Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company

Author	George Eliot
ISBN	0451529170

Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature:...

Author	Knut Hamsun
ISBN	0486431681

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate...

Author

Jack Kerouac

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation...

Author	Nathanael West
ISBN	0451523482

The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by...

Author	Knut Hamsun
ISBN	0141180676

I went into the café and sat down in the corner. I prefer to sit there. I took out my book and opened it. After a while, I looked up and saw that one of the waitresses was standing behind me. I realised she had been there for some time. She was a pretty brunette who looked about twenty.

- Excuse me, I said....

Author	John Clellon Holmes
ISBN	0141188391

The novel that launched the beat generation's literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began On the Road, Go is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures....

Author

Knut Hamsun

In a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. At once arrogant and unassuming,...

Author	Knut Hamsun
ISBN	0285647598

you would think i would have sopped this thing up with a hunk of bread: doomed lovers, the impossibility of communication, the way we hurt the ones we love? that should have karen's stamp of approval all over it.

but it's like hamsun took a great idea for literary exploration and then constructed...

Author	John Fante
ISBN	1841956198

Henry Molise, a 50 year old, successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his aging parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, brick laying father, Nick, though weak and alcoholic, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, though ill and devout to...

Author	Ann Charters
ISBN	0312113471

Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books comprising what he called 'the legend of Duluoz.' Nearly all of his books have been in print internationally...

Author	John Fante
ISBN	0876856555

I have read this book standing.
Because Fante is a magician.

He lines up words so they become fireworks.
He manages to populate the hardships and the hopes next door - in back to back sentences.
You root for any character he wants, immediately.
He orchestrates how many crescendos...

Author	Michael S. Reynolds
ISBN	0393318796

If you like Hemingway, check this one out; if you do not, skip it. Michael Reynolds delves into excruciating, repetitive detail about Hemingway's formative writing years in Paris. He discusses Hemingway's marriage with Hadley Richardson, as well as his interactions with other writers/artists...