Continental Drift by Russell Banks

Continental Drift by Russell Banks

From
 Publishers Weekly
On the extravagant, shallow promises of his brother, Bob Dubois, 30, a burnt-out New Hampshire oil burner repairman, takes his family to Florida. There the Duboises meet their destiny in the form of a counterpoint family—that of Vanise Dorsinville, a woman who has fled Haiti with her infant and nephew for a better life in the U.S.

Read O magazine's review of The Reserve by Russell Banks
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

From the Publisher
 
Fading charmer, Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as the type that loses the girl) and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day, he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope.
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

From the Publisher
 
In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.
A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

Why Gwyneth Paltrow loves The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

From the Publisher
 
The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that something was—a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage. Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, he comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance.
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

From
 Publishers Weekly
A National Book Award finalist in 2004, Bynum returns with an intricate and absorbing collection of eight interconnected stories about Beatrice Hempel, a middle school English teacher. Ms. Hempel is the sort of teacher students adore, and despite feeling disenchanted with her job, she regards her students as intelligent, insightful and sometimes fascinating. Bynum seamlessly weaves stories of the teacher's childhood with the present—reminiscences about Beatrice's now deceased father and her relationship with her younger brother, Calvin—while simultaneously fleshing out the lives of Beatrice's impressionable students (they are in awe of the crassness of This Boy's Life). Though there isn't much in the way of plot, Bynum's sympathy for her protagonist runs deep, and even the slightest of events comes across as achingly real and, sometimes, even profound. Bynum writes with great acuity, and the emotional undercurrents in this sharp take on coming-of-age and growing up will move readers in unexpected ways.

Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

From the Publisher

Mrs. Bridge
Before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique there was Mrs. Bridge, an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testified to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life. India Bridge, the title character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic husband. Though her life is increasingly filled with leisure and plenty, she can't shuffle off vague feelings of dissatisfaction, confusion, and futility. Evan S. Connell builds a world with tiny brushstrokes and short, telling vignettes.

Mr. Bridge
In the companion volume, Mr. Bridge, Walter Bridge is an ambitious lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he senses that his family needs something, even when what they need is more of him and less of his money. Affluence, material assets, and comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void within—not the skeleton in the closet but a black hole swallowing the whole household.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

White Noise by Don DeLillo

From the Publisher
 
Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra-modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys-radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Read O magazine's review of After the Fall by Don DeLillo

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

From the Publisher
 
Welcome to Grouse County—a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric—where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars. At the heart of The End of Vandalism is an unforgettable love triangle set off by a crime: Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an anti-vandalism dance and then marries the culprit's ex-wife Louise. So Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self, and the three find themselves on an epic journey. At turns hilarious and heart-breaking, The End of Vandalism is a radiant novel about the beauty and ache of modern life.
The Hamlet by William Faulkner

The Hamlet by William Faulkner

From the Publisher
 
The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes—wily, energetic, a man of shady origins—quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

Get our tips for reading Faulkner


Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

From the Publisher
 
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed—echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature—a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with Billy Budd and The Great Gatsby.
Something Happened by Joseph Heller

Something Happened by Joseph Heller

From the Publisher
 
Something Happened is Joseph Heller's inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain—recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22.

Why Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is one of Hugh Laurie's all-time favorite reads
Angels and Jesus's Son by Denis Johnson

Jesus' Son and Angels by Denis Johnson

From the Publisher
 

Jesus' Son 
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again.

Angels
The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson's novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays—a runaway wife toting along two kids—and Bill Houston—ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con—on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise. Johnson, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
Corregidora by Gayl Jones

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

From the Publisher
 
Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the 19th-century slavemaster who fathered both her grandmother and mother. Ursa's need to ensure that future generations never forget the horror of his rule founders when she is made sterile in a violent fight with her husband.
Independent People by Halldor Laxness

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

From the Publisher
 
Bjartus is a sheep farmer hewing a living from a blighted patch of land in Iceland. After 18 years of servitude to a master he despises, all he wants is to raise his flocks unbeholden to anyone. Nothing, not inclement weather, not his wives, not his family will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. But she too wants to live independently—and when Bjartus throws her from the house on discovering she is pregnant, her more temperate determination is set against his stony will.
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

The Assistant: A Novel by Bernard Malamud

From the Publisher
 
Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store. Like Malamud's best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

From the publisher
 
Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his "Keltjin potatoes" are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed. 

Read O magazine's review of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs

Get the reading questions for A Gate at the Stairs
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

From the Publisher
 
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Toni Morrison shares her thoughts on Song of Solomon
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

The Beggar Maid, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and Runaway by Alice Munro

From the Publisher

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the coupe of almost 40 years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo's ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 
In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager's practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife's nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

Runaway
The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro's hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

More about Alice Munro and your other favorite women writers
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe

From the Publisher
 
Kenzaburō Ōe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times "close to a perfect novel." In A Personal Matter, Ōe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has "cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe." But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it? Before he makes his final decision, Bird's entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of self-deceit. The relentless honesty with which Ōe portrays his hero—or antihero—makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.
Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy

Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy

From the Publisher
 
A literary cult hero of major proportions, James Purdy's exquisitely surreal fiction—Tennessee Williams meets William S. Burroughs—has been populated for more than forty years by social outcasts living in crisis and longing for love. Eustace Chisholm and the Works, a 1967 novel that became a gay classic, is an especially outspoken book among the author's controversial body of work. Purdy recalls that Eustace Chisholm and the Works—named one of the Publishing Triangle's 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels of the 20th Century—outraged the New York literary establishment. More than breaking out of the pre-Stonewall closet, however, the book liberated its author and readers can be grateful for that.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

From the Publisher
 
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other "midnight's children," all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people—a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight's Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.
In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

From the Publisher
 
Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables—all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection. The best work yet from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
Enemies: A Love Story and The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Enemies: A Love Story and The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

From the Publisher

Enemies: A Love Story 
 
Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha , his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom.

The Family Moskat 
The vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality. The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.
The Greenlanders, The Age of Grief and Ordinary Love and Good Will by Jane Smiley

The Greenlanders, The Age of Grief, Ordinary Love & Good Will by Jane Smiley

From the Publisher

The Greenlanders 
 
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas. Set in the fourteenth century in Europe's most farflung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains...Jane Smiley takes us into this world of farmers, priests, and lawspeakers, of hunts and feasts and long-standing feuds, and by an act of literary magic, makes a remote time, place, and people not only real but dear to us.

The Age of Grief
The luminous novella and stories in The Age of Grief explore the vicissitudes of love, friendship, and marriage with all the compassion and insight that have come to be expected from Jane Smiley...Beautifully written, with a wry intelligence and a lively comic touch, The Age of Grief captures moments of great intimacy with grace, clarity, and indelible emotional power.

Ordinary Love & Good Will
In Ordinary Love, Jane Smiley focuses on a woman's infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. Good Will describes a father who realizes how his son has been affected by his decision to lead a counterculture life and move his family to a farm. As both stories unfold, Smiley gracefully raises the questions that confront all families with the characteristic style and insight that has marked all of her work.
Endless Love by Scott Spencer

Endless Love by Scott Spencer

From
 Publishers Weekly
Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. Published in 1979 and hailed as "one of the best books of the year" by the New York Times, Endless Love is the novel that first established Scott Spencer as "the contemporary American master of the love story."
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

From the Publisher
 
Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of family life, the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives, The Man Who Loved Children, is acknowledged as a contemporary classic.
Taking Care by Joy Williams

Taking Care by Joy Williams

From the Publisher
 
This collection of Williams' short stories focuses on the disturbing, comic, moving and revealing facets of ordinary domestic life in such tales as "The Farm," "Building," "The Woods" and "Preparation for a Collie." Joy Williams is the author of four novels—the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

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