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S P Fahrenholz
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Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
James Mustich
Faulkner's novel forms, disperses, then coalesces again and again around the story of Thomas Sutpen, who arrives in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 with slaves, a French architect, and a “design”: to work his will on a large parcel of land, planting cotton and erecting an extravagant estate house, to e...show more
The Complete Stories
Franz Kafka
Anatomizing the absurdity of modern life through ever more bizarre situations and ironies, Kafka’s tales have a force out of all proportion to their small scale (one, the cat-and-mouse story “A Little Fable,” is just three sentences long). Yet within their deceptive dimensions, they seem to move ele...show more
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Mary Karr begins her gritty narrative on the violent night in 1961 when her mother, Charlie Marie Moore Karr, was carted away because she was “nervous” (read “crazy”). In the hardscrabble East Texas oil refinery town of Leechfield, Charlie had always stood out. She had “artist’s airs” about her, a h...show more
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee and Walker Evans
In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee and Walker Evans to report on the lives of sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee was a twenty-six-year-old journalist who’d published a volume of poems two years earlier; Evans was a thirty-two-year-old photographer. The assignment took...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
A solid masterpiece - Eliot examines and illuminates human relationships and endeavors and provides insight at every turn. Its universality is remarkable, and one can glean fresh depth and new keen observations on multiple readings.
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
Many years ago my wife and I spent a week walking through Umbria, from hilltown to hilltown, marveling at many things, not least the distinctive beauty of each town. Reading Christopher Alexander’s provocative theory of architecture, elaborated in this rich and philosophic book, has given me words t...show more
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
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
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
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Writing with vigor and clarity, with a directness that captures the narrative sweep of events, and with hands-on intelligence of the strategies and tactics described, Grant unexpectedly penned one of the most remarkable and compelling volumes in American history. Focusing almost entirely on his mili...show more
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
In its intense drama and disregard for orthodox morality, Wuthering Heights continues to surprise and challenge us today. To attempt to chart the web of relationships of blood, marriage, social strata, economic dependence, love, envy, hatred, and revenge that bind Catherine and Heathcliff to the boo...show more
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel so strange, so rich, so perfect in its singularity and timeless in its tenor, one can scarcely believe it was written as recently as 1967. At its start we are treated to an inkling of the author’s narrative conjuring: “Many years later, as he faced the firing...show more
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
What makes for an exhilarating read? Usually a gripping plot, magnificent writing, and well-drawn characters. There are, however, a few special books that are exhilarating because the author captures brilliant ideas and unprecedented insights with such vividness and immediacy that the reader is equa...show more