The 7 books on this stack
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Gilead
Marilynne Robinson · 2004
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER• OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER• A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD “Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
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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.