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Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
James Mustich
Student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, founder of the Athenian Lyceum, Aristotle possessed a pedigree every bit as singular as his influence would prove to be. His ideas, instruments of investigation, and observations of nature both loom over and underlie much intellectual endeavor. His wor...show more
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Suzanne Nelson brought an unorthodox approach to her presentation of The Handmaid's Tale, employing actors in costume and handheld signs underscoring the hypocrisy of the patriarchal society at the center of Atwood's novel at the Ridgefield Battle of 11/14/19.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first performed play, written in French and then translated by the author into English. It is one of the signal accomplishments in twentieth-century theater and one of the touchstones of modern literature. It is also, as one contemporary critic said of its two ...show more
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse
Superb writing with lots of interesting ideas throughout the novel. One of Hesse's best, for sure
The Plague
Albert Camus
Welcome to the epidemic city: a place where rumors run wild, government can’t coordinate relief, religious authorities rave ineffectually, and no one knows what today, much less tomorrow, holds in store. At first the citizens of Oran panic and revolt, but before long, as if numbed by the summer sun,...show more
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Tartar Steppe
Dino Buzzati
Dino Buzzati is one of modernity’s most beguiling storytellers: His fictions are a cross between Kafka and the Brothers Grimm—fables and fantasies that are anxious, enchanting, exquisite, and elevated to an eerie sublimity by their reportorial matter-of-factness (the author spent his writing life in...show more
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley’s novel is the work of a thinker, and not just the cheap thrill that countless sequels, spin-offs, and spoofs might lead one to expect. The philosophical, psychological, and ethical complexities in which she has tangled her tale deepen its strangeness and wonder. Strange and wonderful i...show more
Blindness
José Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero
Spooky, eye-opening, and human. It's written with a kind of fury. Be carful reading it on a subway, you may find yourself weeping for the mass of intelligent chimps that bump and push and yell around you.
1984
George Orwell
Even now, six decades after it was written and more than a quarter century after its titular year has come and gone, 1984 continues to haunt us with its aura of pernicious possibility. Orwell’s warning of a spiritless, totalitarian time to come has lost none of its relevance. It would be hard to nam...show more
The Ghost Writer
Philip Roth
Ten years after Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth published The Ghost Writer, an exquisite short novel in which both irreverence and comedy (and, yes, masturbation, too) are subsumed into a tale that explores with an almost serene sense of creative control all of Roth’s earlier themes. Roth spent a half cen...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
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A crucial book of the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn’s first novel chronicles a single day in the life of an inmate in a Soviet labor camp, beginning as “the hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ” at five o’clock on an inhumanly cold January morning—“too cold for the warder to go on ha...show more
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Alex, the frightening narrator of this brutal and brilliant novel, is an amoral, Beethoven-loving gang leader in a near-future
dystopian Britain. Whether adolescent girls or a schoolteacher returning from the library, the gang’s victims are treated with an exuberantly vicious disregard: They might ...show more