Herzog

Author	Christina Stead
ISBN	0312280440

Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot...

Author	Larry Heinemann
ISBN	1400076838

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back...

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

Alberto Denti di Pirajno

"Africa taught me the shallowness of the saying that mankind is everywhere the same"
By sally tarbox on November 14, 2017
Format: Hardcover
Magical account by Italian doctor and administrator who served in Eritrea. Takes you back to a different world; the wildlife, the scenery, the superstitious...

Author	Richard Cork
ISBN	0300038275

Bomberg's career is a case study in neglect. The early popular canvases of this English painter buzzed with mechanistic imagery inspired by futurism. But after fighting on the front in World War I, he lost faith in the machine age. Living in Palestine in the 1920s, he forged a personal figurative style...

Author

Flann O'Brien

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel...

Author	J.F. Powers
ISBN	0940322234

Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.

The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation...

Author	Robert Stone
ISBN	0395860253

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America...

Author	Nelson Algren
ISBN	1583220089

Nelson Algren's devastating of that savage, subterranean world go gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerates remains unsurpassed as an authentic portrait of human depravity.

Only a master like Algren could create such a passionate and dramatic novel of so...

Author	Richard Ford
ISBN	0394743253

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses...

Author	Henry Roth
ISBN	0374522928

When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the...

Author	John O'Hara
ISBN	0394448146

Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

There is here, in the biography of Joe Chapin, nothing that could not have been seen or heard by the people whose lives were touched by Joe Chapin’s life. Whatever he thought, whatever he felt has always been expressed to or through someone else, and the...

Author	Henry Green
ISBN	0099285096

One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...

Author	Isaac Bashevis Singer
ISBN	0374516243

It's been nearly 30 years since I last looked at this excellent collection of short stories, but some of them still visit my thoughts regularly. My favorite is the guy who seduces his neighbor by turning up in her bedroom one night and saying that he's a demon from Hell. It's pitch black, and she's not sure...

Author	Anthony Powell
ISBN	0226677141

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...

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	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374504849

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...

Author	Wright Morris
ISBN	0451027612

Winner of the National Book Award

"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work —which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves— Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify...

Author	Mary Lee Settle
ISBN	1570030979

In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters appear...

Author

Conrad Richter

From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest,...

Author	John Cheever
ISBN	0679737863

Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...

Author	Peter Sadecky
ISBN	0060137371

Honestly I didn't make it through the entire book, but the meme is pretty cool to be aware of , and the artwork and developing mythology of Octobriana is if not revolutionary, pretty fascinating. I should have been online while reading and did more of a where-are-they-now parallel search.

Overall...