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Christine Gilman
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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
James Mustich
Encouraged by their teachers and fueled by optimism, patriotism, and the promise of glory, Paul Bäumer and three friends volunteer for what would come to be known as World War I. But the reality of war in the trenches, as they witness unimagined carnage, leaves them struggling to keep their sanity a...show more
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A Judgement in Stone
Ruth Rendell
A Judgement in Stone begins with a startling first sentence: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” That statement introduces a two-page description of her “peculiarly literate” quartet of victims, shot down in their home in the space of a quarter hour on ...show more
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the revelation of the existence of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Edward Rochester (the man Jane is about to marry), exposes Rochester’s duplicity, disrupting his bigamous wedding to Brontë’s heroine. The madwoman in the attic plays a larger role in the novel’s plot...show more
The Longest Day
Cornelius Ryan
What a wealth of human drama these 350 pages contain. Less than fifteen years after the end of World War II, Cornelius Ryan constructed a fleet and intricate narrative of the maneuverings on both sides of the English Channel during the ambitious operation that would turn the tide of the battle again...show more
The Sagas of Icelanders
The eleven sagas and six shorter tales included here—set mostly around the turn of the first millennium AD (although written two to four centuries later)—charted new literary territory. While the rest of medieval literature was locked in lines of verse, the unknown authors of the sagas freely employ...show more
The Emigrants
W. G. Sebald
Like all of Sebald’s works, this prose narrative (a more apt description for his writing than “novel”) incorporates elements of memoir and travelogue into something unique. His characters often share his interest in photographs and ephemera, and these, too, are presented to the reader, sometimes wit...show more
The Killer Angels
Michael Shaara
In the fleet, fierce narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Michael Shaara brilliantly shows “what it was like to be” at Gettysburg by recording the terrible butchery of the three days’ fighting, switching among leaders’ perspectives on both sides, including Confederates General Lee and his ...show more
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare
The consummate exemplar of the Elizabethan love affair with the sonnet, Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems is replete with luxurious, and lingering, literary melodies. Music amply rewards any reader’s attention, yet there is more to The Sonnets than a considerable catalog of lovely an...show more
Richard II
William Shakespeare
Richard II is a history play distinguished by its poetry. In portraying the downfall of a monarch and the historic violation of the divine right of kings by Henry Bolingbroke, who usurped Richard’s throne to launch the Lancastrian dynasty as Henry IV, Shakespeare gives his title character a lyric el...show more
Berlin Diary
William L. Shirer
Born in the American Midwest in 1904, William L. Shirer died in Boston nearly ninety years later, having seen at close range some of the most determinative events of the twentieth century. If, as Shirer believed, the luck of being in the right place at the right time was the cornerstone of a great j...show more
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
An immediate popular success, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks; by the time of Smith’s death three decades later, more than six million copies had been sold, and the adventures of her protagonist, Francie Nolan, had been translated into more than a dozen languages....show more
I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith
From the first sentence—“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”—Dodie Smith weaves a spell over her readers as she relates, in the voice of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the adventures of a remarkable family that lives, in impoverished eccentricity, in the ruins of a six-hundred-year-old...show more
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s detailed indictment of the state is drawn from his own bitter experience as well as from the reports, memoirs, and letters of 227 fellow zeks. With relentless realism and psychological acuity, he follows the course of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and oppression as su...show more
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
As story and as media phenomenon, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is at the top of the pile of wildly popular dystopian teen fiction that has dominated twenty-first-century bestseller lists (in no small part by appealing to readers well beyond their teen years). In the nation of Panem, power and ...show more
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectiv...show more
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn
Evan S. Connell
The work of an idiosyncratic but engaging storyteller, Son of the Morning Star is discursive, elegant, and unflinching. The Christian Science Monitor called it “the story of Gen. George Armstrong Custer as Flaubert would have written it”; it’s a nice compliment, but the book is better than that, bec...show more
The Road from Coorain
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway’s account of her coming-of-age in Australia in the middle of the twentieth century is a deft evocation of landscape and memory. Through those two dimensions a small girl grows, against cultural and familial odds, into a determined young woman on the verge of a voyage to America, wher...show more
The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton
Although physician Michael Crichton previously published several pseudonymous novels, The Andromeda Strain was his first bestseller, and the storytelling élan it displayed would inform nearly four decades of inventive, often medically or scientifically minded thrillers. The combination of cutting-ed...show more
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand th...show more
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night—the last of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels, and the author’s favorite—sprawls among dozens of characters and settings across Western Europe before and after World War I. Although its messy, heartbreaking story of mental illness, alcoholism, and the disintegration of ...show more