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The Feast of Love
Charles Baxter
James Mustich
Set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Feast of Love relates the intertwining yet wildly divergent stories of several men and women who range across the generations and yet are pulled together, apart, and together again by strands of desire, sex, marriage, pain, and plain old human sympathy. With a sleight...show more
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
One might expect a graphic narrative to be lean, wry, linear. Yet the pioneering triumph of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is that it’s resonantly rich in thought and theme, nuanced in its framing and feeling, contrapuntal in its treatment of chronology, character, and incident. Bechdel imbues her story ...show more
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
Ilene Beckerman
In this charming, unusual book, Ilene Beckerman uses sixty-odd outfits—from pinafore to prom dress, maternity clothes to Pucci knock-offs—to trace her life from the 1940s through the 1990s. Each memory is articulated in an unpretentious paragraph or two that serves, ostensibly, as a caption to Becke...show more
Memoirs of a Medieval Woman
Louise Collis
The Book of Margery Kempe constitutes one of the first autobiographies in English, despite the fact that its author could neither read nor write. Dictated in the 1430s, it was not published in its entirety until a copy of the Middle English original was uncovered in a private British library five hu...show more
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee and Walker Evans
In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee and Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee was a twenty-six-year-old journalist who’d published a volume of poems two years earlier; Evans was a thirty-two-year-old photographer. The assignment took...show more
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
At the outset of his long, ever-evolving career as a dramatist, Edward Albee was an American heir to the intellectual energies of the European Theater of the Absurd. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first staged in 1962, Albee moved his ferocity out of the absurd into a more realistic setting, a ...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
Purgatorio: The Divine Comedy, Book 2
Dante Alighieri
Although the stories in hell are better than those in purgatory, sin being a sexier subject than penance, Dante’s poetry never palls. Throughout, he infuses his narrative with a current of feeling that humanizes the austere theological arc of his pilgrim’s progress.
Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book 1
Dante Alighieri
From the dark wood of its beginning, down through the nine circles of hell, across the seven terraces of purgatory, and into the ten heavens of paradise, Dante’s medieval tour de force gives us, in T. S. Eliot’s estimation, the greatest altitude and the greatest depth of human passion any writer has...show more
Paradiso: The Divine Comedy, Book 3
Dante Alighieri
As the Comedy ascends to a heaven of light, Dante completes the grand imaginative arc he began in the dark wood, having composed out of eschatological speculations an epic as thrilling as those of Homer, as filled with human sensibility as Virgil’s—one in which all the deadly sins, and all the longe...show more
Skellig
David Almond
Some books are like talismans, compact in their power, possessed of an aura mysterious and meaningful, even if—especially if—the precise nature of its mystery and meaning eludes us. Such a work is David Almond’s Skellig, which won the Carnegie Medal as best children’s book by a British author when i...show more
The Arabian Nights
Is there an entry in the annals of story more charming than the tale of the brave and brilliant Shahrazad, who, by dint of cunning and invention, puts off her death at the hands of King Shahryār for a thousand and one nights? Bewitching the king with a nightly dose of suspenseful storytelling, she s...show more
Confessions
Saint Augustine
Of all the saints of the early Christian church, Saint Augustine of Hippo possesses, for the modern reader at least, the most interesting mind. His ideas on language, time, and the mysteries of personality, humanity, and divinity are still provocative—after sixteen centuries!—and his genius for expr...show more
Akenfield
Ronald Blythe
A blacksmith and a bellringer, schoolmasters and a magistrate, farmers and clergy, the district nurse and the local vet, a samaritan and a grave-digger (who is given, of course, the last word): such are the forty-nine men and women, ranging in age from seventeen to eighty-eight, whose voices animate...show more
Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood
There are few reading pleasures more delightful than the feeling of instant rapport a narrative voice can conjure, an intimacy that quickly becomes immersive as you are drawn into a confidence both close and resonant. In Cat’s Eye, the voice belongs to Elaine Risley, a painter who has come back to h...show more
Fifth Business: The Deptford Trilogy, Book 1
Robertson Davies
A boy packs a rock into a snowball and throws it at a friend, who ducks out of the way; the missile hits a pregnant woman, provoking premature labor. The Deptford Trilogy follows the unforeseen and ever-widening effects of that misguided prank at the start of Fifth Business across decades and contin...show more
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Stewart Brand
Beginning with an anecdote about the predictable long line for the ladies’ room at the San Francisco Opera House, Brand argues that too many buildings are built in rigid adherence to long-held notions. Despite the assumptions of many planners, architects, and builders, he continues, time means more ...show more
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The dangerous nerve that runs through Céline's first and best novel, Journey to the End of the Night, has enlivened modern literature through its pervasive influence on writers from Henry Miller to Philip Roth, Samuel Beckett to William S. Burroughs. That nerve—characterized by an energy that is tou...show more
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
Planning to go to Utah, sounds like a interesting read about an area I can go to.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
Drawing on Sherman Alexie’s personal experience growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel that has more to say about big virtues like tolerance than a whole shelf of earnest adult tomes could ever manage. The book’s unflinchi...show more