A Naked Singularity
10 best books like A Naked Singularity (Sergio de la Pava): Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid's Tale, Gravity's Rainbow, Libra, Infinite Jest, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, The Recognitions, The Public Burning, Europe Central, Wittgenstein's Mistress
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0140283331 |
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0143039946 |
Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:
Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle...
| Author | Don DeLillo |
| ISBN | 0140156046 |
From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who...
| Author | David Foster Wallace |
| ISBN | 0316921173 |
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment...
| Author | George Saunders |
| ISBN | 0099595818 |
Have you ever heard a politically incorrect joke and laughed, and then felt guilty, but then laughed again?
Have you ever driven by a car wreck and slowed down to see the emergency response vehicles, and the vehicle made to look like a damaged accordion?
Have you ever watched a reality...
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0140187081 |
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the...
| Author | Robert Coover |
| ISBN | 0802135277 |
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the...
| Author | William T. Vollmann |
| ISBN | 0143036599 |
In this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences...
| Author | David Markson |
| ISBN | 1564782115 |
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson - or anyone else - has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced, and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well, that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0141180102 |
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of...
| Author | Meghan Daum |
| ISBN | 1890447269 |
Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for the fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition...
| Author | Lesley Arfin |
| ISBN | 1576873838 |
A collection of a girl's funniest diary entries from 12 to 25 years old. She updates each entry by tracking down the people involved and asking awkward questions like, "Do you remember when I tried to beat you up?" Sometimes old friends apologize. Sometimes they become new enemies. No matter who she talks...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 1903809509 |
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business...
| Author | Steven Weisenburger |
| ISBN | 0820310263 |
This Companion was extremely beneficial in reading Pynchon's novel, especially giving reference to the social context and pop culture allusions that appear on nearly every page. However, I had to often set it aside, only referring back to it every so often since there was so much information that it...
In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like...
