Memoirs of Montparnasse

10 best books like Memoirs of Montparnasse (John Glassco): De Kooning: An American Master, Henderson the Rain King, Light in August, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, The Sound of Waves, Fortune Smiles, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

De Kooning: An American Master

Author	Mark Stevens
ISBN	0375711163

Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement...

Henderson the Rain King

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0140189424

There is a thriving trade in self-help books which have always baffled me. I could never relate to another person telling me Look, these are the steps you need to take to better your life & if you don't take them you are done for ! Well, no book will be so absolute in saying so but underlying all the sugarcoating...

Light in August

Author	William Faulkner
ISBN	0679732268

Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted...

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Author

Michael Pollan

The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects...

The Sound of Waves

Author	Yukio Mishima
ISBN	0099289989

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach and they fall in love. When the...

Fortune Smiles

Author	Adam Johnson
ISBN	0857522973

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed and bestselling novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is one of America's most provocative and powerful authors. In Fortune Smiles - his first book since Orphan Master - he continues to give voice to characters rarely heard from, while offering something...

So Long, See You Tomorrow

Author

William Maxwell

My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.

In his memoirs, he talks about his...

Wittgenstein's Mistress

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...

Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man

Author

James Baldwin

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s...

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

Author

Robert Hughes

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.
   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally...

Complete Plays 1932–1943

Author

Eugene O'Neill

The third and final volume of the first complete collection of Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic writings (available exclusively from The Library of America) contains eight plays written between 1932 and 1943, when illness forced him to stop writing. They represent the crowning achievements of his...

Novels and Stories 1932–1937: The Pastures of Heaven / To a God Unknown / Tortilla Flat / In Dubious Battle / Of Mice and Men

Author	John Steinbeck
ISBN	1883011019

John Steinbeck, from the very start of his career, evoked the landscape and people of central California with lyrical intensity and unflinching frankness. The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck’s early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community,...

Hemingway: The Paris Years

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...

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's "1984"

Author	Dorian Lynskey
ISBN	0385544057

The author has written a study that places George Orwell's 1984 in a variety of contexts: the author's life and times, the book's precursors in the science fiction genre, and its subsequent place in popular culture. Lynskey delves into how Orwell's harrowing Spanish Civil War experiences shaped his...

Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

Author	Dietmar Elger
ISBN	0226203239

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during...

The Green Man

Author	Kingsley Amis
ISBN	0099461072

A ghost story for adults. Like all good coaching inns, the Green Man is said to boast a resident ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy, rumoured to have killed his wife. However, the landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness...