The 7 books on this stack
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Gilead
Marilynne Robinson · 2004
A NOVEL THAT READERS and critics have been eagerly anticipating for over a decade, Gilead is an astonishingly imagined story of remarkable lives. John Ames is a preacher, the son of a preacher and the grandson (both maternal and paternal) of preachers. It’s 1956 in Gilead, Iowa, towards the end of the Reverend Ames’s life, and he is absorbed in recording his family’s story, a legacy for the young son he will never see grow up. Haunted by his grandfather’s presence, John tells of the rift between his grandfather and his father: the elder, an angry visionary who fought for the abolitionist cause, and his son, an ardent pacifist. He is troubled, too, by his prodigal namesake, Jack (John Ames) Boughton, his best friend’s lost son who returns to Gilead searching for forgiveness and redemption. Told in John Ames’s joyous, rambling voice that finds beauty, humour and truth in the smallest of life’s details, Gilead is a song of celebration and acceptance of the best and the worst the world has to offer. At its heart is a tale of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, pitch-perfect in style and story, set to dazzle critics and readers alike.
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Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville · 1966
Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world--even those daunted by Moby-Dick--Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine--to, sadly, critical disdain.
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Mrs Dalloway : the Hours
Virginia Woolf · 1925
Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past emerge, igniting old feelings and making Clarissa question the life she has created for herself. *Mrs. Dalloway* became the inspiration for Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel *The Hours*.
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Mezzanine
Nicholson Baker · 1988
"A seriously funny book."--Salman Rushdie "It pulverized me."--Hernan Diaz An elegant new edition of Nicholson Baker's stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working life The Mezzanine is a novel told through one man's ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, the bestselling and award-winning author of Vox and The Anthologist , this journey is transformed into a stylistically dazzling reappraisal of the objects and rituals of our lives. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, Baker at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. His sharp storytelling and existential humor bring clarity to the odd angles of the ordinary. Since its first publication in 1988, this novel has become a perennial favorite of readers and writers looking to better understand our uncanny everyday, and has become a cult classic of modern literature. In less than 150 brilliant pages, The Mezzanine manages to wryly interrogate the logic of modernity, celebrate the strange reality of life in the 1980s, and express something of the profundity of human existence.
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1994
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available* WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past. 'A triumph . . . This wholly convincing portrait of a human life unweaving before your eyes is inventive and absorbing, by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.' Sunday Times 'A dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.' New York TImes Book Review
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Our souls at night
Kent Haruf · 2015
Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to her neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have long been aware of each other, if not exactly friends; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter, Holly, lives hours away in Colorado Springs; her son, Gene, even farther away in Grand Junction. What Addie has come to ask — since she and Louis have been living alone for so long in houses now empty of family, and the nights are so terribly lonely — is whether he might be willing to spend them with her, in her bed, so they can have someone to talk with.
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Stoner
John Williams · 1965
Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe. The critic Morris Dickstein has said that John Williams's Stoner "is something much rarer than a great novel - it is a perfect novel," and in the last decade this austere and deeply moving tale of a Midwestern college professor has been embraced by readers all over the world. Here, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Stoner , NYRB Classics offers a special hardback edition of the book that also includes a previously unpublished correspondence between John Williams and his agent about its writing and publication.