Check back for supplemental materials. As always, if you find something interesting, please let me know and I'll include it here!
November 28, 2018
Doc, Mary Doria Russell - January 7, 2019
Check back for supplemental materials. As always, if you find something interesting, please let me know and I'll include it here!
October 30, 2018
Dead Wake, Erik Larson - November 26, 2018
Check back for supplemental materials. As always, if you come across materials, let me know so I can add them to the list!
October 22, 2018
UPDATED Slate for 2018-2019 and our Pitches
UPDATED 11/27/18 (after making the swap for Commonwealth and Death in the Family)
Here's our slate for 2018-2019, followed by a list of everything we pitched tonight.
Here's our slate for 2018-2019, followed by a list of everything we pitched tonight.
Our Selections for 2018-2019
November 26 - Dead Wake, Erik Larson
January 7 - Doc, Mary Doria Russell
January 28 - Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin
February 25 - Improvement, Joan Silber
March 25 - A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler
April 22 - Death in the Family, James Agee
May 20 (3rd Monday) - Commonweath, Ann Patchett
June 24 - Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett
July 22 - Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
August 26 - The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
September 23 - A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Pitches - Votes for classic/Votes in main draw)
Classics
Nervous Conditions - Karen - 5/11
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing - Susan - 17/7
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde - Steph - 15/18
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins - Suzanne - 9/x
Five Smooth Stones - Kerry - 16/12
Death in the Family - Katherine - 17/28
Brideshead Revisited - Julie - 21
Main Draw
Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple - Ruth - 4
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin - Steph - 39
Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector - Suzanne - x
Dead Wake, Erik Larson - Katherine - 26
Doc, Mary Doria Russell - Julie - 23
Funny Boy, Shyam Selvadurai - Karen - 14
A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler- Connie - 37
Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett - Kathy - 16
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison - Susan - 8
Outline: a Novel, Rachel Cusk- Ruth - 2
Improvement: A Novel, Joan Silber- Steph - 24
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles - Katherine and Suzanne - 41
The Beggar Maid, Alice Munro - Julie - 10
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood - Karen - 11
Commonwealth, Ann Patchett - Connie - 21
The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - Kathy - 14
The Secret History, Donna Tartt - Kathy - 9
October 6, 2018
Long Lists for Book Picking Night on October 22, 2018
What are you thinking about pitching? Send me your long lists and I'll post them here, so others can research the books before book-picking night, so others can give you feedback on your lists, and so that you can avoid pitching the same book as someone else.
Connie
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, Cherise Wolas
"I viewed the consumptive nature of love as a threat to serious women. But the wonderful man I just married believes as I do―work is paramount, absolutely no children―and now love seems to me quite marvelous."
These words are spoken to a rapturous audience by Joan Ashby, a brilliant and intense literary sensation acclaimed for her explosively dark and singular stories.
When Joan finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin’s delight, his instant betrayal of their pact. She makes a fateful, selfless decision then, to embrace her unintentional family.
Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.
Epic, propulsive, incredibly ambitious, and dazzlingly written, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a story about sacrifice and motherhood, the burdens of expectation and genius. Cherise Wolas’s gorgeous debut introduces an indelible heroine candid about her struggles and unapologetic in her ambition.
Kathy
The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather
The Song of the Lark is the story of an artist’s growth and development from childhood to maturity. More particularly—and decidedly more rarely—it traces the development of a female artist supported by a series of male characters willing to serve her career.
Inspired by Willa Cather’s own development as a novelist and by the career of an opera diva, The Song of the Lark examines the themes of the artist’s relationship with family and society, themes that would dominate all of Cather’s best fiction.
Thea Kronborg is a Scandinavian-American singer who works her way up from the dusty desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, to the boards of the Metropolitan Opera house. Although Willa Cather herself was not a musician, the portions of the novel covering childhood, apprenticeship, and artistic awakening in the western landscape are frankly autobiographical. Its final section, dealing with Thea’s professional life, is drawn largely from the career of the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the kind of artist Willa Cather still aspired to be. For although Cather was forty-two when The Song of the Lark was published in 1915, it was only the third of her twelve novels, and belongs to the early stage of her distinguished literary career. After its publication, however, the great literary critic H. L. Mencken said that it placed Cather in “the small class of American novelists who are seriously to be reckoned with.”
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett
When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
Kerry
Five Smooth Stones, Ann Fairbairn
This gripping bestseller, first published in 1966, has continued to captivate readers with its wide-ranging yet intimate portrait of an America sundered by racial conflict. David Champlin is a black man born into poverty in Depression-era New Orleans who makes his way up the ladder of success, only to sacrifice everything to lead his people in the civil rights movement. Sara Kent is the white girl who loves David from the moment she first sees him, and who struggles against his belief that a marriage for them would be wrong in the violent world he has to confront. And the “five smooth stones” are those the biblical David carried against Goliath. By the time this novel comes to its climax of horror, bloodshed, and hope, readers will be convinced that its enduring popularity is fully justified.
Steph
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”
Description from the New York Review of Books: "The Name of the Rose succeeds in being amusing and ambitious at the same time. It can be regarded as a philosophical novel masked as a detective story, or as a detective story masked as a historical novel, or even better as a blend of all three. The venture sounds improbable, but Eco carries it out."
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin
“I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows…. [T]he genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
A Suitable Boy, Vickram Seth
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.
Won't pitch this due to its length. But I want to remember to try to read it, so am plopping it here for myself and anyone else looking for a beefy historical fiction book.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel, Haruki Murakami
Katherine might pick a Murakami novel to pitch, but in case not, I'm including this on my long list.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. It tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts.
The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.
Improvement, Joan Silber
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.
A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.
"[I]t feels vital to love Silber’s work. . . Now is the moment to appreciate that she is here, in our midst: our country’s own Alice Munro. Silber’s great theme as a writer is the way in which humans are separated from their intentions, by desires, ideas, time. . . Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, she’s a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves." —Washington Post
Suzanne
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
Since she graduated from Oxford’s Shrewsbury College, Harriet Vane has found fame by writing novels about ingenious murders. She also won infamy when she was accused of committing a murder herself. It took a timely intervention from the debonair Lord Peter Wimsey to save her from the gallows, and since then she has devoted her spare time to resisting his attempts to marry her. Putting aside her lingering shame from the trial, Harriet returns to Oxford for her college reunion with her head held high—only to find that her life is in danger once again. The first poison-pen letter calls her a “dirty murderess,” and those that follow are no kinder. As the threats become more frightening, she calls on Lord Peter for help. Among the dons of Oxford lurks a killer, but it will take more than a superior education to match Lord Peter and the daring Harriet.
Gaudy Night is the 12th book in the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries.
The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night is now back in print with an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
"Lispector, a Jewish, Ukraine-born Brazilian author and journalist, is much-beloved throughout the world, but is sadly under-read in the United States. Her last (and most popular) work, The Hour of the Star, was originally published mere months before her death in 1977. Lispector's novel offers the story of Macabéa, a poor, unattractive, and malnourished — yet curious (if not a little naïve) — Rio-based typist, as well as that of the book's narrator, Rodrigo S.M., and his mounting hardships in conveying the tale of young Macabéa. Exquisite and singular, the often-woeful novel is magnificent as much for its story as for the uncommon approach by which it's told. Lispector's gifted prose frequently shimmers with an innocent beauty, and so many of her passages nearly radiate from the page. Lispector may well be one of the most brilliant writers you haven't yet had the honor of reading." – Jeremy, a staffer at Powell's Books
The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon) and "one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis's short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.
"It can be hard to pinpoint what makes Lydia Davis's writing so magnetic. Her precise, no-nonsense language combined with her liberal definition of the short story? Her attention to the overlooked, the mundane, the clutter in our lives that holds so much meaning? Her understated sense of humor, so deeply ingrained in her observations about the absurdities of life? Whatever it is, you'll find it in spades in her Collected Stories, which compiles all of Davis's short fiction from her seminal Break It Down (1986) through Varieties of Disturbance (2007). Few writers' work lends itself so well to a compilation. Whether you pick stories at random or start at the beginning and work your way through the collection (highly recommended), this is a book that feels like the best gift: fun, poignant, and endlessly rewarding." – Renee P., a staffer at Powell's Books
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collin's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel ands its serialisation history.
Wilkie Collins was a colleague and writing partner of Charles Dickens. PBS is now airing a multi-installment movie of it.
Connie
"I viewed the consumptive nature of love as a threat to serious women. But the wonderful man I just married believes as I do―work is paramount, absolutely no children―and now love seems to me quite marvelous."
These words are spoken to a rapturous audience by Joan Ashby, a brilliant and intense literary sensation acclaimed for her explosively dark and singular stories.
When Joan finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin’s delight, his instant betrayal of their pact. She makes a fateful, selfless decision then, to embrace her unintentional family.
Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.
Epic, propulsive, incredibly ambitious, and dazzlingly written, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a story about sacrifice and motherhood, the burdens of expectation and genius. Cherise Wolas’s gorgeous debut introduces an indelible heroine candid about her struggles and unapologetic in her ambition.
Kathy
The Song of the Lark is the story of an artist’s growth and development from childhood to maturity. More particularly—and decidedly more rarely—it traces the development of a female artist supported by a series of male characters willing to serve her career.
Inspired by Willa Cather’s own development as a novelist and by the career of an opera diva, The Song of the Lark examines the themes of the artist’s relationship with family and society, themes that would dominate all of Cather’s best fiction.
Thea Kronborg is a Scandinavian-American singer who works her way up from the dusty desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, to the boards of the Metropolitan Opera house. Although Willa Cather herself was not a musician, the portions of the novel covering childhood, apprenticeship, and artistic awakening in the western landscape are frankly autobiographical. Its final section, dealing with Thea’s professional life, is drawn largely from the career of the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the kind of artist Willa Cather still aspired to be. For although Cather was forty-two when The Song of the Lark was published in 1915, it was only the third of her twelve novels, and belongs to the early stage of her distinguished literary career. After its publication, however, the great literary critic H. L. Mencken said that it placed Cather in “the small class of American novelists who are seriously to be reckoned with.”
Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
- FINALIST for the PULITZER PRIZE
- LONG-LISTED for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
- WINNER of the LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
- FINALIST for the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
- FINALIST for the KIRKUS PRIZE
- LONG-LISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
- TOP 10 NOVELS OF THE YEAR — TIME, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC, Newsday
- ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Barnes & Noble, BookPage, BuzzFeed, Elle, Financial Times, Huffington Post, Kirkus, NPR, Refinery29, Seattle Times, Shelf Awareness, WBUR's On Point
When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
Kerry
This gripping bestseller, first published in 1966, has continued to captivate readers with its wide-ranging yet intimate portrait of an America sundered by racial conflict. David Champlin is a black man born into poverty in Depression-era New Orleans who makes his way up the ladder of success, only to sacrifice everything to lead his people in the civil rights movement. Sara Kent is the white girl who loves David from the moment she first sees him, and who struggles against his belief that a marriage for them would be wrong in the violent world he has to confront. And the “five smooth stones” are those the biblical David carried against Goliath. By the time this novel comes to its climax of horror, bloodshed, and hope, readers will be convinced that its enduring popularity is fully justified.
Steph
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”
Description from the New York Review of Books: "The Name of the Rose succeeds in being amusing and ambitious at the same time. It can be regarded as a philosophical novel masked as a detective story, or as a detective story masked as a historical novel, or even better as a blend of all three. The venture sounds improbable, but Eco carries it out."
- Shortlisted for the 2017 Mann Booker International prize
- On The Thread's list of best books of 2017
- Winner of 2017 Tournament of Books
“I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows…. [T]he genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.
Won't pitch this due to its length. But I want to remember to try to read it, so am plopping it here for myself and anyone else looking for a beefy historical fiction book.
Katherine might pick a Murakami novel to pitch, but in case not, I'm including this on my long list.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. It tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts.
The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.
Improvement, Joan Silber
- Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
- Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
- A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
- Newsday Best Book of 2017
- A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them.
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.
A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.
"[I]t feels vital to love Silber’s work. . . Now is the moment to appreciate that she is here, in our midst: our country’s own Alice Munro. Silber’s great theme as a writer is the way in which humans are separated from their intentions, by desires, ideas, time. . . Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, she’s a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves." —Washington Post
Suzanne
Since she graduated from Oxford’s Shrewsbury College, Harriet Vane has found fame by writing novels about ingenious murders. She also won infamy when she was accused of committing a murder herself. It took a timely intervention from the debonair Lord Peter Wimsey to save her from the gallows, and since then she has devoted her spare time to resisting his attempts to marry her. Putting aside her lingering shame from the trial, Harriet returns to Oxford for her college reunion with her head held high—only to find that her life is in danger once again. The first poison-pen letter calls her a “dirty murderess,” and those that follow are no kinder. As the threats become more frightening, she calls on Lord Peter for help. Among the dons of Oxford lurks a killer, but it will take more than a superior education to match Lord Peter and the daring Harriet.
Gaudy Night is the 12th book in the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries.
The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night is now back in print with an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.
Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
"Lispector, a Jewish, Ukraine-born Brazilian author and journalist, is much-beloved throughout the world, but is sadly under-read in the United States. Her last (and most popular) work, The Hour of the Star, was originally published mere months before her death in 1977. Lispector's novel offers the story of Macabéa, a poor, unattractive, and malnourished — yet curious (if not a little naïve) — Rio-based typist, as well as that of the book's narrator, Rodrigo S.M., and his mounting hardships in conveying the tale of young Macabéa. Exquisite and singular, the often-woeful novel is magnificent as much for its story as for the uncommon approach by which it's told. Lispector's gifted prose frequently shimmers with an innocent beauty, and so many of her passages nearly radiate from the page. Lispector may well be one of the most brilliant writers you haven't yet had the honor of reading." – Jeremy, a staffer at Powell's Books
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon) and "one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis's short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.
"It can be hard to pinpoint what makes Lydia Davis's writing so magnetic. Her precise, no-nonsense language combined with her liberal definition of the short story? Her attention to the overlooked, the mundane, the clutter in our lives that holds so much meaning? Her understated sense of humor, so deeply ingrained in her observations about the absurdities of life? Whatever it is, you'll find it in spades in her Collected Stories, which compiles all of Davis's short fiction from her seminal Break It Down (1986) through Varieties of Disturbance (2007). Few writers' work lends itself so well to a compilation. Whether you pick stories at random or start at the beginning and work your way through the collection (highly recommended), this is a book that feels like the best gift: fun, poignant, and endlessly rewarding." – Renee P., a staffer at Powell's Books
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collin's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel ands its serialisation history.
Wilkie Collins was a colleague and writing partner of Charles Dickens. PBS is now airing a multi-installment movie of it.
September 24, 2018
Link to the survey for 2017-2018
Here is the link to the survey of our books and discussions for this past year: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6Q76Y2Q
September 20, 2018
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro - September 24, 2018
Supplemental materials:
- Discussion questions from publisher
- Television interview (2017) of Kazuo Ighiguro interviewed by a man who must remain nameless but who conducted good interviews, after publication of The Buried Giant
- Television interview, (1995) - same interviewer who shall not be named
- Radio interview (2017) - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- Interview, Electric Lit (March 27, 2015)
- Telegraph author profile (October 5, 2017)
- Conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro on the topic of genres, NewStatesman (June 4, 2015)
- Review of The Buried Giant, the Atlantic, March 2015
- Review of The Buried Giant, the New Yorker, March 23, 2015
- Review of The Buried Giant, Washington Post, February 24, 2015
2018 Man Booker Prize Short List
The 2018 Man Booker Prize Short List is out. MPR's The Thread gives short blurbs about each book here.
August 27, 2018
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi - August 27, 2018
Supplemental materials:
- Publisher's discussion questions
- Washington Post review
- New Yorker review
- NPR review
- Interview with author, NPR Weekend Edition
- Interview with author, The Guardian
As always, if you come across interesting supplemental materials, please send them to me and I will add them to this post.
July 23, 2018
Difficult Women, Roxane Gay - July 23, 2018
Supplemental materials:
- Review, The Journal,
- Review, The Washington Post, January 3, 2017
- Review, The New York Times, January 3, 2017
- Roxane Gay's website
- Roxane Gay's work published by The Guardian
- Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (somewhat focused on Gay's memoir Hunger)
- Interview, Aukland Writers Festival, Look, Listen & Learn podcast, 2017
- Interview, Kerry Miller, The Thread Book Hour, April 7, 2018
As always, let me know if you come across supplemental materials, so I can add them to the list!
June 24, 2018
East of Eden, John Steinbeck - June 25, 2018
Supplemental materials:
- Short biography of Steinbeck. (Includes notes about his political views.)
- Discussion questions
- "East of Eden: Steinbeck's Proclamation of Human Greatness," David Stewart McCright, Master's Thesis, Iowa State, 1990
- "Inseparability of Good and Evil as a Challenge in John Steinbeck's East of Eden," Eva Kralova, University Review, Vol 7, No. 13 (2013), Alexander Dubcek University of Trencin, Slovak Republic.
- "Cathy Trask, Monstrosity, and Gender-Based Fears in John Steinbeck's East of Eden," Claire Warnick, Master's Thesis, Brigham Young University, 2014
- A Thematic Analysis, Owlcation - short analysis of themes of human nature, choice, change, strength/weakness
- "The Writer Who Said What Hemingway Couldn't," Jackson J. Benson, Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1989. Interesting discussion of how storytelling style limits the types of stories that can be told.
- "Steinbeck Catches Critical Hell," Oprah.com
- "John Steinbeck: Should he be afraid of Oprah?" Chris Suellentrop, Slate, June 26, 2003
- "Steinbeck in the Schools: East of Eden," San Jose State University, website. (Visit all the sublinks: Setting, Character Census and Descriptions, Plot Synopsis, Critical Reception.
As always, let me know if you come across anything you find useful and I'll add it to this list. And check back for more later.
May 20, 2018
The Turner House, Angela Fournoy - May 21, 2018
April 21, 2018
Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance - April 23, 2018
Check back for supplemental materials.
March 23, 2018
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead - March 26, 2018
February 23, 2018
Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine - February 26, 2018
January 26, 2018
The Testament of Mary, Tolm Coibin - January 29, 2018
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