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Libby Browning
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The Coming of Age
Simone de Beauvoir
James Mustich
“Old age is an island surrounded by death,” the nineteenth-century Ecuadorean essayist Juan Montalvo wrote. In her impassioned book, which spans a thousand years and a variety of nations and cultures, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that all too often the inhabitants of that island are left to their own ...show more
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The Diary of a Country Priest
Georges Bernanos
One of the most intuitive and inspired explorations of religious faith in modern literature, Georges Bernanos’s 1936 novel is a portrait of a humble and uncertain priest going quietly about the most significant business. The uncertainty of Bernanos’s protagonist—an unnamed cleric in a village in rur...show more
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Judy Blume
Narrated by Margaret Simon, an almost twelve-year-old who moves from New York City to the Jersey suburbs, Blume’s novel for young readers engages, with directness and a strong dose of appropriate preteen bewilderment, themes seldom treated so familiarly at the time. Top of the list is the perplexity...show more
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
Published in 1931, while Modernism was turning fiction artfully on its ear, Buck’s simple, plot-driven tale of the shifting fortunes of Chinese peasants Wang Lung and O-Lan was innovative in its own way, marking the introduction of Asian characters into mainstream Western literature. In its pages, r...show more
True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
The son of an Irish convict father, Ned Kelly stole horses as a child, murdered policemen, robbed banks, and took up as a “bushranger”—the Australian term for runaway convicts who evaded British authorities in the open continent. His notoriety grew until Kelly became a Robin Hood–like symbol of Iris...show more
The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin
Dashing, prodigiously talented, with a mysterious knack for alighting upon alluring geographical and literary destinations, Bruce Chatwin passed through the crowded city of travel writing with a spectral, Keats-like splendor; he even died before his time, but left behind at least two masterpieces, I...show more