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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
James Mustich
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
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
When it comes to page-turners, The Count of Monte Cristo is the great granddaddy of them all. Despite the novel’s gargantuan dimensions—it runs to more than twelve hundred pages in most editions—each of its chapters is like an exhibit in a compendium of narrative suspense; it’s hard to imagine any t...show more
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton’s best fiction is a form of intelligence, a gathering of detailed information that turns revelatory under her persistent and insightful gaze. She wrote about the world she knew—New York high society at the turn of the twentieth century, where rules were unbreakable, money was silent, a...show more
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Austen’s first published novel, which appeared under the pseudonym “A Lady,” is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and of the tension between private passions and public decorum. This is Austen’s most social novel, and in both town and country, she depicts a privileged class rif...show more
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett may have invented the hardboiled detective story, but nobody wrote it better than Raymond Chandler. With his stylized prose and flair for similes, he gave his detective Philip Marlowe a voice that would become the hallmark of the genre. Marlowe is the protagonist in all of Chandler’...show more
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an ...show more
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
“I have tried to fashion a narrative of the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it, using their own words whenever possible.” So Dee Brown announced his intention in this book, which fundamentally altered our perspective of the past. Published in 1971, Brown’s unprecedented chro...show more
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
What kind of novel would Marcel Proust have written if he’d listened to the Rolling Stones instead of Beethoven’s late quartets? The answer might well be something very much like A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s virtuosic and open-hearted tale of music and mortality. Like the music it ev...show more
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl is the story of a marriage’s unraveling and the suspicion that falls on the husband in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. But it is author Gillian Flynn’s knowing exploitation of the intimate pact between writer and reader, her head-turning violation of it, that tightens the story's gri...show more
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Assigned at least once to nearly every student in the English-speaking world, Golding’s chilling depiction of the descent into savagery of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island stirs to menacing life as we turn the pages; terror coils behind the words like a patient predator stalking its prey. Wr...show more
The Firm
John Grisham
There are times in our reading lives when turning the page is more important than what’s on it, when the headlong rush toward what happens next overwhelms reflection—and sometimes even reason. John Grisham has made a career creating plots that deliver just such pleasure to readers. In his writing, G...show more
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
Hannibal Lecter is one of the most chillingly drawn villains in the annals of modern fiction. He is perverse, polite, charming, brilliant, and brutal, and the FBI would like to lure him into helping with an ongoing investigation of a string of savage killings of young women that have left them baffl...show more
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day tells, in the first person, the story of Stevens, a proper British butler who has spent three decades in service at Darlington Hall. Stevens has been devoted to his career, playing a reliably unobtrusive role in polishing the etiquette of the upper class while pursuing—in acti...show more
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is near the top of the list of most-beloved American novels. Set in Depression-era Alabama, it is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout; her older brother, Jeremy, nicknamed Jem; and their father, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer who...show more
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin
Maupin’s Tales encompass a rich array of people—gay and straight, male and female, financially struggling and well-off—who reside at (or pass in and out of) 28 Barbary Lane. The immediacy of the serial telling allows the author to indulge his gift for social satire at the same time as he is accumula...show more
The Golden Gate
Vikram Seth
The Golden Gate is a novel about a group of worthy but unexceptional Bay Area people falling in and out of love on the path to middle age. There are also serious forays, via rumination, conversation, and incident, into matters of the heart, celibacy and sexual identity, music and politics, families ...show more