Cousin Bette
10 best books like Cousin Bette (Honoré de Balzac): Sacred Time, A Quiet Storm, La Débâcle, The Meaning of Consuelo, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, The Song of Names, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, The Fall of the Athenian Empire, Monsieur Proust, Novels, 1930-1942: Dance Night / Come Back to Sorrento / Turn, Magic Wheel / Angels on Toast / A Time to Be Born
| Author | Ursula Hegi |
| ISBN | 0743255992 |
The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family. In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise...
| Author | Rachel Howzell Hall |
In this vividly written, suspense-driven novel, the secrets shared between two sisters erupt in tragedy. Rikki Moore was always the star of the family, easily outshining her younger sister, Stacy, at every turn. Smart, kind, and beautiful, it was no surprise when Rikki met and married the perfect...
| Author | Émile Zola |
| ISBN | 0192822896 |
The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Debacle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention...
| Author | Judith Ortiz Cofer |
| ISBN | 0807083879 |
The Signe family is blessed with two daughters. Consuelo, the elder, is thought of as pensive and book-loving, the serious child-la niña seria-while Mili, her younger sister, is seen as vivacious, a ray of tropical sunshine. Two daughters: one dark, one light; one to offer comfort and consolation,...
| Author | Julia de Burgos |
| ISBN | 1880684241 |
Song of the Simple Truth (Canción de la verdad sencilla) is the first bilingual edition of Julia de Burgos' complete poems. Numbering more than 200, these poems form a literary landmark—the first time her poems have appeared in a complete edition in either English or Spanish. Many of the verses...
| Author | Norman Lebrecht |
| ISBN | 1400034892 |
Martin Simmonds’ father tells him, “Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.” The advice comes too late. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the...
| Author | Seymour M. Hersh |
| ISBN | 0394714504 |
Investigative journalist Hersh made one of his earliest splashes documenting the My Lai atrocity at the height of the Vietnam War; this short, angry book summarizes his research and findings. Unfortunately for modern readers, it's a leftist polemic that spends as much time trashing the American...
| Author | Donald Kagan |
| ISBN | 0801499844 |
In the fourth and final volume of his magisterial history of the Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan examines the period from the destruction of Athens' Sicilian expedition in September of 413 B.C. to the Athenian surrender to Sparta in the spring of 404 B.C. Through his study of this last decade of the war,...
| Author | Céleste Albaret |
| ISBN | 1590170598 |
Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present an intimate...
| Author | Dawn Powell |
| ISBN | 1931082014 |
For decades after her death, Dawn Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been renewed awareness of the novelist who was such a vital presence in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s. With these two volumes, The Library of America...
| Author | Theodore Isaac Rubin |
| ISBN | 0020535708 |
The opening of America's heinous public Mental Hospitals- or rather the 'closing' of said institutions - began to occur in the 70's, I believe. It was a time where tens of thousands of individuals incarcerated for years or decades for mental health problems - or simply 'put away' because they were inconvenient...
| Author | Gary Krist |
| ISBN | 0767913310 |
William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies.
The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is...
| Author | Mary McCarthy |
| ISBN | 1590170105 |
Mary McCarthy was one of the leading literary figures of her time. In addition to the novels and memoirs for which she is best remembered, she was also a tireless literary and social critic. Starting out as a theater reviewer for "Partisan Review" in 1937, she quickly distinguished herself for her witty...
| Author | Julie Mars |
| ISBN | 0974207454 |
After witnessing her older sister's losing battle with pancreatic cancer, "her journey though the dark landscape of religious doubt toward her God," Mars was overtaken with a compulsion: she wanted to go to church. So, she dedicated herself to visiting 31 houses of worship over a period of as many weeks....
| Author | James N. McKean |
| ISBN | 0385721307 |
Matt O’Brien, an assistant curator and art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has always been passionate about the Italian Renaissance. But when he discovers a long-neglected portrait of a beautiful woman among the museum’s miles of storage bins, he becomes obsessed--and not only because...
| Author | Virginia Holman |
| ISBN | 0743255496 |
A startling memoir of a daughter's harrowing sojourn in the prison of her mother's mind and a moving portrait of a young woman defined by her mother's illness -- until at last she rekindles a family love that had lost its way.
"1974 was a bad year to go crazy," Virginia Holman writes in this astonishing,...
| Author | Alan Jay Lerner |
| ISBN | 0769202225 |
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| Author | Greg Critser |
| ISBN | 0141015403 |
In this astonishing expose, journalist Greg Critser looks beyond the sensational headlines to reveal why nearly 60 percent of Americans are now overweight. Critser's sharp-eyed reportage and sharp-tongued analysis make for a disarmingly funny and truly alarming book. Critser investigates the...
| Author | Jan Lars Jensen |
| ISBN | 0786715626 |
This book isn't the typical book I'd read, but my husband gave it to me for Christmas because I'm a writer. I enjoyed the book, but it's not something I'd read again. It was a quick read (it took me a few months because I put it down to read other books). Sometimes when I read it before sleeping, I'd have dreams...
| Author | T.J. Binyon |
| ISBN | 1400076528 |
In the course of his short, dramatic life, Aleksandr Pushkin gave Russia not only its greatest poetry–including the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin–but a new literary language. He also gave it a figure of enduring romantic allure–fiery, restless, extravagant, a prodigal gambler and inveterate...
| Author | H.L. Mencken |
| ISBN | 0679413154 |
While it does include a very telling look into the life of Mencken and his inner circle of aristocratic literary society, this memoir is very rough and incoherent at times. He includes an insane amount of trivial detail that would bore even the most devoted of Menckophiles--such as hyperspecific details...
