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Eric Kolste
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
James Mustich
Composed in English and published in 1958, two years before Nigeria declared independence, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to attain a wide international readership. It is a short, sparely told tale that nevertheless embraces themes of enormous import: fate and will, the determining i...show more
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Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
A riotous satire of English university life, the engaging and high-spirited Lucky Jim had a huge impact in its time, setting the style for postwar fiction and helping to define the generation of “Angry Young Men” in 1950s Britain. But this Angry Young Man is as funny as they come, and the novel’s se...show more
Père Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
In simple outline, the book sounds like a poor man’s King Lear: A retired businessman is done in by the greed and callousness of his ungrateful daughters. What distinguishes this tale in the fullness of its telling, however, is the way in which Balzac uses Goriot’s sad circumstances to paint a dynam...show more
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
The opening of The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen’s discerning portrayal of one woman’s coming-of-age and another’s realization that her own period of becoming has come and gone, reveals the power of perception this author calibrates with words. The sentences follow one another like facts in a ...show more
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
The Sheltering Sky is the story of a New York married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, who bear some resemblance to Bowles and his brilliant, troubled wife, Jane, whose long physical and mental decline would occupy the author for years. Traveling in the Sahara with a friend, hoping the journey will imp...show more
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. But, in the dystopian future of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, a fireman’s duty is not to put out fires, but to start them. His job, in fact, is to burn books, a task that requires the temperature of 451° Fahrenheit. It’s natural to see Fahrenheit 451 as an allegory about cens...show more
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
Having returned to London after long residence in southern Africa, Richard Hannay finds himself stuck in a rut. Much to the reader’s delight, Hannay will make his way out of it by falling into another ditch so deep that it hides in its dark recesses murder, espionage, and a plot to undermine the sec...show more
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein
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
