NY Times: 100 Best Books of the Century
From NYT’s definitive book list. A century in pages. How many have you seen?
Items in this hypelist
Ranked from 1 to 100 (highest to lowest)
Tree Of Smoke
Denis Johnson · 2007
<p><p>twenty-five Years In The Making, A Dark, Indelible Epic Of The American Empire In Decline From The Author Of <i>jesus' Son</i>, One Of The Best And Most Compelling Novelists In The Nation (<i>elle</i>)</p><h3>the New York Post - Andrew Hubner</h3><p>johnson Is An Author Who Has Captured The Zeitgeist Of American Experience As Surely As Twain, Hemingway Or Ellison.</p>
How to Be Both
Ali Smith · 2014
Bel Canto
Ann Patchett · 2023
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award • Winner of the Orange Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist<br/>"Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book." —Washington Post Book World<br/>Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis.<br/>Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.<br/>Patchett's lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.
Men We Reaped: A Memoir
Jesmyn Ward · 2013
Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South. “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.” -Harriet Tubman In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth-and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue higher education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity. A brutal world rendered beautifully, Jesmyn Ward's memoir will sit comfortably alongside Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Saidiya V. Hartman · 2019
Traces a time of radical transformation of black life in early twentieth-century America, revealing how a large number of black women forged relationships, families, and jobs that were more empowered and typically indifferent to moral dictates.
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel · 2012
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize<br/>Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Award<br/><br/>The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn<br/><br/>Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.<br/><br/>At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head?<br/><br/>Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012
On Beauty
Zadie Smith · 2005
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.<br/>Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?<br/>Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
Station Eleven: A novel
Emily St. John Mandel · 2014
The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante · 2005
The Human Stain
Philip Roth · 2000
Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid the controversy, Silk must struggle to keep his greatest secret, a secret he's held for the majority of his life, from becoming made public.
The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) (The Sympathizer, 1)
Viet Thanh Nguyen · 2016
The Return
Hisham Matar · 2017
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis · 2010
Detransition, Baby: A Novel
Torrey Peters · 2021
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Roughcut)
David W. Blight · 2018
Pastoralia
George Saunders · 2001
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2011
When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamín Labatut · 2021
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor · 2020
The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation Prize Longlisted for the National Book Award Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.
Pulphead: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan · 2011
The Story of the Lost Child: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 4)
Elena Ferrante · 2015
The “stunning conclusion” to the bestselling saga of the fierce lifelong bond between two women, from a gritty Naples childhood through old age (Publishers Weekly, starred review).<br/><br/>The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives.<br/><br/>Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.<br/><br/>“Lila is a magnificent character.” ―The Atlantic<br/><br/>“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” ―The Boston Globe
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Lucia Berlin · 2016
Septology
Jon Fosse · 2022
An American Marriage (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (Oprah's Book Club 2018 Selection)
Tayari Jones · 2018
<b>A <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> AND <i>WASHINGTON POST</i> NOTABLE BOOK<br><br> A 2018 BEST OF THE YEAR SELECTION OF <i>NPR</i> *<i> TIME</i> * <i>BUSTLE</i> * <i>O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE</i> * <i>THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS</i> * AMAZON.COM<br><br> OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB 2018 SELECTION<br><br> LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION</b><br><br><b>“A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.” —Barack Obama<br><br> “Haunting . . . Beautifully written.” —<i>The New York Times Book Review</i><br> <br> “Brilliant and heartbreaking . . . Unforgettable.” —<i>USA Today</i><br> <br> “A tense and timely love story . . . Packed with brave questions about race and class.” —<i>People</i><br> <br> “Compelling.” —<i>The Washington Post</i><br> <br> “Epic . . . Transcendent . . . Triumphant.” —<i>Elle</i></b><br><br> Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.<br> <br> This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. <i>An American Marriage</i> is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel
Gabrielle Zevin · 2022
Exit West: A Novel
Mohsin Hamid · 2017
Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout · 2008
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV
Robert A. Caro · 2013
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Svetlana Alexievich · 2017
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
Tove Ditlevsen · 2021
All Aunt Hagar’s Children
Edward P. Jones · 2007
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander · 2012
The Friend: A Novel
Sigrid Nunez · 2018
<b><b><b>WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION<br><br>ONE OF <i>THE NEW YORK TIMES</i>’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY<br><br>NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING NAOMI WATTS<br></b><br></b>“A beautiful book . . . a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love.” <i>—Wall Street Journal</i><br><br><b>“</b>A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory . . . Nunez has a wry, withering wit.” <i>—NPR</i><br><br><b>“</b>Dry, allusive and charming . . . the comedy here writes itself.” <b><i>—</i></b><i>The New York Times</i><br><br>The <i>New York Times</i> bestselling story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.</b><br><br>When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.<br><br>While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.<br><br>Elegiac and searching, <i>The Friend</i> is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon · 2013
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Books for a Better Life Award, and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2012, this masterpiece by the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon features stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so—“a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity” (People).<br/><br/>Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.<br/><br/>All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.<br/><br/>Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.
We the Animals
Justin Torres · 2011
The Plot Against America
Philip Roth · 2004
The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai · 2018
<b>PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST<br><b>NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST<br></b>A <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018<br><i>LOS ANGELES TIMES</i> BOOK PRIZE WINNER<br><b>ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER</b><br>THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER<br><br>Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler • <b>One of the <i>New York Times</i>’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century</b><br><br>“A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” <i>—The New York Times Book Review</i><br><br>A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris</b><br><br>In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.<br><br>Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.<br><br><b>Named a Best Book of 2018 by <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>,<i> NPR</i>, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, <i>The Boston Globe</i>, <i>Entertainment Weekly</i>, <i>Buzzfeed</i>, <i>The Seattle Times</i>, <i>Bustle</i>, <i>Newsday</i>, <i>AM New York</i>, <i>BookPage</i>, <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i>, <i>Lit Hub</i>, <i>Publishers Weekly</i>, <i>Kirkus Reviews</i>, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library </b>
Veronica
Mary Gaitskill · 2006
10:04: A Novel
Ben Lerner · 2015
Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022
Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese Laymon · 2018
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Jeffrey Eugenides · 2002
<p><i>"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal."</i></p><p>So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, <i>Middlesex </i>is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.</p><p><i>Middlesex </i>is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.</p>
Stay True: A Memoir
Hua Hsu · 2022
Nickel and Dimed (20th Anniversary Edition)
Barbara Ehrenreich · 2021
The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner · 2014
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine’s #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker; Time; Flavorwire; Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast<br/><br/>“Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”—The New Yorker<br/><br/>Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright · 2007
Tenth of December: Stories
George Saunders · 2014
Runaway
Alice Munro · 2005
Train Dreams: A Novella
Denis Johnson · 2012
Life After Life: A Novel
Kate Atkinson · 2014
Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Hernan Diaz · 2022
The Vegetarian
Han Kang · 2016
<b>FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE</b><br><br><b>“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize</b><br><br><b><i>A NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b>WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE </b><br><b>ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY<br>A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS </i>BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY</b><br><br><b>“Ferocious.”—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> (Ten Best Books of the Year)</b><br><b>“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff</b><br><b>“Provocative [and] shocking.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br>Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. <br><br>Celebrated by critics around the world, <i>The Vegetarian</i> is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.<br><b><br>A Best Book of the Year: <i>BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly</i></b>
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi · 2004
Home
Toni Morrison · 2012
The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding himself--and his home.
The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Donna Tartt · 2013
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson · 2015
<p><b>An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family </b><br><br><b>Maggie Nelson's </b><i>The Argonauts </i>is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.</p>
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1)
N. K. Jemisin · 2015
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt · 2006
A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel
Marlon James · 2014
Winner of the Booker Prize One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the Decade One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years A “thrilling, ambitious . . . intense” (Los Angeles Times) novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s, from the author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines brilliant storytelling with his unrivaled skills of characterization and meticulous eye for detail to forge an enthralling novel of dazzling ambition and scope. On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated. A Brief History of Seven Killings delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents, even ghosts – over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Along the way, they learn that evil does indeed cast long shadows, that justice and retribution are inextricably linked, and that no one can truly escape his fate. Gripping and inventive, shocking and irresistible, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a mesmerizing modern classic of power, mystery, and insight.
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan · 2021
H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald · 2015
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan · 2010
The Savage Detectives: A Novel
Roberto Bolano · 2008
<p><b>National Bestseller<br></b><b>A<i> New York Times</i> Best Book of the Twenty-First Century</b><b><i><br><br>The Savage Detectives </i>is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. <br></b><br>New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.<br><br>The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, <i>Los Angeles Times</i>), <i>The Savage Detectives </i>follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.<br><br>A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. <i>The Savage Detectives </i>is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.</p>
The Years
Annie Ernaux · 2017
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel · 2007
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home, ' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.--From publisher description.
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine · 2014
Salvage the Bones: A Novel
Jesmyn Ward · 2012
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst · 2004
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the NBCC award. From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.<br/><br/>In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby―whom Nick had idolized at Oxford―and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.<br/><br/>As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
White Teeth (Vintage International)
Zadie Smith · 2003
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Updated for the 25th Anniversary with a new introduction by the author • The blockbuster debut novel from “a preternaturally gifted” writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. “[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review
Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
Jesmyn Ward · 2017
The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt · 2016
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell · 2004
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2014
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2002
Random Family
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc · 2003
Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between life and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George's business activities; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty. Together, then apart, the teenagers make family where they find it. Girls look for excitement and find trouble; boys, searching for adventure, join crews and prison gangs.
The Overstory: A Novel
Richard Powers · 2018
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List Named One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage
Alice Munro · 2002
In this superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers, nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territorya place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can trace the arc of an entire life.<br/>The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a "frizz of reddish hair,"just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girlÕs practical joke. A college student, visiting her aunt for the first time, stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient, stunned by good news, discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman, remembering an afternoon's wild lovemaking with a stranger, realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.<br/>Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro's large and ever-growing audience has come to expect.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo · 2014
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond · 2016
Erasure: A Novel
Percival Everett · 2011
<p><b>Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright</b><br><br>Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of <i>We's Lives in Da Ghetto</i>, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. <br><br>In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for <i>My Pafology </i>to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.</p>
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2020
Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
George Saunders · 2018
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE<br/><br/>The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented<br/><br/>One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade<br/><br/>Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR • One of Time’s Ten Best Novels of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book • One of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of the Year<br/><br/>February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.<br/><br/>From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.<br/><br/>Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?<br/><br/>“A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review<br/><br/>“A masterpiece.”—Zadie Smith
The Sellout: A Novel
Paul Beatty · 2015
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 2000
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee · 2017
A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).<br/><br/>NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE<br/><br/>Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post<br/><br/>NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER<br/><br/>"There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones."<br/><br/>In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.<br/><br/>Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.<br/><br/>*Includes reading group guide*
Outline: A Novel (Outline Trilogy Book 1)
Rachel Cusk · 2015
<p><b> A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. <br></b><br><b>One of <i>The New York Times'</i> Top Ten Books of the Year. </b><b>Named a A<i> New York Times Book Review</i> Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by <i>The New Yorker</i>,<i> Vogue, NPR, The Guardian</i>, <i>The Independent</i>,<i> Glamour,</i> and<i> The Globe and Mail</i> <br></b><br><b>A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language</b> <br><br>A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.<br><br>Rachel Cusk's <i>Outline</i> is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.<br><br> <i>Outline</i> takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people's motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.</p>
The Road
Cormac McCarthy, Ltd. 2006 M-71, Tom Stechschulte · 2009
<p><p>a Searing, Postapocalyptic Novel Destined To Become Cormac Mccarthy’s Masterpiece.<p>a Father And His Son Walk Alone Through Burned America. Nothing Moves In The Ravaged Landscape Save The Ash On The Wind. It Is Cold Enough To Crack Stones, And When The Snow Falls It Is Gray. The Sky Is Dark. Their Destination Is The Coast, Although They Don’t Know What, If Anything, Awaits Them There. They Have Nothing; Just A Pistol To Defend Themselves Against The Lawless Bands That Stalk The Road, The Clothes They Are Wearing, A Cart Of Scavenged Food—and Each Other.<p><i>the Road</i> Is The Profoundly Moving Story Of A Journey. It Boldly Imagines A Future In Which No Hope Remains, But In Which The Father And His Son, “each The Other’s World Entire,” Are Sustained By Love. Awesome In The Totality Of Its Vision, It Is An Unflinching Meditation On The Worst And The Best That We Are Capable Of: Ultimate Destructiveness, Desperate Tenacity, And The Tenderness That Keeps Two People Alive In The Face Of Total Devastation.</p><h3>the San Francisco Chronicle</h3><p>his Tale Of Survival And The Miracle Of Goodness Only Adds To Mccarthy's Stature As A Living Master. It's Gripping, Frightning, And, Ultimately, Beautiful. It Might Very Well Be The Best Book Of The Year, Period.</p>
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2007
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Junot Díaz · 2007
Winner of:<br/>The Pulitzer Prize<br/>The National Book Critics Circle Award<br/>The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award<br/>The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize<br/>A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year<br/><br/>One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...<br/><br/>Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years<br/><br/>Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú—the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.<br/><br/>Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
Gilead (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
Marilynne Robinson · 2004
<p><b>A <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><b>• OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • WINNER OF THE </b><b>PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION </b><b>• NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER</b><b>• A <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>NOTABLE BOOK </b><b>• MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD<br><br></b><b>“Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)</b><br><br><b>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.</b><br><br>In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. <br><br>Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.<br><br>This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.</p>
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2006
<b>NOBEL PRIZE WINNER <b>•</b> From the acclaimed, bestselling author of <i>The Remains of the Day</i> comes “a Gothic tour de force" (<i>The New York Times</i>) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.<br><br>One of <i>The New York Times</i>’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Fiction Book of the Century • A <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years</b><br><br>As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. <br><br>Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald · 2001
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W.G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is. An orphan who came to England alone in the summer of 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own, Austerlitz grew up with no conscious memory of where he came from.<br/><br/>W.G. Sebald embodies in Austerlitz the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defenses against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects–railway architecture, military fortifications; insets, plants, and animals; the constellations; works of art; the strange contents of the museum of a veterinary school; a small circus; and the three capital cities that loom over the book, London, Paris, and Prague–in the service of its astounding vision.
The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Colson Whitehead · 2016
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.<br/><br/>Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.<br/><br/>In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.<br/><br/>As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.<br/><br/>Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
2666: A Novel
Roberto Bolaño · 2013
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen · 2001
THE CORRECTIONS is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.<br/>After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.<br/>Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, THE CORRECTIONS brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
The Known World
Edward P. Jones · 2009
<p>From Edward P. Jones comes one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.</p><p>The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. </p><p>Edward P. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.</p><p>“A masterpiece that deserves a place in the American literary canon.”—Time</p>
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel · 2009
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power<br/><br/>England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.<br/><br/>Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?<br/><br/>In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson · 2010
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS “A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal “What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • USA Today • Publishers Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • Salon • Newsday • The Daily Beast ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Economist •Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Entertainment Weekly • Philadelphia Inquirer • The Guardian • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Christian Science Monitor In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.
My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels Book 1)
Elena Ferrante · 2012
