The Time Machine is a classic science fiction novel by H.G. Wells and published in 1895. It tells the story of an unnamed Time Traveller who invents a machine capable of traveling through time. The novel explores themes of social class, evolution, and the possible future of humanity. The Time Traveller gathers a group of acquaintances at his home and demonstrates his invention. He then embarks on a journey into the future, specifically the year 802,701 A.D. There, he encounters...

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My Struggle, Book 1

My Struggle Book 1 is the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series, originally published in Norwegian in 2009. The book is a deeply introspective and honest exploration of Knausgaard’s personal life, relationships, and struggles. It delves into his childhood, his complex relationship with his father, and his journey as a writer. The narrative unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, with Knausgaard reflecting on various episodes from his life. He describes his upbringing in rural Norway, the dynamics within his...

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A Brief History of Time

While A Brief History of Time deals with complex scientific concepts, Stephen Hawking ensures that readers without a scientific background can still grasp the main ideas. He uses vivid examples and analogies, such as comparing the expansion of the universe to the motion of raisins in a rising loaf of bread, to make abstract concepts more relatable. Hawking takes readers on a journey through the history of cosmology, from ancient Greek philosophers to modern scientific theories. He explores key concepts...

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a comprehensive book written by French economist Thomas Piketty and published in 2013. The book examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality, exploring their causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Piketty argues that the rate of return on capital tends to be higher than the rate of economic growth. This leads to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. He presents extensive historical data from various countries to support this claim,...

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The Left Hand of Darkness

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness became immensely popular and established Le Guin’s status as a major author of science fiction. The novel is part of the Hainish Cycle external link , a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin set in the eponymous fictional universe, which she introduced in 1964 with ‘The Dowry of the Angyar’. The Left Hand of Darkness is part of Le Guin’s Hainish novels. City of Illusions precedes it and The...

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Indignation

Set in America in 1951, during the Korean War, Indignation is narrated by Marcus Messner, a Jewish college student from Newark, NJ. Messner describes his sophomore year at Winesburg College in Ohio ( a reference to the fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Marcus transfers to Winesburg from Robert Treat College in Newark to escape his father, a kosher butcher. He wants to escape him because he is consumed with fear about the dangers of adult life. The world, and the uncertainty that...

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Infinite Jest

Set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule...

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Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Spanish: Memoria de mis putas tristes) is a novella by Gabriel García Márquez. The book was originally published in Spanish in 2004, with an English translation by Edith Grossman published in October 2005. The proper translation of the title would be ‘memory of my sad whores.’ ‘Melancholy’ is a word whose meaning is far more intricate than Spanish triste. And Spanish triste translates best to the English adjective sad. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout...

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Homage to Catalonia

The book provides a firsthand account of Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he served as a soldier in the Republican militia fighting against the Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco. Homage to Catalonia begins with Orwell’s arrival in Barcelona in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the civil war. He joins the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). The POUM is a revolutionary socialist group, which became actively involved in the fight against Franco’s forces. Orwell...

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Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities in 1972, but it feels as if it had always existed. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories...

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Cannery Row

Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California. The street is one lined with sardine canneries known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there, including Lee Chong, the local grocer. Doc, a marine biologist. And Mack, the leader of a group of derelicts. The actual location Steinbeck was writing about in Monterey, was later renamed “Cannery Row” in honor of the...

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Rhinoceros

Rhinoceros is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. Throughout three acts, the inhabitants of a provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses. Ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger. Bérenger is a flustered everyman figure. Inhabitants initially criticize Bérenger for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle. Later they call him paranoid for an obsession with rhinos. Some critics read Rhinoceros as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge...

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The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald frames the narrative of The Rings of Saturn as a walking tour taken by an unnamed narrator through the county of Suffolk in England. As the narrator explores the region, he encounters many people, places, and stories. These serve as starting points for thoughts on broader themes such as history, memory, and mortality. Sebald weaves together topics and historical events, ranging from the decline of the herring industry to the hell of World War II and the Holocaust....

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Voyage Around My Room

Voyage Around My Room is a whimsical and introspective travelogue written by French author Xavier de Maistre and published in 1794. The book takes a unique approach to travel literature by exploring the world within the confines of a single room. The narrator, who is under house arrest for dueling, embarks on a journey of self-discovery and imagination within the boundaries of his own room. He observes and describes the objects, furniture, and artwork in his surroundings, imbuing them with...

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Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

The Life of Samuel Johnson is a biography written by James Boswell and published in 1791. It is a comprehensive and influential account of the life of one of the most prominent figures in 18th-century English literature, Samuel Johnson. One of the notable features of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the inclusion of numerous conversations and anecdotes. Johnson’s wit, wisdom, and idiosyncrasies are all here. These dialogues provide insights into Johnson’s views on a wide range of topics, including...

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Night of Wenceslas

The Night of Wenceslas is the debut novel of British thriller and crime writer Lionel Davidson. This Bildungsroman describes the reluctant adventures of Nicolas Whistler, a dissolute young man of mixed English and Czech parentage who finds himself caught up against his will in Cold War espionage. The novel won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award in 1960 and the Author’s Club First Novel Award. It was filmed in 1964 under the title Hot Enough for June. (wikipedia)

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The Complete Short Prose of Beckett

Collected in The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett include “Fizzles,” “Heard in the Dark,” “Ping,” and “The Last Ones.” The Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He expressed the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the “important writing,” the medium in...

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The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums follows the character of Ray Smith, a thinly veiled representation of Kerouac himself, as he embarks on a series of adventures and encounters with various individuals. The narrative is set against the backdrop of the Beat Generation’s counter-cultural lifestyle and the exploration of Eastern philosophy. The novel begins with Ray’s friendship with Japhy Ryder, a character based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder. Japhy becomes a mentor to Ray, introducing him to Zen Buddhism, mountaineering, and...

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The Quiet American

In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American it’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s...

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Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West is set in New York during the Great Depression, a time of economic hardship and social upheaval. Miss Lonelyheart’s real name is never revealed. He receives countless letters from individuals seeking guidance and solace in their troubled lives. However, he finds himself unable to offer genuine help or find meaning in the face of the overwhelming suffering he encounters. As Miss Lonelyhearts becomes increasingly burdened by the weight of his readers’ despair, he descends into...

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The Dead

“The Dead” is a short story written by James Joyce in 1914 as the final story in his collection Dubliners. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest short stories in the English language. Set in early 20th-century Dublin during a Christmas party, the story explores themes of mortality, memory, and the complexities of human relationships. The narrative centers around Gabriel Conroy, a university professor, and his wife, Gretta. The story unfolds as they attend an annual gathering hosted...

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The Sun Also Rises

Jake Barnes, a journalist and World War I veteran narrates The Sun Also Rises . He is impotent due to a war injury. Jake is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful and independent woman. Ashley and Robert Cohn (writer and former amateur boxer) are in a tumultuous relationship. The characters are part of a circle of expats living in Paris. They seek to escape the emptiness and disillusionment of post-war society. The group travels to Pamplona for the...

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Narcissus and Goldmund

Set in medieval Germany Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse revolves around the complex and transformative friendship between two contrasting characters. Narcissus, an intellectual and monk, and Goldmund, a restless and artistic wanderer. The novel begins with Goldmund. Raised in a monastery, Goldmund yearns for a passionate existence beyond the confines of religious life. He embarks on a journey of self-discovery. He leaves the monastery to explore the world and indulges in various carnal and artistic experiences. Throughout his travels,...

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Trainspotting

The narrative of the novel Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is presented through a series of interconnected short stories, each focusing on different characters within the group. The central character is Mark Renton, a young man caught in the grip of heroin addiction. The novel delves into Renton’s experiences, his attempts at quitting drugs, and the cyclical nature of addiction and relapse. Renton’s friends, including the hot-tempered and unpredictable Francis Begbie. The affable and naive Spud. The ambitious Sick Boy. And...

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Kindred

Kindred by Octavia Butler begins with Dana, a young Black American, and her white husband, Kevin, moving into their new home. Suddenly, Dana is yanked back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century. She finds herself in the presence of Rufus Weylin, a white plantation owner’s son, who is in danger of drowning. Dana quickly realizes that she has been brought back in time whenever Rufus’s life is at risk. Her survival is tied to his....

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays divided into two sections: “Life Styles in the Golden Land” and “Personals.” In the first section, Joan Didion provides a series of journalistic essays that offer a critical and perceptive look at different aspects of American life. She delves into topics such as the counterculture movement, the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, and the cultural and social dynamics of California. Didion’s writing is characterized by her keen observations, sharp prose, and her...

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Fox 8

Fox 8 is a novella written by George Saunders and published in 2013. It tells the story of Fox8, a clever and curious fox living in a suburban landscape impacted by human development. The novella is narrated from Fox 8’s perspective. His unique voice and broken English add a distinct charm to the story. Or a lady drops her purse and bends to retreev her guds, when sudden lee her hat blows away, at which time, speeking a bad werd,...

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Zero K

In Zero K , Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau. Her health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled. Bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to life. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. These are...

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Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad and published in 1899. The story follows Charles Marlow, a sailor and narrator, as he recounts his journey into the heart of Africa to find the enigmatic ivory trader Kurtz. Marlow’s quest takes place during the height of European colonialism in Africa. As he travels up the Congo River, he witnesses the brutal and exploitative nature of imperialism firsthand. The novella explores themes of darkness, moral ambiguity, and the corrupting...

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The Peregrine

The Peregrine is a nature book written by J. A. Baker and published in 1967. It is a deeply immersive account of the author’s observations of peregrine falcons in the British countryside. Baker divides the book into diary entries spanning several years. During this time, Baker meticulously documents his encounters with these birds of prey. His observations focus on a particular pair of peregrines and their hunting expeditions. Baker’s prose is rich and evocative. It captures the beauty and power...

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The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966. The story follows Oedipa Maas, a California housewife, as she becomes entangled in a complex and bewildering conspiracy. Invararity’s estate names Oedipa the executor of his estate. As she delves into her role, she discovers a series of puzzling and interconnected clues that lead her on a surreal and convoluted journey. Oedipa’s investigation takes her into a world of enigmatic underground postal systems, secret societies, and strange encounters with eccentric...

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King Lear

King Lear is a tragic play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1603 and 1606. The play tells the story of an aging King Lear who decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. But the consequences of this decision lead to a series of tragic events. Act I Act I introduces the characters and sets the stage for conflicts that drive the rest of the play. King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his...

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The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses is a novel written by Salman Rushdie and published in 1988. The story revolves around two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, whose lives become intertwined in a series of surreal and fantastical events. The novel begins with a plane explosion over the English Channel, in which Gibreel and Saladin miraculously survive. However, their bodies undergo a transformation, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination. Gibreel starts experiencing vivid dreams and visions, while Saladin develops physical...

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Numero Zero

Numero Zero is a novel written by Umberto Eco and published in 2015. It is a satirical work that explores themes of media manipulation, conspiracy theories, and the blurred line between truth and fiction. The story is set in Milan in 1992 and follows Colonna, a freelance writer who is hired to work for a mysterious publishing project called “Domani” (“Tomorrow”). “Domani” aims to create a nonexistent newspaper, which would be used to manipulate public opinion and serve the interests...

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Any Human Heart

William Boyd wrote and published Any Human Heart in 2002. It is a fictional autobiography that follows the eventful life of the protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, during the 20th century. Boyd presents the narrative through Logan’s journal, which Logan keeps throughout his life. The novel spans various periods and locations, offering a panoramic view of historical events. These events include World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Swinging Sixties. Boyd portrays Logan as a complex and...

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To Set Prometheus Free

In 2007 Anthony Grayling external link (Wikipedia bio) wrote Against All Gods, a collection of polemical essays attacking religion. In To Set Prometheus Free he develops those themes more comprehensively. He unpacks the claims and arguments of religious apologists. He summarizes the views of his fellow secularist Bertrand Russell. In particular, he details the controversy over ‘Intelligent Design’ and outlines his personal, naturalistic worldview. In To Set Prometheus Free , Grayling robustly calls for humanity to choose deliverance from religion....

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The Sisters Brothers

Eli Sisters, the more introspective and sensitive of the two brothers narrates The Sisters Brothers . A wealthy man known as the Commodore hires Eli and Charlie to hunt down and kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. The Commodore says Harm has stolen from the Commodore. As the brothers travel from Oregon City to California, they encounter a variety of eccentric and often dangerous characters. Among these include rival bounty hunters, sex workers, and gold prospectors. Eli begins to...

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The Martian

Andy Weir wrote the sci-fi novel The Martian in 2011. It is a gripping and realistic tale of survival set on Mars. Watney’s crew strands him on Mars after they believe he is dead, killed in a giant dust storm. With limited supplies and no means of communication with Earth, Watney must rely on his ingenuity. He turns to his scientific knowledge and resourcefulness to survive in the harsh Martian environment. Watney faces numerous challenges, including finding ways to grow...

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Traveler of the Century

Set in the early 19th century, Traveler of the Century follows the travels of Hans, a young German traveler and translator who arrives in the fictional city of Wandernburg. Hans becomes acquainted with a diverse cast of characters, including intellectuals, revolutionaries, and aristocrats, each representing different facets of society. As Hans delves deeper into the city’s social and intellectual circles, he becomes involved in discussions. He debates on a wide range of topics, such as politics, love, literature, and human...

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Paterson

“Paterson” is a long poem written by American modernist poet William Carlos Williams and published in five parts between 1946 and 1951. Williams names the poem “Paterson,” as Patterson, NJ is where he lived and worked as a doctor. The poem is a sprawling and ambitious work that was published in four parts and tend in my reading to go from great (Book 1) to so-so (Book 2), and on downward in overal quality. Just a fragment from the first...

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Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel is a novel written by Thomas Wolfe and published in 1929. It is a coming-of-age story that follows the protagonist, Eugene Gant, as he grows up in the fictional town of Altamont, North Carolina, during the early 20th century. The novel explores Eugene’s tumultuous upbringing in a dysfunctional family. His father, Oliver, is a restless and ambitious stonecutter, while his mother, Eliza, is a controlling and domineering woman. Eugene’s siblings and extended family members also contribute to...

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China Mountain Zhang

China Mountain Zhang is a science fiction novel written by Maureen McHugh and published in 1992. Set in a future where China has become the dominant global superpower. The world is one where social and technological advancements have shaped a new society. The novel follows the life of Zhang Zhong Shan, a young man living in New York City. Chinese culture now influences most aspects of life. Zhang is a construction worker with a Chinese heritage who struggles with his...

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All I Asking for is My Body

All I Asking for Is My Body is a novel written by Milton Murayama and published in 1975. Set in early 20th-century Hawaii, the novel follows the life of Kiyoshi. Kiyoshi is a young Japanese-American boy growing up in a plantation community. Murayama’s novel explores the struggles of the Japanese immigrant community in Hawaii during a time of social and economic inequality. Kiyoshi comes from a poor family. They face discrimination and prejudice from both the white plantation owners and...

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The Purloined Letter

“The Purloined Letter” begins with Dupin’s friend, the narrator, visiting him at his home. The Prefect of the Parisian police interrupts the investigation. The Prefect seeks Dupin’s assistance in locating a stolen letter. He informs Dupin that the letter contains sensitive information. And potentially has blackmail material against a prominent societal figure. The Prefect explains that the letter was stolen by Minister D—, who concealed it in plain sight. Minister D– placed it among his correspondence. Despite conducting thorough searches,...

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The Gold Bug

“The Gold Bug” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. It follows the adventure of an unnamed narrator and his eccentric friend, William Legrand, as they search for buried treasure. The story begins with the narrator visiting Legrand on an isolated island in South Carolina. Legrand, who has recently become obsessed with finding buried treasure, shows the narrator a mysterious scarab-like bug (aka “The Gold Bug”). He believes holds the key to discovering the treasure’s location. Legrand describes...

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The Colossus of Maroussi

The Colossus of Maroussi is a travel memoir written by American author Henry Miller and published in 1941. The book chronicles Miller’s experiences traveling through Greece in the late 1930s and his encounters with various people. At its core, The Colossus of Maroussi is a personal exploration of Miller’s deep appreciation for Greece and its people. The narrative is a blend of vivid descriptions, philosophical reflections, and poetic musings. Miller immerses himself in the Greek way of life and the...

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A Contest for Supremacy

A Contest for Supremacy examines the socioeconomic forces at play in US-China relations. I do not share the author’s conclusion, but it’s an engaging book. According to Friedberg, despite its impressive size and population, economic vitality, and drive to upgrade its military, China remains a vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful rivals and potential foes. Understanding China’s foreign policy means fully appreciating these geostrategic challenges, which persist even as the country gains increasing influence over its neighbors. Andrew J. Nathan and...

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The Great Wall of China

“The Great Wall of China” is a short story written by Franz Kafka. It is a fictional account that explores the construction and purpose of the Great Wall, employing allegory and philosophical themes. The story presents a first-person narrative of an unnamed narrator who joins the labor force building the Great Wall. The narrator describes the immense scale of the project, highlighting the effort and resources required to build such a colossus. As the story progresses, the narrator delves into...

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Let Me Be Frank With You

Let Me Be Frank with You ( LMBFWY ) is a novel by American author Richard Ford and published in 2014. LMBFWY is a collection of interconnected stories featuring Frank Bascombe. Bascombe is a middle-aged retired sportswriter and real estate agent living in New Jersey. The book serves as a sequel to Richard Ford’s previous novels: The Sportswriter , Independence Day , and The Lay of the Land . Following Hurricane Sandy, Let Me Be Frank with You explores Frank’s...

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Slaughterhouse 5

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse 5 from his own experiences serving in the armed forces. It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist and World War II veteran. Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” experiencing moments of his life out of chronological order. Vonnegut structures the novel in a non-linear fashion. Billy’s experiences during the war, particularly the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, serve as a central focus. Vonnegut himself was a survivor of the Dresden bombing, and the novel draws from...

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The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams, journalist, historian, and member of the Adams political family, posthumously published The Education of Henry Adams in 1918. It won a Pulitzer the following year. The book chronicles Adams’ personal and intellectual journey throughout his life. He reflects on the changes and challenges he witnessed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Adams recounts his privileged upbringing as a member of a prominent New England family. He explores his experiences in education, from his time at Harvard...

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The Royal Game

“The Royal Game,” also known as “Chess Story,” is a novella written by Stefan Zweig. It tells the story of Mirko Czentovic, an uneducated but exceptionally talented chess player. Czentovic becomes the focus of a psychological battle during a transatlantic voyage. The narrative begins with the introduction of Dr. B., a wealthy Austrian who is traveling on a cruise ship. Dr. B. is a chess enthusiast and becomes intrigued when he learns that Czentovic is also on board. Czentovic is...

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Desert Queen

Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell is a biography written by Janet Wallach that explores the remarkable life of Gertrude Bell. She was an influential British traveler, writer, archaeologist, and political figure of the early 20th century. The book provides a comprehensive account of Bell’s life, beginning with her privileged upbringing in a wealthy British family. It follows her journey as she defied societal expectations for women at the time. Bell went on extensive travels and explored the...

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Barley Patch

Gerald Murnane published Barley Patch in 2009. It is a contemplative and introspective work that delves into themes of memory, imagination, and the nature of storytelling. A writer and self-described “matchmaker of words” narrates the novel. He shares his reflections on his life, his obsession with the Australian landscape, and his experiences with writing and storytelling. The narrative is nonlinear and fragmented, with the narrator weaving together memories, dreams, and fictional scenarios. At the heart of the novel is the...

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971. It is a semi-autobiographical account of a drug-fueled journey through Las Vegas by the narrator, Raoul Duke. His attorney, Dr. Gonzo, joins him for the ride. The story follows Duke and Dr. Gonzo as they travel to Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race. However, their trip quickly descends into a chaotic and hallucinatory adventure fueled by drugs, alcohol, and reckless behavior. Throughout the novel, Thompson explores the...

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Vineland

On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County, a wild assortment of sixties refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction” live on. They’re still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity. The latter typically involving self-defenestration to keep government checks flowing. When news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland. And with him a...

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Burning Secret

Burning Secret is a novella written by Stefan Zweig. Set in an Austrian resort in the early 20th century, the story involves young Edgar and his mother. The two are spending their summer vacation at the hotel. The central focus of the novella is the relationship that develops between Edgar and a man named Baron von Aschenbach. The baron takes a particular interest in Edgar and begins to form a close bond with him. The baron’s desires to win the...

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy wrote and published the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886. It tells the story of Ivan Ilyich, a high-ranking Russian bureaucrat, and his gradual realization of his own mortality as he faces a terminal illness. The novella begins with the news of Ivan Ilyich’s death, which prompts his colleagues to reflect on their own mortality briefly before resuming their daily lives. The narrative then shifts back in time to explore Ivan Ilyich’s life and the events...

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Eye in the Sky

Philip K. Dick published the sci-fi novel Eye in the Sky in 1957. The story follows a group of individuals who find themselves trapped in a bizarre and ever-shifting alternate reality created by a malfunctioning particle accelerator. The novel begins with the main characters, Jack Hamilton and Marsha, visiting a new tourist attraction - an experimental particle accelerator. The particle accelerator goes awry and transports the group into a series of parallel worlds. Specific beliefs and prejudices govern each of...

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Report from the Interior

Report from the Interior is Paul Auster’s memoir and it’s divided into four distinct sections. The first section focuses on Auster’s childhood and early adolescence, recounting his experiences growing up in post-World War II America. He reflects on his move at the age of four into his first house. He recounts his fascination with comic books, movies, and literature, discussing how these cultural artifacts shaped his understanding of the world and influenced his development as a writer. Grass and trees,...

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Man Walks Into A Room

Man Walks Into a Room is a novel written by Nicole Krauss and published in 2002. The story centers around Samson Greene. Greene is a professor of cognitive science who discovers that he has lost all memory. All memories of the first 24 years of his life–due to a brain tumor. The novel follows Samson’s struggle to come to terms with his memory loss and to reconstruct his identity. As he grapples with the gaps in his past, he embarks...

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The Ruined Map

Kobo Abe wrote and published The Ruined Map in 1967. Set in Tokyo, the story follows a private detective named Mr. Nemuro. Takahashi seeks Nemuro’s help in finding his missing brother-in-law, Katsumi, who disappeared after his wife’s murder. Takahashi is desperate to uncover the truth behind the events and wants Nemuro to unravel the mystery surrounding Katsumi’s disappearance. As Nemuro delves into the investigation, he becomes increasingly entangled in a web of mystery and confusion. The novel explores themes of...

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The Driver's Seat

Lise begins her final journey not with a whimper, but with the jarring visual discord of a dress—a lemon-yellow skirt paired with a bodice of violent, unnatural pink. In the sterile, fluorescent-lit boutiques of her unnamed northern city (could be in Scotland, where Spark is from?), she rejects the tasteful and the subdued, opting instead for a costume that ensures she cannot be missed. There is a brittle, porcelain quality to her composure, an existential restlessness that Muriel Spark renders...

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Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a novel by Mo Yan published in 2006. The story spans several decades of Chinese history, following the protagonist, Ximen Nao, through his various lives and reincarnations. The novel begins during the land reforms of the 1950s, where Ximen Nao, a wealthy landowner, is executed. However, instead of moving on to the afterlife, Ximen Nao is reincarnated as different animals over several decades. Each reincarnation takes place during a significant period in...

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Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge is a novel written by Thomas Pynchon and published in 2013. Set in NYC in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, we follow fraud investigator and mother Maxine Tarnow. She becomes entangled in a vast conspiracy involving technology, finance, and the shadowy forces of the digital age. The world of the “bleeding edge” of technology pulls Maxine into its complex narrative circuitry. It is “here” where she uncovers a series of suspicious financial transactions that hint at...

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The Conservationist

Set in apartheid-era South Africa, the story revolves around a wealthy white businessman named Mehring who acquires a farm in the countryside. Mehring acquires a farm called Trekkersburg. Through Mehring’s perspective, Nadine Gordimer explores the dichotomy between the black majority who work the land and the white minority who hold power. Mehring’s attempts to assert control over the land and its people reflect the broader dynamics of white privilege. The exploitation of black labor during the apartheid era is naturally...

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All That Is

All That Is is a novel written by James Salter and published in 2013. The story follows Philip Bowman, a book editor, as he navigates the landscape of love and the world of publishing. The novel runs from the end of World War II through the latter half of the 20th century. As Bowman moves through different phases of his life, he encounters various women. Each represents different facets of love and desire. From his first love to his failed...

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Le Grand Meaulnes

Le Grand Meaulnes revolves around Augustin Meaulnes, a young man from a rural background who arrives at a boarding school in the village of Sainte-Agathe. Meaulnes befriends a fellow student named François Seurel, who also serves as the narrator of the story. One day, Meaulnes goes on an adventurous journey and stumbles upon an estate known as the Domaine de la Sablière. A grand wedding celebration is taking place. He becomes captivated by the festivities and falls in love with...

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Mason & Dixon

Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon follows the adventures of two historical figures, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The two were surveyors and astronomers tasked with establishing the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 18th century. Pynchon employs the language of the Enlightenment period helping to recreate the atmosphere of that era. From the novel’s first page: Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,— the...

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Breakfast of Champions

What would any of our high school educations be without Mr. Vonnegut, a ubiquitous favorite among our English teachers. Breakfast of Champions is set in the fictional town of Midland City. It’s where Dwayne Hoover’s life begins to unravel as he becomes increasingly unstable and delusional. Kilgore Trout, unaware of his importance to Dwayne’s situation, arrives in the same city. He’s there for an arts festival. Vonnegut explores a wide range of themes, including free will, mental illness, capitalism, and...

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Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley wrote and published Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. It is the first book in the Easy Rawlins noir detective series. Set in Los Angeles in the 1940s, the story revolves around the protagonist, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, as he becomes entangled in a web of crime and corruption. The novel begins with Easy Rawlins, a Black American World War II veteran, who is recently laid off from work. Desperate for money to pay his mortgage, he accepts...

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The Rider

The Rider is a memoir written by Dutch author Tim Krabbé and originally published in 1978. It recounts the author’s personal experience of participating in a cycling race called the Tour de Mont Aigoual. The book takes readers on a journey through the mind of a cyclist as Krabbé narrates his own race experience. He provides a detailed and introspective account of the physical and mental challenges faced during the grueling competition. Krabbé’s writing captures the essence of endurance sports....

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The Lemon Table

The Lemon Table is a collection of short stories written by Julian Barnes and published in 2004. The book explores themes of aging, mortality, and the complexities of human relationships through a series of interconnected narratives. The stories in The Lemon Table revolve around characters who are either facing the challenges of old age or grappling with the loss of loved ones. Barnes delves into the emotional and psychological aspects of aging, examining the fears, regrets, and reflections that come...

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Persepolis

Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi and published in 2000. It’s about the author’s childhood and adolescence in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War. The book begins with Marjane as a young girl growing up in Tehran. She witnesses the cultural and political changes brought about by the Iranian Revolution. Through her eyes, readers witness the imposition of strict Islamic rules and the effects of war on everyday life. As Marjane navigates...

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Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985. Set in the mid-19th century, the story follows a runaway known as “the Kid” who joins a band of ruthless scalp hunters. The narrative centers around the Kid’s experiences with the gang, led by the enigmatic and brutal Judge Holden. As they venture into the lawless violent frontier they take part in relentless acts of violence. They engage in massacres, scalping, and other atrocities committed against Native Americans and Mexican settlers. Blood Meridian...

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V.

Thomas Pynchon wrote V. in 1963. The narrative follows two interconnected storylines that unfold across time and continents. The first storyline of Pynchon’s V. centers around Benny Profane, a disenchanted sailor. Benny becomes entangled in the lives of a group of eccentric individuals known as the Whole Sick Crew. Profane navigates a chaotic and absurd world filled with bizarre characters and strange occurrences. He often finds himself in peculiar and humorous situations. The second storyline revolves around Herbert Stencil, an...

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Hunger

Hunger is a novel written by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and published in 1890. It follows the story of an unnamed protagonist, a struggling writer living in the city of Kristiania (now Oslo). He is the epitome of the starving artist. The novel is a psychological exploration of the protagonist’s descent into physical and mental deprivation. He wanders the streets, desperately searching for food and work. He becomes consumed by his hunger and the constant struggle to survive. The narrative...

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The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles is a collection of interrelated science fiction short stories written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1950. The book presents a series of loosely connected narratives that depict humanity’s colonization and exploration of Mars, as well as the complex interactions between humans and the native Martians. The stories in The Martian Chronicles span a wide range of themes and periods, creating a tapestry of Martian history. Bradbury explores topics such as the allure of space exploration, the...

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Poems of Philip Larkin

The Poems of Philip Larkin show him to be one known for his introspective and often pessimistic view of the world. Here is a summary of some of his notable poems: “Be the Verse” Larkin’s most famous and controversial poem. It reflects on the negative impact of family and inheritance on individuals. The poem emphasizes the perpetuation of unhappiness and disappointment across generations. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They...

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Laughter in the Dark

Vladimir Nabokov wrote and published Laughter in the Dark in 1932. The story follows the life of Albinus, a middle-aged art critic who becomes infatuated with a young aspiring actress, Margot. Albinus, a respected and affluent man, leaves his wife and enters into a passionate affair with Margot. However, as their relationship unfolds, Albinus becomes increasingly blind to Margot’s true character. Margot manipulates and deceives him. She uses him for her gain and to pursue her ambitions in the world...

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The Sense of an Ending

The narrative of The Sense of an Ending unfolds in two parts. The first part focuses on Tony’s youth and his friendships with a group of intellectual classmates. His close friend Adrian Finn is of particular interest in the plot. The second part takes place in Tony’s later life as he receives an unexpected bequest. It forces him to reevaluate his understanding of the past. As Tony delves into his memories, he confronts the fallibility of memory itself and the...

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Death in Venice

Death in Venice is a novella written by Thomas Mann. Set in the early 20th century, it tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach. Aschenbach is a renowned and disciplined writer who travels to Venice in search of inspiration and a change of scenery. However, his visit becomes an introspective journey into his desires and the exploration of beauty, decay, and mortality. Aschenbach becomes captivated by the beauty of a young Polish boy named Tadzio, who embodies the ideal of...

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Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946. Frankl divides the book into two parts and explores his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. It also goes into his development of logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy focused on finding meaning in life. In the first part, Frankl vividly recounts his time in Auschwitz and other concentration camps during World War II. He reflects on the extreme suffering and dehumanization he and his fellow prisoners...

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where most of Earth’s animal species have become extinct, the novel . Humans have emigrated to other planets. The remaining inhabitants on Earth strive to own and care for live animals as a status symbol. The central protagonist is Rick Deckard. Deckard is a bounty hunter who retires rogue androids, known as replicants. The replicants have escaped from off-world colonies and returned to...

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1Q84

Haruki Murakami, a renowned Japanese author, wrote 1Q84 in bunko editions from 2009 to 2010. Set in Tokyo during the year 1984, the story follows two main protagonists, Aomame and Tengo, whose paths become intertwined as they navigate a peculiar and mysterious alternate reality. A secret organization known as “Sakigake” draws Aomame into it. Aomame is a skilled assassin. Tengo rewrites a mysterious novel conspiratorially. Teenage girl Fuki-Eri titles the novel “Air Chrysalis”. If this sounds hard to follow, it...

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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Set in London in the early 20th century, the story takes place over a single day. It follows the thoughts and experiences of various characters. The novel centers around Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman preparing for a party she is hosting in the evening. As Clarissa goes about her day, her thoughts and memories intertwine with events and encounters with other characters. Through her perspective, Woolf delves into themes of identity, social conventions,...

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The Horse's Mouth

The Horse’s Mouth is a novel written by Joyce Cary and published in 1944, centering on the compelling character of Gulley Jimson. An unconventional artist, Gulley is larger-than-life and tirelessly pursues his passion for art, reflecting the complexities and chaos of the art world. Gulley’s fervent dedication to his craft drives his eccentricity and talent. He relentlessly seeks inspiration, often pushing boundaries to create his masterpieces. Despite his artistic prowess, Gulley grapples with societal expectations and frequently clashes with the...

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Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ, Umibe no Kafuka) is a 2002 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Its 2005 English translation was among “The 10 Best Books of 2005” from The New York Times and received the World Fantasy Award for 2006. The book tells the stories of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The book...

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2666

Chilean author Roberto Bolaño wrote and published 2666 posthumously in 2004. It is a sprawling and complex work that weaves together multiple storylines and characters. It explores themes of violence, the search for meaning, and the human condition. The novel is divided into five parts, each with its own distinct narrative focus. I. The part about the critics The first part introduces four European literary critics obsessed with the elusive and reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. II. The part...

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Swann's Way

At the risk of invoking a Monty Pythonesque guffaw, here is a summary of Proust and specifically Swann’s Way . Published in 1913, Swann’s Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-part novel, In Search of Lost Time . The volume serves as an introduction to Proust’s intricate exploration of memory, time, and the complexities of human experience. Swann’s Way begins with the narrator’s reminiscences of his childhood in the fictional town of Combray. Proust structures the narrative around...

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The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer is a novel written by Walker Percy and published in 1961. It tells the story of Binx Bolling, a young man living in New Orleans who is grappling with a sense of alienation and a search for meaning in his life. Binx Bolling, the protagonist and narrator, comes from a privileged Southern family but feels disconnected from the world around him. He finds solace in going to the movies, seeking refuge in the fantasy world of the silver...

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The Road to Wellville

T.C. Boyle published The Road to Wellville in 1993. Set in the early 20th century, it explores the eccentric and often controversial practices of health enthusiasts in the pursuit of well-being. The story revolves around two main characters. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a real-life figure and the inventor of corn flakes and Will Lightbody, a fictional character seeking a cure for his chronic digestive issues. Dr. Kellogg runs the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health resort promoting holistic healing and physical...

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The Angel's Game

Carlos Ruiz Zafón published The Angel’s Game in 2008. It is set in 1920s Barcelona. It is a prequel to Zafón’s earlier work, The Shadow of the Wind , but can be read as a standalone story. The novel delves into themes of love, obsession, and the blurred lines between reality and fiction. The story follows David Martín, a young writer struggling to make ends meet as a journalist. He receives an offer from a mysterious publisher named Andreas Corelli...

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American Pastoral

Philip Roth wrote American Pastoral in 1997. Set against the backdrop of post-World War II America, the story explores the disintegration of the American Dream through the lens of one family. American Pastoral centers around Seymour “Swede” Levov, a successful Jewish-American businessman and former star athlete. Swede seemingly embodies the American Dream, with a beautiful wife named Dawn and a daughter named Merry. However, the tranquil façade of Swede’s life is shattered when Merry becomes involved in radical political activities...

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Blindness

José Saramago wrote and published Blindness in 1995. It is a thought-provoking and allegorical story that explores the fragility of humanity and the breakdown of society in the face of an epidemic of sudden blindness. The novel begins when a “white blindness” strikes people in an unnamed city. People lose their sight overnight, leaving the city’s inhabitants in a state of panic and confusion. Among the blind, a doctor, his wife, a girl, her mother, a thief, and others play...

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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout wrote Olive Kitteridge in 2008. It is a collection of interconnected stories that revolve around the complex and often prickly character of Olive Kitteridge. Olive is a retired schoolteacher living in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. The novel delves into the lives of the residents of Crosby, with Olive serving as the thread connecting the narratives. Through a series of episodic chapters, the reader gains insight into Olive’s struggles. Olive is depicted as a strong-willed and...

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The Siege of Krishnapur

J.G. Farrell wrote and published The Siege of Krishnapur in 1973. Set during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, aka the Sepoy Mutiny, the story depicts the harrowing experiences of British residents. They find themselves trapped in the fictional town of Krishnapur, located in British India. The novel begins with British residents of Krishnapur living an idyllic life, protected from the realities of the Indian rebellion. However, as the rebellion gains momentum, the town becomes besieged by rebel forces, cutting off...

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Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon published Inherent Vice in 2009. Set in 1970s California, the story follows private detective Larry “Doc” Sportello as he becomes caught up in a complex and psychedelic web of mystery, conspiracy, and counter cultural chaos. The novel unfolds in the made-up Gordita Beach, where Doc leads an easy and mostly aimless existence. When Doc’s former girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth shows up one day seeking help, his life takes an unexpected turn. She knows of a plot to kidnap...

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Elizabeth Costello

J.M. Coetzee published Elizabeth Costello in 2003. The story revolves around the fictional character of Elizabeth Costello, a renowned and aging Australian writer who travels the world giving lectures and engaging in philosophical debates. The novel is structured as a series of chapters that depict different moments in Elizabeth’s life. These moments include her interactions with family members, encounters with other intellectuals, and public speaking engagements. Through these episodes, Coetzee raises profound questions about literature, ethics, animals, and the nature...

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Slow Man

J.M. Coetzee wrote Slow Man in 2005. The story revolves around Paul Rayment, an aging photographer who suffers a debilitating accident that results in the amputation of his leg. The novel explores themes of identity, loss, and human connection. After his accident, Paul becomes dependent on others for his daily needs. He struggles to come to terms with his new reality. He is assigned a caregiver named Marijana, a young Croatian immigrant who initially resents her role. However, she gradually...

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Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee

Robert van Gulik wrote The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee , a collection of detective stories, and published them in 1949. van Gulik sets the stories in ancient China during the Tang Dynasty. The fictional character of Judge Dee may be based on a real person: Di Renjie. Di was known for his wisdom, intelligence, and strict adherence to the law. Robert van Gulik was in a Tokyo bookshop one day when he served as a diplomat from the Netherlands....

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The Singapore Grip

J.G. Farrell wrote The Singapore Grip in 1978. Set during World War II, the story takes place in Singapore and explores the lives of a diverse cast of characters against the backdrop of an impending Japanese invasion. The novel primarily centers around the Blackett family, British rubber merchants who have prospered in Singapore. The protagonist, Matthew Webb, is a young British man who joins the Blackett’s firm. He quickly becomes entangled in their complex business and personal dynamics. As the...

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What I Talk About when I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in 2007. Combining reflections on running with personal anecdotes, the book provides insights into Murakami’s experiences as a writer and a long-distance runner. Throughout the memoir, Murakami shares how running has been an integral part of his life and creative process. He discusses his motivations for running, the discipline it requires, and the meditative aspects that allow him to find solace and inspiration. As Murakami reflects on his...

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Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

A few topics covered in Consider the Lobster : Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike’s deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of John McCain’s 2000 presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker at...

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Stranger Shores

Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world’s greatest novelists and in Stranger Shores he turns his gaze on those who have influenced him. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, “What Is a Classic?”, Coetzee asks, “What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?” He explores the answer by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Zbigniew Herbert....

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